In fiction, when a billionaire supervillain mobilises himself and his nefarious army of dollars against British democracy, we send a secret agent to have a word or two. That arm of the state is apparently inoperative, and I don’t know who to blame for that, probably austerity.
Instead, our first line of defence against Elon Musk has turned out to be Nigel Farage. Who could possibly have foreseen that they’d fall out, and so soon? They’re both so reasonable and conciliatory.
It seems like only a nanosecond ago that Musk was offering to hose Farage with cash; to give him so much money to spend on stunts and Facebook ads that our next general election would be a mere formality. All Farage had to do was fall in line on the simple matter of whether Tommy Robinson was a folk hero or far-right thug, and Westminster would be his for the taking.
You couldn’t call Farage’s response a principled stand: what he actually told Reform’s East Midlands conference was that Musk had “a whole range of opinions, some of which I agree with very strongly, and others of which I am more reticent about”. As critique goes, it’s weak; but as support goes, it’s pretty weak as well, given that it could mean anything. Does Farage agree very strongly that you should name your children with Roman numerals, as Musk has, but feel reticent on the matter of driverless cars? Does he agree with Musk’s long-game of colonising Mars, but feel reticent about the existence of a woke mind virus? What use is reticence to anyone in the context of Musk, whose entire persona is built on provocation, and demands either support or opposition; a man who spent $44bn on a social media platform apparently aiming to radicalise others, but mainly just radicalised himself? Even if there were some mysterious third way, where you could meet inflammatory and mendacious rhetoric with a tactful silence, would that somehow help? Does Farage have any skills or experience in the reticence area?
It’s been infuriating to watch commentators on the right explain how this was good for Nigel Farage, actually, enabling him to stand proud against Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), when in fact what he performed was more of a wheedling stoop, as if hoping against hope that the cash would spill out of Musk’s back pocket anyway.
And yet, just from a surfeit of human kindness, I feel like offering Farage some consolation: he could have fallen in line over Tommy Robinson, he could have signed up to Musk’s other tweet-proposition that Jess Phillips is a “rape genocide apologist”, and Musk would have found something more unhinged to say about British politics. Never mind that Musk is unconstrained in these pronouncements by reality or evidence; it’s all about the spectacle. Musk’s opinion-giving is dictatorial in its purest sense; he dares his acolytes to refute him, the better to flex his power over them. He wants to replace their observed reality with his own, and it has to be in public. He won’t be satisfied – and this goes for every politician he has in his pocket, up to and including the new US president – until he’s forced them to resile from their core positions while the world watches. This is why he picked a fight with Maga over visas before the inauguration was even cold, when reducing immigration was at the core of their offer. It’s chilling to witness, even if you have no time, let alone love, for its object, and don’t care to parse the fine differences of their dog-whistle politics. I’m not even looking forward to the bit where he gets Trump to surrender on the subject of high-skilled immigration. Nobody likes a sadist.
I was, on the other hand, medium-eagerly anticipating the moment when the prime minister found an appropriate response to the ongoing slander by the billionaire that Labour has somehow been complicit in, indeed orchestrated a cover-up of child sexual abuse in Rotherham, in the 00s and 10s. Starmer’s words, that the man was “spreading misinformation and lies”, were stronger than many expected, but a bit of an anticlimax. I’d have liked more in the space of “things we didn’t already know”; but how do you match the unhinged energy? Democratic politics, whatever its hue, has yet to find the language to deal with a man like Elon Musk, a man to whom maybe no words will ever speak as loudly as money. The answer’s probably pretty simple: tax him till his pips stop squeaking.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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