By Travis AAROE

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Can an eccentric billionaire really tip the balance in politics? The record, surprisingly, seems to suggest not. Even the press monopolist Lord Northcliffe never established any real ascendancy over national life. Those who have succeeded, such as Donald Trump or Ross Perot, have usually ended up having to enter the ring themselves.

In Britain, Elon Musk now tests this rule to destruction. He may be the first billionaire who really can decide the fate of an advanced democracy on a whim. After several months of rattling the cage of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he has now turned to Britain’s child-rape gangs scandal — the great crime of our age. The X owner has called for Labour minister Jess Phillips to go to prison for her part in rejecting an inquiry, for the release of activist Tommy Robinson from incarceration, and for new UK elections.

Musk has no major business stake in the UK, and has taken an interest in national affairs apparently out of curiosity. What statements he’s made about British politics have been consciously gnomic, rarely more than a few words long: “Wow”, “Yes”, “There must be accountability”, “Absolutely”, “Yes”, “Wow”. Yet these have still proved enough to convulse the body politic, dominating the British news cycle and setting the terms of debate.

Musk’s comments on “two-tier policing” during last summer’s riots turned an event following the pattern of 2001 into a political crisis. The term “two-tier” is now an established attack line and is regularly invoked in Parliament. Meanwhile, Musk’s criticisms of Rachel Reeves’s Budget have soured the mood among investors. In each of these cases, and in response to his posting about grooming gangs, there has been almost no opposition to the billionaire from “civil society”. The British Government has been mute and shuffling, murmuring something to the Lobby press that is soon drowned out by the latest “Wow”.

Billionaire interventions in politics are not new. What is new, and strange, is their almost complete success in this instance. Most democracies have evolved ways to resist such interventions, and there are devices, legal and otherwise, that have been used against Musk. The German government has formally rebuked him for endorsing the AfD, and Brazil — with a GDP that’s 65% of the UK’s — briefly tried to ban X inside the country.

How, then, do we explain the relative quiescence of Starmerism, a political force that’s now meant to be leading the global opposition to populism? This is not by choice, or design. It speaks instead to a British politics that is hollowed-out and ripe for capture by virtually anyone, even a third party. Musk has merely found a vacuum and stepped into it.

One example of this is the way in which the British press still operates, with almost all political news disseminated through secretive Lobby briefings. Large areas of inquiry are closed off with libel laws and “super-injunctions”, and the state broadcaster still dominates national life. This media ecology helps keep order but, being deadening by design, is extremely flat-footed in the face of a hostile challenger. Team Starmer has answered Musk’s viral posts with what are essentially analogue methods, while Britain lacks the kind of online Left capable of beating the tech mogul at his own game. During Musk’s most recent intervention, it’s no exaggeration to say that the defence of the entire Windsorite social order was left to the unofficial X account of Larry the Cat.

In Westminster, meanwhile, a strange silence has now descended. Starmer has noticeably little to say. The increasingly speculative leadership of Kemi Badenoch has seen her squirrel herself away from public life, apparently in search of the philosophical meaning of Conservatism. Reform UK has made noise in Parliament and now enjoys Musk’s personal favour, but for now remains too small to affect legislation. Few ideas are forthcoming from the Liberal Democrats, a strange and giggling party of country rentiers, proudly narrow in outlook.

As a result, many of Musk’s British victories have simply been by default — through sheer lack of local competition. When he brings up something like the grooming gangs scandal, he is not so much opposed as stared at, blinking. What a strange triumph for a man living half a world away.

Original article: unherd.com