Moving the post goals: Musk’s British-politics meddling

0:02The Economist

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:24In 2025, European governments, like pretty much everybody else, have to work out the art of dealing with Donald Trump. Our series The World Ahead concludes today with our defense editor laying out what that means in the context of European security. And in fiction, love wins out in spite of roadblocks and setbacks, usually. Our obituaries editor reflects on the life of Cheng Yao, a remarkably prolific novelist and screenwriter whose own love life was no less wrenching than those in her many works.

1:01First up, though.

1:09Eight years ago, the world wondered, worried, about an incoming Trump administration and just how much policy and foreign relations would happen by tweet. Well, here we go again. The twist in the story is that Mr. Trump himself is over on Truth Social, his own personal money-spinning megaphone. But still, potentially agenda-setting tweets are flooding in, this time around from America's tech bro-in-chief, whose online diatribes are becoming offline concerns for Britain's politicians. Elon Musk is going to Elon Musk. I've got bigger and more important things to be thinking about. I have no desire to go to war with Elon Musk, and I'm not going to, and I haven't done.

1:50The spectre of the richest man in the world trying to buy a British political party should give us all pause for thought. What is Mr. Musk's game here? So in the past couple of weeks, Elon Musk, the world's richest man and the owner of X, has really emerged as one of the most dominant figures in British politics. Matthew Hulhouse is our British political correspondent. In a barrage of X messages, he has focused on a sexual abuse scandal or series of scandals which took place in the UK more than a decade ago. He has flirted with the British far right and he's lacerated the government of Keir Starmer.

2:35And it really exposes some quite profound fault lines within British politics itself. There's a hint there that the latest outrage on X is not his first outrage on X as regards Britain. So to run through the chronology, Elon Musk emerges as a fairly strident critic of Keir Starmer's new government fairly shortly after he was elected in July 2024. He was focused on the way in which the British Crown Prosecution Service and British police forces were arresting and charging people who had incited the riots that took place in the summer online on Facebook and on the X platform. As the autumn moves on, he focuses on the government's decision to amend the inheritance tax framework so it would apply to agricultural land that was perceived by some as an attack on farmers.

3:27Musk rallied to the defence of farmers. But really his output in the past week has been an order of magnitude greater, much, much more vociferous. He has mused about the US mounting an intervention to liberate the British people from their government, as he put it. He said that the British Prime Minister had been complicit in the rape of Britain. So really sort of unrestrained language and very, very sharply targeting Keir Starmer himself. And about those claims that have been plastered all over the news, I guess, on both sides of the pond, what's behind it? Is there anything that needs looking at here?

4:01The issue on which Elon Musk has alighted is, you know, anything but trivial. in a large number of English towns in the late 1990s and through the noughties and some cases later. It was the case that there were gangs of largely Pakistani or Pakistani origin men who were predating on children and subjecting them to often fairly horrific sexual abuse. This was an issue which was covered intermittently at the time. The Times newspaper particularly did a lot of coverage of this. In the period that followed, there have been a number of large trials and some inquiries and investigations. Few serious people doubt that this abuse took place or that the victims were very, very badly failed.

4:47What is particularly contested and has become the firestorm here politically is Mr. Musk's incendiary claim that Keir Starmer was somehow complicit in this. Now, Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK from 2008 through to 2013, but he very hotly points out that he was actually trying to reform the system. And on his watch, a number of fairly large prosecutions were brought and that he was trying to change the way in which the CPS looked at these cases. He further contends that actually what has happened in the previous 14 years is that when there was a major public inquiry into sexual abuse cases broadly, but also looking specifically at these sorts of gang-based grooming cases, the recommendations from that inquiry went unimplemented by the conservative government.

5:33But given that you've said that Mr. Musk seems to have it in for Mr. Starmer and has done for a time, I wonder how much this is supposed to be exposing the wrongdoing of a politician or how much it is an attempt to influence politics. So one of the to-be-seen elements of this is how far this is just the late night, early morning tweets of Elon Musk or whether it reflects something more strategic, whether his goal is, as has been reported, that he does want to remove Keir Starmer from office, whether he's looking to be an orchestrator of a broader movement of radical right parties throughout Europe.

