‘Attack’ Starmer is right to tell Elon Musk to get lost
The IndependentIn recent days, the prime minister faced a dilemma about how to respond to the barrage of abuse from Elon Musk, troll-in-chief, owner of X and soon-to-be member of the Trump administration. Starmer said he wasn’t going to “individualise this to Elon Musk or anyone else”, and tried to turn his counterfire onto the Conservative Party – accusing it of echoing the unjustified attack on Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister. “These are people trying to get some kind of vicarious thrill from street violence that people like Tommy Robinson promote.” And the prime minister defended Phillips, saying that the Tories’ amplification of Musk’s demand that she should be in prison was putting an MP at risk. The trouble is that people can be interested in more than one thing at a time, and while everyone recognises that the NHS is important, and might even concede that there are some early hopeful signs that Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is starting to make a difference, they are also interested in the soap opera of the world’s richest man pursuing a vendetta against the elected leader of another country. Musk’s shock-jock tactics are going to gain headlines whether Starmer responds to them or not, so the prime minister might as well seek to set out the facts.