It’s been two weeks since the entrepreneur Elon Musk turned his sights on the United Kingdom, with a steady stream of posts on his X platform about the so-called “grooming gangs” child sexual abuse scandal in the country. The result was turmoil in British politics, as the country’s politicians scrambled to respond. Somehow, the furor has only grown: Op-eds and explainer articles have been published daily on both sides of the Atlantic, policy changes have been announced and the U.K.’s political parties have both found new attack lines and faced internal rifts. By Friday, the Financial Times was reporting that Musk had discussed ways of ousting Prime Minister Keir Starmer before the end of the current parliament in 2029, and the U.K. media was awash with debate about whether it was better to deprive the entire spectacle of attention or face up to the realities of a troublingly blunt new form of power.
The U.K. is far from the only country in Musk’s crosshairs, and the question of how to respond is also vexing world leaders. Musk has, for example, endorsed Pierre Poilievre, likely to become the next Canadian prime minister following the recent resignation of Justin Trudeau. His most concerted interventions have been in Germany, where he has given direct support to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which seems set to perform well in the federal elections scheduled for February, following the collapse of the country’s ruling three-party coalition. Late last year, Musk posted that “Only the AfD can save Germany,” then doubled down on the statement in an op-ed in the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, causing the opinion section editor to resign in protest. In response, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck suggested that Musk was working to weaken Europe and Chancellor Olaf Scholz intervened to say it was best not to “feed the troll” by getting drawn into debate.
The unfolding of the U.K. drama has prompted further responses from European leaders, aware that they could be next. French President Emmanuel Macron attacked Musk’s statements on foreign elections and the Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store suggested that the billionaire’s actions went against the spirit that should prevail in relations between democracies. Musk showed little sign of reconsidering, however, and ended last week by engaging in a chat with the AfD leader Alice Weidel, whom he has described as potentially the next chancellor of Germany, in which the two sought to highlight a shared libertarianism that they defined against the “socialism” and “communism” of the Nazis.
There are broad questions here about what Musk wants and how he intends to get it, but a closer look at events in the U.K. suggests that the effects of his interventions may be more unpredictable than many observers are suggesting — his power to cause damage at a distance seems to have as much in common with chaos theory’s famous flapping of a butterfly’s wings as it does with a guided missile.
The epicenter of the grooming gangs scandal lies in the northern English town of Rotherham, where a group of men, largely of Pakistani heritage, along with white members of the gang, groomed predominantly white girls (some as young as 11) and subsequently raped many of them, developing “relationships” before passing them around the ring, telling them that to sleep with their friends was a sign of “love.” Though the group was active from at least the mid-1990s and evidence of what was happening was collected from the early 2000s, as with so many criminal cases involving children, signs were missed to investigate and prosecute — in no small part because young women and girls are routinely dismissed and disbelieved, and the dots are rarely joined between disparate accusations.
In 2010, several gang members were convicted and, in 2011, The Times of London ran reports that raised questions about how long accusations had been ignored and whether it was because of the ethnicity of the majority of the perpetrators. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Edwards was quoted at this time as saying, “Everyone’s been too scared to address the ethnicity factor.” It is clearer than ever that these issues have never gone away.
Over the following years, the scale of what happened in Rotherham, involving many hundreds of young girls, became apparent, and further similar cases were discovered in many towns and cities around the U.K. As the offending, of a type not previously widely known, was unearthed, the public experienced outrage and shock. And while many of the gangs included white men, and reports have now long indicated that white men are responsible for most group-based child sexual abuse, the issue nevertheless became a rallying cry and recruiting tool for the far right — figures like Tommy Robinson, a founder of the English Defence League, who has built and retained a sizable online influence, not least through his rhetoric around “Islamic gangs.” The scandal was so common a talking point among far-right communities that the shooter in the 2019 attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, had “For Rotherham” engraved on one of his ammunition clips. It is brought up during times of extreme rhetoric from politicians and pundits over immigration and there is no doubt that it motivates action, seen most explicitly (and violently) in the riots that the U.K. witnessed in many cities in the summer of 2024.