6:11He has flirted with and then jilted Nigel Farage, who's the leader of Reform UK, an insurgent right-wing populist party. This is something that Keir Starmer seized at Prime Minister's Questions this week. I think we all had a smile on Sunday when the Honourable Member said how cool it was to have the support of Musk, only for Musk to say he should be removed. Just a few hours later, that's the rough and tough of politics. And earlier you suggested that all of this reveals a rift in British politics. What were you driving at there? What I think is very interesting, which this really underlines, is a sort of a generational gap in British politics between a generation of politicians who came of age politically before social media, So that's Keir Starmer.

6:56And those who came of age after Keir Starmer really experienced politics through and on social media. So principally, Kemi Badenoch, who's the leader of the opposition. Now, Starmer, it seems in all his speech and the way he's acted as party leader, has come to regard social media as something of a nuisance or a triviality. So for him, social media is where there are trolls and there are right-wing populists. And the left of his party gets completely absorbed in their own online social media issues. And for him, real politics is about ordinary folk who watch TV and want the NHS to work and want the potholes in their road to be filled.

7:35And all this sort of populist right agitation is a real sort of pollutant of politics. That's the impression you get listening to him. One of the things he said before he became prime minister was that his aspiration for Labour government really is that it would cool some of these online tempers, that this sort of exhausting, conflictual politics, as he put it, people wouldn't have to worry about it so much anymore, that they could just have a government that let them get on with their lives. You contrast that with Kemi Badenock, who is some years younger than Starmer, is very, very interested in debates that take place on social media principally.

8:10So the international debates around the politics of race, the politics of gender, diversity, equity and inclusion schemes, all of which she's very critical of debates which are very heavily influenced by America, which she's an active participant in. But also she's very interested in the way in which social media fundamentally changes the nature of politics itself, because old certainties around sources of authority or around the presumption of innocence is sort of swept away by the online. And I think that sort of helps explain the difference in reaction we've seen this week, where she was very, very quick to effectively seize on Musk's intervention and really use it to try and set the political agenda in Westminster.

8:50So one of the lessons from this is the ability of Elon Musk to shake the British political system or political systems more widely is very dependent on the degree to which those systems are porous. And so if you have a class of politicians who are extremely online in the way that Kemi is, then he can have a great influence. If you have a class of politicians who regard this all as noise and chaff in the way that Starmer does, he has less capacity really to make a political system so dense to his music through the power of posting alone, I think. But Mr. Musk, for all of this, is not just an online agitator.

9:24He is effectively in an incoming American administration. Do you think he has the power, is showing the power to affect, to strain the special relationship between America and Britain? This morning, actually, I was just at an event at the Foreign Office with David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. He was asked a lot about Musk and what it all meant. And he really was seeking to downplay it all, stressing, you know, how good the bilateral relationship is generally, but also, you know, how good the early Starmer-Trump relationship is. The question that nobody here can really answer is whether this barrage of incredibly targeted and aggressive tweets about Keir Starmer personally, but also about the British government in the round, is just banter, it's just tweeting, it's just ephemera, or whether it signifies something much, much more fundamental about how the relationship between the UK and the US is going to have to change under Donald Trump.

10:24Matthew, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.

10:39Tomorrow is Saturday, and you know what that means. I mean, I hope. It means the next episode of The Weekend Intelligence is out. Our subscriber-only Kickback Listen, where our correspondents indulge their own passions and curiosity. This week, it's a postcard from Tokyo, where our bureau chief asks how a city so big and bustling can be so very livable. What's that you say? You're not a subscriber to Economist Podcasts Plus? Well, get in there, my friend. It's half off at the moment.

11:192024 was a big year when it comes to questions of security and defense. And there's no reason to believe 2025 is going to present any fewer of them for Europe. The most obvious continues to be what will happen in the war in Ukraine. When Mark Rutte became NATO's Secretary General in October, that was among his three biggest priorities. Independent and democratic Ukraine is vital for peace and stability in Europe. As for America's once and future president, in military alliances, well, in any kind of alliances, he made clear what he reckons it's all about. I want Europe to put up more money because they're laughing at us.

11:57They think we're a bunch of Jews. In short, those who would secure liberty and keep order in Europe have their work cut out. And that's not even to mention the recent suggestion from Mr. Trump that America might get all annex-y itself and threaten Greenland. As part of our World Ahead series about the coming year, I spoke to Shishank Joshi, our defense editor, about what awaits.

12:23In 2025, European governments need to limit the damage that Donald Trump might do to security on the continent. They've got to persuade the new president to commit to NATO, to continue America's provision of security to the continent, to keep up aid to Ukraine, and perhaps most importantly of all, to get a good peace deal in Ukraine. And what they're beginning to do now is ask themselves, what can we put on the table to persuade Trump to give us all of those things?

