Starmer's best moment as PM

And the Powellisation of conservative thought

Keir Starmer has had his best moment since taking office in July. The cynical among you might say there’s not much competition, but that would be to underplay the strength and not inconsiderable political skill he displayed in his first speech of 2025. He’d gone to Surrey to talk about the NHS but he and his team knew the press wanted to talk about one thing only: Elon Musk. The agenda- what he’s said about Keir Starmer, what he’s said about Jess Phillips, even his Twitter poll this morning which suggested it might be a good idea for the US to “liberate” the UK (maybe that’s what Greenland was about, after all).

Starmer is often accused of being mealy-mouthed, of ducking and diving a little too often. Though there’s some truth in that critique it misses the occasions he’s been brave- his gambling on the Durham police inquiry, for example. Today was one of those rareish days, where Starmer displayed a calculated courage, responding to the Musk question at length, and in a characteristically deliberate way.

Ever since it became clear that Musk had become a key member of the Trump court, and especially since Trump won, Downing St had been reluctant to engage with Musk directly. That extended even to choosing to play down the prospect of a Musk Reform donation and saying that they did not intend to review electoral law to prevent it. Starmer and his team correctly recognised that that approach could not hold after the outrageous remarks Musk made about Jess Phillips, saying as he had done that the safeguarding minister was a “rape genocide apologist” and that she should be imprisoned.

If you haven’t seen the Starmer response, I won’t bother repeating it, but you can watch it here.

It did two things.

1. It sounded stronger on tape than the written words might imply. At no real point does he direct anything at Musk personally. But he does make clear that he sees what Musk and those who spread the things Musk has said as part of a far right campaign of misinformation, conspiracy and lies. He sounded especially passionate in defending Phillips herself.

2. He pushed the conversation away from Musk and to his own immediate opponents: Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and in particular, the wider Conservative Party. When pushed to criticise Musk directly he said this:

"I think only a few months ago it would have been unthinkable for the things that have been said about Jess Philips without all political parties and the leader of the opposition to call it out in terms...to condemn it...if you're not prepared to stand up as a Tory MP and denounce what's been said about her, then you need to seriously think about why you're in politics in my view."- Keir Starmer, 6th January 2025

Starmer is undoubtedly right and has identified a disturbing dynamic at the heart of this story. It has been the best example yet of the defining feature of our political age: the emergence of a radicalised Anglosphere online right, with Musk at its head. It is one which has essentially come to direct quite a bit of what the old “mainstream” right says and does and from where it takes its cues. This seems a trend likely to intensify under Kemi Badenoch, a terminally online political figure and a person who has imbibed an extreme free speech ideology. It is an ecosystem where conspiracy and fringe thinking which would have once been beyond the pale is at the centre, cloaked in the language of truth-telling and free speech, but which more often than not is just wrong, frenzied or taken entirely out of proportion to the matter at hand . Far from being little men and women raging against the machine, it is imbibed and amplified by a powerful illiberal metropolitan elite. This line runs, unbelievably, from Tommy Robinson to Musk to Reform to GB News to the right wing press through to the Conservative Party itself. It is fear of stepping outside this ecosystem, and the tropes and obsessions it alights upon, which is changing the behaviour of leading mainstream Conservative politicians.

Starmer is right, it would have been unthinkable for a leader of the opposition not to condemn an egregious attack on a sitting minister which said that she was a “genocide rape apologist”- but we have had no such condemnation from Kemi Badenoch. This is especially horrifying when we consider the recent history of political violence this country has experienced. When I pushed the reasonable Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp on my LBC Sunday show to condemn the remarks, he said the language was unfortunate but did not take the opportunity to do so. As I wrote yesterday, Richard Tice told me that “I don’t know what Jess Phillips is.”

And then, four days ago there was this from Liz Truss.

In fairness this was before Musk had targeted Phillips with his absurd rape genocide apologist charge. But it is indicative of the shift that I am talking about. Here we have a former British prime minister suggesting that a sitting minister and MP is on the side of Islamists. In this online right world, conspiracy and fifth columnists, are everywhere. In the Corbyn years the online left were mocked as extreme, this political and digital universe is often on another level entirely.

