He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s seven-month-old Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.
Elon Musk has once again set his sights on Britain, putting the country in the bull’s-eye in the capricious world of his online obsessions. In a fusillade of posts that began before the new year, Mr. Musk moved on from his enthusiastic boosting of a far-right party in Germany to targeting Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.
After mostly ignoring Mr. Musk’s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government on Friday snapped back, though in characteristically polite fashion.
“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” the government’s health minister, Andrew Gwynne, said in an interview with LBC radio. Mr. Gwynne’s boss, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, told reporters, “Some of the criticisms Elon Musk has made, I think, are misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Britain is one of several European countries where Mr. Musk is trying to replicate the influence he wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in the American election last fall. In addition to Germany, where his advocacy of a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties, Alternative for Germany, has roiled that country’s politics before elections next month, Mr. Musk has nurtured close ties to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
In Britain, Mr. Musk’s antagonism toward the Labour government is rooted in part in its aggressive response to hate speech online. Officials said false and inflammatory posts helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, which prompted Mr. Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the free speech that he extols on his platform, X.
Britain, he said, “is turning into a police state.”
Since then, however, Mr. Musk has waded into other volatile issues, from declaring his support for the anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., to stirring up anger over the government’s response to a decade-old child sexual abuse scandal in the northern town of Rotherham. An estimated 1,400 girls were exploited by “grooming gangs” composed largely of British Pakistani men.
Perhaps most provocatively, Mr. Musk has taken up the cause of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigrant agitator whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He has been in prison since October after being convicted of defying a court order by repeating false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee who had successfully sued him for libel.
Mr. Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.
“Free Tommy Robinson!” Mr. Musk posted on Jan. 2 as his pinned item atop his X account, which has 210 million followers.
Mr. Musk’s championing of Mr. Robinson has put his other right-wing allies in Britain in an awkward spot. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform U.K. and a close ally of Mr. Trump’s, has long shunned Mr. Robinson, who founded the English Defence League, an Islamophobic, nationalist group known for its violent street protests in the late 2000s and 2010s.
Mr. Farage, who has reveled in Mr. Musk’s endorsement and has courted him in the hopes of winning a donation to Reform U.K., echoed his demands for a new investigation of the child sex abuse scandal. But he has been conspicuously silent about Mr. Robinson.
As in Germany, where Mr. Musk’s promotion of the far-right AfD party provoked a widespread backlash against him, Mr. Musk’s interventions have won him few fans in Britain. But analysts say his proximity to, and influence over, Mr. Trump mean that his opinions, amplified by his social media platform, cannot be ignored by the government.
“His message doesn’t work in Britain and Germany, and yet the governments are constrained by their relationships with Trump,” said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research organization in London. “It will be hard enough to have a relationship with Trump. What Musk does is put this nongovernment official in the center of the court.”
Mr. Katwala argued that it made sense for the government to respond to Mr. Musk’s more extreme or erroneous statements, if only because his unpopularity makes him an inviting target for other critics. “They leave an open goal by not saying anything,” he said.
Privately, British officials say they hope that after Mr. Trump’s inauguration later this month, Mr. Musk will be too busy overhauling the American federal government to continue his daily barrage of criticism of Britain and Germany. But in the meantime, his online reach is broad enough that “it affects the political weather,” Mr. Katwala said, citing the child sex abuse scandal as a case in point.
Mr. Musk’s posts have helped whip up a tempest over a case that was the subject of local and national inquiries dating back to 2014. After one of Mr. Starmer’s ministers, Jess Phillips, pushed back on calls for yet another national investigation — saying it was a matter for the local council — the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, followed Mr. Farage in castigating the government. “No one in authority has joined the dots,” she posted on X on Jan. 2.
On Friday, Mr. Musk claimed that Ms. Phillips, the under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls who has long campaigned for women’s rights, was a “rape genocide apologist” — language that women’s rights supporters said jeopardized Ms. Phillips’ safety. He has also tried to turn the scandal against Mr. Starmer, who ran the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013, when the abuses first came to light.
Although several men were imprisoned, the inquiries found that the police and prosecutors were slow to react to the allegations, in part because the victims were reluctant to come forward and in part because of worries about racism, given that most of the accused were British Pakistanis.
“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Mr. Musk said in a post that was pinned to the top of his account earlier on Friday. “Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.”
In fact, in 2013, in the wake of the scandal, Mr. Starmer published new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children.
Having won a landslide Parliamentary majority in July, Mr. Starmer is in no immediate danger of losing his job. But the drumbeat of disinformation and criticism from Mr. Musk, combined with the prospect of him giving money to Reform U.K., has rattled people across the political spectrum in Britain. Lawmakers have called on the government to tighten laws to restrict foreigners from donating to British political parties.
Mr. Musk’s endorsement of posts calling on Charles to step in and call an election betrayed his ignorance of how Britain works. Under the terms of its constitutional monarchy, the king can dissolve Parliament, but only at the request of the prime minister, who decides when to call an election.
“He’s a 21st-century Citizen Kane,” Mr. Katwala said of Mr. Musk. “He’s got a picture of Britain, a picture of Germany, and he looks for information that confirms those pictures. The problem he has in exporting it to Britain or Germany is the evident lack of knowledge of Britain or Germany.”