13:07And do you fancy the Europeans' odds in getting what it is they need from that wish list? I think there are pretty steep odds on this because, Jason, look, all of this is going to be unfolding amid a potential trade war, right? We've already just seen America threaten to inflict tariffs on Denmark if it doesn't hand over Greenland, and that's among many other threats. The European Commission may impose retaliatory tariffs on America that would be directed to cause maximum political pain. and we don't really know what Trump's aims are. If he's only interested in shaking down Europeans, getting them to spend more on defence, maybe that's possible.

13:47But what I'm hearing and what is becoming clear is that he's going to go and ask Europeans to be spending 5 % of their GDP on defence with the idea perhaps he'll settle for 3%, 3.5%. That is way above the current level. We're talking tens of billions of dollars in additional spending. That's already a huge ask. and on Ukraine fundamentally we know he wants a deal. We don't know whether he wants any deal, however bad it is for Ukraine, or whether he wants a good deal which would require him to bring some actual leverage to bear against the Kremlin. So if he's willing to throw Ukraine under the bus, Europeans are in trouble.

14:25There's not an awful lot they can do about that. If he's willing to do a deal that will protect Ukraine in the long run, I think Europeans will then have to ask What do we have to offer to make that possible? When you say throwing Ukraine under the bus, what do you mean? Let's game this out from Europe's perspective. Well, Trump could obviously simply cut aid off completely and allow Ukraine to fend for itself, and that might result in its collapse eventually. I think that's relatively unlikely. But you can imagine bad deals that are more subtly bad, right? So imagine a deal that freezes the lines, but it lifts sanctions on Russia, but it doesn't really buy Ukraine any security.

15:04There are no security guarantees. And what happens is Russia then invades again in a year or two years in the way that it did after the Minsk agreements of 2014, 2015. Now, you could call that a peace deal, but it wouldn't be a real lasting peace. And I think Europeans would be extremely concerned about that kind of situation. And coming back to NATO and what they ask might be for members to spend and what have you, or indeed an altogether American withdrawal. What do you think Europeans are thinking about those possibilities? Europeans are generally in agreement that they need to spend more. They recognize this, they get it, they understand it.

15:41But look, two thirds of NATO's European members, that's 30 countries, already spend 2 % of GDP on defense, which is the NATO target. That's already quite a high level. And the countries that don't do that, many of them are on course to do that anyway. So the question they have to ask is, are we spending this money to placate Trump, in which case maybe you have to just spend it quickly, spend it very visibly, maybe you have to buy more American arms? Or are we spending it to hedge against the possible withdrawal of Donald Trump from NATO? And if that's the case, if you're looking at the serious prospect of an American pullout from Europe, then you have to fill in all kinds of critical things like air defenses, air refueling, airborne radar.

16:29And let's be very clear, Europe cannot do that. It can't fill all those gaps in the four years of Trump's presidency. That's a kind of generational project in a sense. So that's the picture in terms of the pocketbook and the means of defense. But what about the political picture here, an absent America in a security structure that's more or less been built around it? If you think Trump will ultimately stay in NATO, that America will stay in NATO, then you hedge a little bit, but you do it through NATO. If you think that that's going south, you maybe do more through the European Union. You maybe do more through other kinds of institutions like the Joint Expeditionary Force, GEF, which is a block of 10 Northern European countries led by the UK.

17:15And then you have way more difficult questions to answer. This is particularly the case for Britain, which is joined at the hip with America on intelligence issues and nuclear issues. It has the most to lose in any break with the Trump administration. We spent all this time talking about the effect of the second Trump presidency on Europe's security and its feelings about security. but there is the rest of the world to talk about, I suppose. What do you think is on Europeans' minds besides all of that Trump stuff? There's two big things. One of them is China. The atmospherics between Europe and China are terrible at this point.

17:51They have huge trade issues, security disagreements, and I think the Europeans are waking up to the security challenge posed by China, for example, in terms of cyber attacks, espionage, other national security threats. but they don't really have a collective view on how to respond. So that's problem one. Problem two is the Middle East. Of course, we've just had a situation where Syria's regime has unexpectedly collapsed. The last time there was serious unrest in Syria, we saw millions of refugees fleeing to Europe. That is right on Europe's doorstep, right in the Mediterranean. This affects NATO allies like Turkey, as well as other Southern European countries.