The scandal also resulted in a series of local and national inquiries and reports attempting to understand the extent of the sexual abuse and how it could have continued for so many years without detection. Among them was a national independent investigation into child sexual abuse launched by then-Home Secretary Theresa May in the wake of the revelations about the pedophile entertainer Jimmy Savile, encompassing the grooming gangs. Chaired by Professor Alexis Jay, the inquiry ran from 2014 to 2022 and made several recommendations, including that those working with children should be legally required to report child sexual abuse, which was just announced as forthcoming legislation by the home secretary this week, alongside other changes related to sentencing and the gathering of information. (The timing of this long-discussed policy was notable.) The head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) at the time, the body with the power to move ahead with prosecutions, was a certain Keir Starmer, who subsequently overhauled the way victims and evidence are treated in cases with young people. He was lauded in subsequent inquiries for his response and the reforms he implemented. At no point did the CPS try to cover up what it had done or failed to do. But given that the scandal happened under his watch, and the police missed multiple opportunities to recommend prosecution, it is easy to accuse him of turning a blind eye to ongoing abuse. And accuse him people do, with Musk posting on Jan. 6 that “Starmer was deeply complicit in the mass rapes in exchange for votes.”
The original crimes and the treatment of victims have caused widespread horror, much debate and significant institutional change. Yet the scandal remains a classic contender for a culture-war issue: Take something that sounds self-evident (let’s stop people raping girls and women) and make it into a dog whistle against immigration and Muslims. The weaponized narrative skips over all complexity and uncertainty. The British government recently released data on the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators of child sexual abuse. Of the limited number of perpetrators of group-based child sexual exploitation with a self-declared ethnicity in 2013, 83% were white, while 7% were Asian, making whites slightly overrepresented. In turn, this form of abuse is only a small part of the problem of child sexual exploitation in the U.K., a problem whose nature and extent are evolving and inherently difficult to capture, not least because reports depend on victims coming forward and being taken seriously.
Musk appears to have tapped into the ongoing stream of far-right invective and, in one sense, this is hardly surprising. His takeover of X, recasting it as a bastion of “free speech,” and his alliance with President-elect Donald Trump have seen him become a right-wing figurehead and led to him rubbing shoulders with Britain’s Nigel Farage, the anti-EU and anti-immigration campaigner who is now a lawmaker and leader of the Brexit Party’s reincarnation, Reform UK. It is also clear that, as an enthusiastic user of his own product, Musk has been on a journey of self-radicalization, as the more extreme, conspiratorial and visceral X emerged like the “Alien” chestburster from the body of Twitter. Musk had previously turned his attention to the U.K. during the summer riots, posting that “Civil war is inevitable” and promoting the idea that British police were harder on right-wing protesters because of their backgrounds, which prompted a pushback from Starmer and the police and possibly gave Musk an ax to grind.
From the start of the new year, Musk began making a series of posts and reposts highlighting false and misleading claims about the grooming gangs scandal, interspersed with depictions of Robinson as a brave truth-teller harassed and persecuted by the establishment. (Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, has been convicted of contempt of court for nearly collapsing a grooming gang case, among many other convictions including mortgage fraud. In October, he was handed an 18-month sentence for contempt of court after repeatedly libeling a refugee boy by accusing him of sexual assault — a case that has nothing to do with grooming gangs.) Musk’s posts increasingly focused on the Labour Party leadership, with Starmer accused of being “complicit in the rape of Britain” while the lawmaker Jess Phillips was called a “rape genocide apologist” for suggesting that an inquiry in Oldham should be locally rather than nationally run. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was accused of having “sold those little girls for votes” thanks to the entirely false allegation that he ordered the police to treat victims as if they were making a lifestyle choice. Musk also enthusiastically agreed with U.K. right-wing accounts calling for the king to dissolve Parliament, posting his own poll asking whether the United States should “liberate” the people of Britain.
As the situation escalated, it evidently became too much for Starmer’s team. On Jan. 6, a speech on health policy was overshadowed as he defended his record and that of Phillips and called out the “outright lies” being circulated. This was widely regarded as a political mistake and led to accusations that Starmer had linked the concerns of the vast majority of the population with far-right deception. Top Conservatives evidently agreed with commentators that this was a political opening, and both the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and the man she defeated to win the leadership, Robert Jenrick, went into attack mode, supporting calls for a further national inquiry. It seems reasonable to the point of self-evident to be on the side of more information, but the chair of the last inquiry has herself said that there is no value in covering the same ground when the recommendations she made have not yet been implemented. Starmer initially took this line, leading Badenoch to suggest in Parliament that the refusal would cause the public worry about a cover-up. At the time of writing, several Labour lawmakers are echoing the inquiry call and Starmer has clarified that he is not opposed to it in principle.
From the headlines, the result appears to be a right-wing victory. Starmer looked like he was on the back foot, and attention was directed away from Labour’s halting efforts to rectify the parlous state of much of the country’s national services toward right-wing talking points about integration and identity. And it was all done without either the Conservatives or Reform having to offer up concrete proposals for government.
