Elon Musk's relentless involvement in the British national debate is becoming very encumbering for Keir Starmer's government. The richest man in the world entered the UK political scene over the summer and since then, not a week has gone by without him criticizing the actions of the British prime minister on his platform, X, often without nuance or concern for the facts.

Until now, the Labour leader has pretended to ignore him, but this strategy has become more difficult to maintain since President-elect Donald Trump announced that the Tesla boss would be joining his future administration to oversee its effectiveness. Given that the British attach great importance to their diplomatic relations with the US, Peter Mandelson – Tony Blair's ex-minister and ex-European commissioner for trade, favorite to become the UK's next ambassador to Washington, suggested on November 19 that Labour should "redouble its efforts" to find common ground with Musk.

Musk first predicted that "civil war" on the streets of the UK was "inevitable" when, at the beginning of August, television screens showed far-right activists protesting against asylum seekers and threatening mosques all over England. The situation was certainly very tense, but not out of control, following false rumors relayed on X in particular, according to which the person who killed three little girls in the north of the country at the end of July had crossed the English Channel in a "small boat." In reality, he was a 17-year-old Briton born in Cardiff, Wales, to a family originally from Rwanda. The SpaceX boss echoed the arguments of the British far right, denouncing a supposedly two-tier police force, which is tough on far-right demonstrators but lax with defenders of minority rights.

The multi-billionaire also expressed outrage when the Starmer government had to prematurely release prisoners with light sentences to decongest prisons. Rishi Sunak's Conservative government had been forced into the same expedient a year earlier. "I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they're releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts," Musk warned on X.

"Make Orwell Fiction Again!" he said indignantly again when Allison Pearson, a journalist with The Telegraph, learned in mid-November that she was under police investigation for reposting a tweet considered to incite hatred in the context of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli demonstrations after the start of the Gaza conflict a year ago. On November 18, Musk again accused the UK of having gone "full Stalin" over Labour's introduction of inheritance tax on the country's richest farms.

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