18:32And Trump is going to affect both of those things, right? Will he, for instance, support an Israeli attack on Iran this year? Will he make demands of Europeans to align with America on China when it comes to things like semiconductors or other technology issues? So the point here is it's Europe's problems are not just about Ukraine. They're not just about Russia. They're not just about Trump. It really is grappling with a big, big set of security challenges that go well beyond that. Shishan, thank you very much for your time. Thanks, Jason.

19:27A car is driving along a narrow mountain road and the man and woman sitting in it are talking about breaking up. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. So we must break up, must we? The woman says, yes. All right, then get out, says the man. She does so. He slams the car door shut, revs up the engine, and drives the car right to the edge. She is horrified to think that he might go over, and she flings herself onto the bonnet, and he, after a while, opens the door, gets out and pulls her into his arms. It becomes a passionate embrace. That sounds like a scene from any one of the 65 novels that were written by Chung Yao, Taiwanese novelist.

20:20But in fact, it was a scene from her real life. She was that fiery heroine who insisted on getting out even though she knew they were in the middle of nowhere and she couldn't really believe he would abandon her there. And he was Ping Xintao, her publisher, the man who ran Crown Company, which had put out all her novels from her very first one, which was called Outside the Window. He had built her up to be an enormous success in China and in the whole of the Chinese-speaking world. He had actually bullied her, more or less, into writing as many novels as she did, And there was always something about the power of this man that inspired her.

21:05So in fact, in the end, she married him and they were together for 40 years. But before that, he had built her up slowly into being a real star of the literary scene.

21:24Her novels were all about love, love that went well, love that went badly, constant ups and downs, lots of pain. What characterised her novels was sometimes it seemed the frailty of the women heroines, because they had names like rain or mist or cloud, but in fact these were women who were determined to do what they wanted and to love as they chose. She had fallen in love, in fact from very early childhood, but with words. She was fascinated by language. When she was a child growing up in Sichuan, her mother taught Chinese literature at primary school. As a girl, she was not allowed to go there, but she used to sit on the threshold of the door and simply listen to the classes.

22:15She gradually decided, as she went through school, that the only thing she wanted to do was write. By that time, the family had left China, and she went to high school in Taiwan, but it was terrible that almost every subject, maths, sciences, couldn't begin to understand them. All she wanted to do was read and read. Her parents were both teachers and very much hoped she'd pass the college exam, but she failed it not only once but twice. And she had a big argument with her mother and she said, no, what I want to do is write. and she raced out of the house and went and bought manuscript paper, pens and ink and brought it back and sat down at her little desk, spread out the paper and decided that she was going to write from then on.

23:13But she also fell in love. There was a tremendous first love affair with the teacher of Chinese literature. She was 18 or 19, and he was 25 years older than she was. He was widowed and lonely, but he was a poet. He was full of literary thoughts and could talk about books. And rather as in a famous scene from My Fair Princess, they could watch the stars and the moon together and talk poetry and philosophy. it was a complete romance, as in her novels later. But the school found out about it, and he was dismissed for seducing a minor. What with that and all the pressure from her parents, she would have to give him up.

24:05She was completely devastated. The scar on her heart never healed. Nonetheless, she fell for a writer again, a struggling writer who was quite poverty-stricken. She called him Qin Yong in her memoir. And he was trying to write the great Chinese novel and it wasn't going very well, so they had a rather vexed marriage, particularly because by this stage, Zhong Yao had written quite a few novellas and short stories. And she then wrote a novel called Outside the Window, which was based on her first love affair with the teacher. And it was a terrific success. He was extremely jealous of this. And he was also very fed up with her because she was not a particularly good wife.

24:55She just wanted to write. So after a while, they had to get divorced. It simply wouldn't work. She began to fall in love with her publisher. She'd obeyed him even when he'd insisted on almost impossible schedules of writing. But he was a married man and he had three children. and it took eight years for his divorce to come through. And while it happened, her own reputation as someone who wrote about impossible love or immoral love, love outside marriage, the whole reputation that she'd earned through the novels became attached to her life.

25:44she was seen as a woman who was determined no matter what to get the person she loved even if it went against culture and social mores even if it was viewed as completely improper love would always triumph and love was the only thing that mattered Anne Rowe on Chung Yao, who's died aged 86.

26:49We'll see you back here tomorrow for The Weekend Intelligence.