Yet despite this apparent right-wing gain, there have also been signs of rifts and resistance among those supposedly benefiting. Farage has long sought to distinguish his form of politics that aspires to reshape respectable opinion from Robinson’s brand of fact-free racist rabble-rousing, yet reiterating this stance led Musk (who had been rumored to be on the brink of making a large donation to Reform) to question Farage’s leadership credentials. The move showed a lack of understanding by Musk: Reform is largely a vehicle for Farage, who has the power to mobilize his electorate independent of any party branding and thus is integral to any future U.K. election campaign.
There has also been unease from senior Conservatives over Jenrick’s repeated statements that “not all cultures are equal,” and the pursuit of the issue by Badenoch. (Not known for her cautious language, yesterday she made headlines again for suggesting that the grooming gangs reflected the perpetrators’ “peasant backgrounds.”) For some, the whole incident clearly smacks of opportunism and imported demagoguery, and accepting the interference of a foreign billionaire may have implications in terms of public opinion for both politicians and the press. Like Farage, voters don’t enjoy feeling pushed around. Perhaps sensing this, many right-wing commentators attacking Starmer kept Musk at arm’s length, with one voice in The Telegraph calling him an “idiot space marine.”
Whether this whole affair will do any lasting damage to the government is also unclear. By the weekend, the story was competing with the more fundamental problem for Starmer of the rising cost of government borrowing. It is possible that the particular issue of grooming gangs, the politically weak opportunists amplifying it and the missteps of the prime minister have been more responsible for generating the excitement than Musk himself. More generally, it’s easy to see how Musk’s impulsivity, ignorance of the places he is pronouncing on and total inability to backpedal on statements could derail the effectiveness of whatever political strategy he pursues.
This is revealing of a weakness in the way Musk is using X. The supposedly free and communal marketplace of ideas was always shaped by an invisible algorithm even in the Twitter days, but has since been turned into a kind of hierarchy of platforms, in which Musk and his acolytes have a hugely expanded reach. Yet while the media owners of yore who used to decide British elections (at least by their own reckoning) hid themselves behind carefully chosen mouthpieces who were then allowed a significant amount of day-to-day latitude over how to gain the public’s trust, Musk is acting as owner, editor and journalist in a way that places maximum pressure on his personal brand, which risks progressively and irreversibly alienating more people. This risk is compounded by the fact that he isn’t disguising his foreignness or personal wealth and connections, and in fact is likely garnering more attention and exercising more pressure thanks to his closeness to the U.S. president-elect, with his most outrageous recent statements and those of Trump — on annexing Canada, the Panama Canal and Greenland — blurring into a single image for many observers.
It may well not be possible, however, for liberal Europeans to sleep well by simply turning their heads and not feeding the trolls. It seems clear that what Musk wants goes beyond flexing his muscles for the sake of it, pushing a free-speech agenda through wild and unexpected statements, or the desire to promote the relevance of X. We are seeing a definite attempt to shape international politics and push it toward libertarianism and ethnonationalism. This recent obsession with grooming gangs and vulnerable white girls slots neatly into Musk’s wider ideological beliefs, in particular his preoccupation with a falling birthrate and the overlap with “manosphere” talking points about women’s role in society. According to these communities, women in the West are no longer producing the babies necessary for the continuation of a culture or race, which, for many in far-right circles, amount to the same thing: a white Christian civilization.
Musk is now clearly in the game of accumulating political power, even if a large part of the purpose is to challenge social media regulation, hoover up government contracts and subsidies beyond the U.S. or secure global market share in electric vehicles by ensuring that his Teslas made cheaply in China can continue to be sold everywhere while European car manufacturers go to the wall. Whatever his motivation, his vast wealth and the connections of his enterprises to policy will make learning how to influence global politics more effectively an achievable and worthwhile goal in his eyes. This is likely to remain the case even if splits within Trump’s camp, like that with strategist Steve Bannon (who has vowed to reduce the influence of the “racist” and “truly evil” Musk), pry him away from the president.
What exactly this means for politicians like Farage and Weidel — or Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Viktor Orban and others — is unclear. The first quarter of the century has seen them successfully chip away at Europe’s political norms without the help of Musk’s X account. Can his money, publicity and proximity to Trump outweigh his capriciousness and relative unpopularity in Europe, and will Musk enjoy the process of managing new alliances? Amid the onslaught of outrageous and clearly spontaneous statements from both Musk and Trump, understanding what’s sincere and what’s posture is not easy. The element of chaos is clearly a fundamental part of the communication style, but it doesn’t follow that all the effects are part of the plan. For both Musk and the rest of the world, the ultimate results of playing with right-wing fire are unknowable.
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