Quickly, the online extremist right, led by Musk, decided and decreed that Starmer had said that anyone who was concerned about child abuse was “far right.” Of course, this was yet another lie. Starmer began his remarks by saying explicitly that child abuse was “heinous” and said he was happy to stand by his record as DPP on the subject. What Starmer pointed to was a) the hypocrisy of those who until recently had been in office and done precious little about the subject b) the absurdity of a whole multitude of online commentators and politicians acting as if grooming gangs had just been discovered c) how far right thinking (the idea there had been a national conspiracy to protect Muslims) has become mainstream. Remember that the notion of ubiquitous Muslim grooming gangs has long been a trope of extremism, despite little evidence to suggest that ubiquity- when far-right terrorist Brenton Tarrant killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 the words “for Rotherham” were painted on his gun.

The idea that there has been a national conspiracy to protect Muslims and deny victims justice is dangerous nonsense. There is no doubt that appalling crimes were committed over a decade ago in different pockets of the country by predominantly Asian or Muslim grooming gangs. There is no doubt the victims were treated abominably by the authorities. There is no doubt, as established through a multitude of inquiries at a local and national level, that part of the problem in prosecuting the perpetrators and aiding victims was a cultural sensitivity and a fear of being called racist or offending a particular community. There is no doubt there are questions about certain cultural practices and attitudes which are not appropriate or acceptable or compatible with British life, and about which in past the political class could be somewhat squeamish.

But the frenzied idea, which has become commonplace on the online right, that there has been a mass conspiracy, perpetrated up to and including Starmer, government and the “mainstream” media is absurd. We know about the gangs not because of the egregious Robinson but because of the dedicated work of a number of “mainstream” journalists, in the papers and broadcasters, many years ago. We know there were cultural sensitivities because they were identified by myriad local and national inquiries. We know that Starmer, as DPP actually rewrote the code as to how these cases should be handled and was praised at the time both by Parliament and the man who prosecuted the Rotherham Cases, Nazir Afzal. Reasonable people can disagree about whether or not there should be another national inquiry, this time specifically into the question of Muslim grooming gangs (perhaps it might be an idea to implement the recommendations of the Jay Inquiry first) but it is absurd to suggest, as far too many have done, that this means a mass cover up is going on. The extremist Musk and Robinson tail are wagging the formerly mainstream dog.

And this brings us to something which hasn’t received nearly enough attention: the take of the Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick.

This, I think is the most telling reaction of the lot. It shows how far the thinking of the Conservative Party has moved away from any form of liberalism, to a deep and overwhelming nativism and cultural conservatism. Consider the logic of what Jenrick is saying here. He is drawing a direct link between “mass immigration” and child grooming. That there is an inimical connection between a particular group (in this case Pakistanis) and grooming, that there was something inexorable and inevitable about what happened. There is no evidence for that. What percentage of Pakistanis, first generation, second, third who are well-integrated British citizens would have any truck with grooming and child abuse? 10%? 1%? 0.1%? 0.001%? It logically follows from Jenrick’s tweet that Conservative thinking is that it was a mistake to allow a whole migrant group, or at least a significant proportion of it, because of the grooming scandal. If Jeremy Corbyn had applied such blanket thinking about any subject to British Jewry, there would (rightly) have been outrage and I note there is seldom such concern about the religious practices of other minority groups or institutions, other than Muslims. The online right picks and chooses its concerns. Where are the calls for inquiries into the Church of England? English public schools? Or any number of British institutions and groups which have had child abuse scandals over the last decade?

There aren’t any. Because what is at heart here is a growing radicalisation of conservative thought about migration, integration and in particular Islam. It is genuinely absurd as Jenrick does, to say that these grooming scandals prove somehow, that British integration has failed. In fact, largely it’s a success story, especially by comparison to other countries. His own party’s most recent leaders, including the incumbent are at least in part a testament to that success. We used to have a word for the idea that groups could never and would never be able to integrate into British society, that they could never be British, that they were and would always be intrinsically “alien”- it’s called Powellism. It was that idea, rather than the florid racial slurs and words, which were at the heart of Enoch Powell’s argument in his 1968 Rivers of Blood speech. And it’s an idea which is now at the heart of much of the mainstream right’s thinking. This is being accelerated by Musk’s repeated interventions. What is becoming clear is that Musk has been radicalised and is intent on doing the same to British politics. The question is whether there is enough strength or will left on what was the mainstream right to stop him.

In the meantime, as much as Starmer had a good day, in a sense he had a bad one. Instead of talking about the NHS, the number 1 issue which concerns the British public, he had no choice but to respond to the daily exigencies of Musk and the online right community. It’ll happen again, especially when Trump takes office. And Starmer won’t be able to repeat this trick every time.

PS You won’t be surprised to hear that we recorded today’s News Agents on this subject. If you’d like to listen to it below.