We're five days in to 2025

Musk has set fire to Reform. And I've started a substack.

Well, here goes nothing.

If you’re reading this you probably know I think about politics, a lot. It’s a pathetic, niggling adolescent obsession which I’ve had since being properly sentient and my needs weren’t confined to family, food and SuperTed. I report, talk and broadcast about it for a living and do a fair amount of writing about it too, but I’ve long thought I’d like somewhere and the space for the thoughts inside my head that can sit between the fleeting hard sugar of a tweet, and the eat-your-greens (but time consuming) newspaper piece, with the associated clunkiness of commissioning, copy editing and the like. Politics moves too fast now for any of that now, and I’d like to just open my laptop and send something into the ether as quickly as I can.

As we survey the long haul that is 2025 ahead, I'm acutely aware that there are just so many contradictory impulses, so many narratives which are too much to keep inside anyone’s head, including mine. So as much as anything, I’d like this to be a political notebook, a sort of diary, I suppose, in a vain hope that if those things are noted down as they occur, some logic or sense might be drawn from them. But as often as anything, I might just like to tell you about a play , film or a restaurant I really liked, or a place I’ve been to, or a piece of reporting I’ve done, and hope you might be interested- or just a means of exorcising to funnel the random thoughts that burrow in my head, in the hope (there’s that word again) that someone else might like them to burrow in theirs. Think Nigel Slater’s, The Kitchen Diaries but for politics (Jesus, I have become middle class haven’t I). So here it is, Goodall and Good Luck (again, not helping myself there). On the other hand, maybe middle age is rearing its head slightly early. So here we are, in the substack space.

When some of the nice people from this site kindly met me a while back and suggested they thought my writing might do well here they suggested a strong, opening piece where I set out exactly what I’m trying to do. With the greatest of respect to them- nah. I’m not sure the internet is in desperate need of yet another journalist’s lengthy prognostications about their craft, or reinventing the art. So I thought I’d start with the sort of thing which I’ll be doing a lot. Reflections on the day. And what a day.

It started with my doing my LBC show, which included among other people Reform’s Deputy Leader Richard Tice. We had a lengthy exchange about Elon Musk’s remarks about the safeguarding minister, Jess Phillips. Musk had suggested that she was a “genocide rape apologist” (no, me neither).

Richard Tice on Elon Musk and Jess Phillips

Tice, to my surprise, not only refused to condemn these absurd (and dangerous) remarks, but refused also to even say that they were inaccurate, saying simply “I don’t know what Jess is.” Farage, in an interview with the BBC, had also again defended Musk and his “right to free speech”. This follows Farage, as recently as Friday, saying that Musk was “a hero”.

“I am very pleased he’s backing our party, even if reports of his potential financial donations are somewhat overexaggerated,” he said. “Whether we like everything he says or not, he’s a hero.”- Nigel Farage, Friday 3rd January

Only hours later, Musk tweeted this- stunning Westminster.

After months of kissing the ring, it was thrust firmly into Farage’s face. Ostensibly out of nowhere, Musk jettisoned him, and later suggested that he might prefer the MP for Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe- a man who has recently spread misinformation about a cow additive designed to stop them burping, and issued angry tweets about the World Bowls Championships.

A phrase involving swords, living and dying comes to mind. It turns out out that a man who entirely baselessly and bizarrely calls a British minister a rape genocide enabler and tweets random conspiracy theories day and night might neither be the most stalwart nor reliable political ally. It is highly embarrassing for Farage, who only weeks ago was gleefully tweeting out pictures of his meeting Musk at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly after Musk’s bombshell, Farage tweeted this.

The speediest of reverse ferrets of various right wingers who had been lauding Musk’s broadsides into British politics ensued in short order. Turns out foreign interference was a problem after all! Turns out Elon should butt out of matters which don’t concern him! Weird that. But as gleefully as liberals might gorge on popcorn as they watch the drama, hurriedly unable to decide whose guts they can’t bear more , a word of caution- Farage could emerge from all of this strengthened. Though this would suggest (though does not guarantee) that Reform will not receive any money from Musk in the near future (at least while Farage is leader), as you can see from his tweet, Farage is astutely already making the best of a bad situation. The truth is, while he would have doubtless liked the money, and to avoid an altercation with the billionaire, as soon as Musk emerged as an unlikely devotee of the far right thug Tommy Robinson (frequently tweeting his "‘documentaries” and advising his 200m+ followers to watch) Farage had no choice but to distance himself.

Farage understands his voters and political realities far better than Musk, who actually knows almost nothing about British politics. One of the biggest questions ahead in 2025 is whether Nigel Farage’s electoral ceiling is as low as it has always been, or whether he can elevate it. By this I mean though Farage has always had a significant base of support in the country, in general elections, it has generally hovered at around the 12% mark. There’s plenty of polling evidence to suggest that there are voters out there who are Reform or “Farage curious”- who might be broadly aligned with him on many of the issues but suspicious of his long and chequered political history, who fear he is secretly extreme. Any sense of any closeness whatsoever to the extremist Robinson would have scared off those voters permanently. Farage’s great political skill has been to move the Overton window of British politics gradually further and further to the right, by increments. He knew too well that that would be a jolt too far. It’s also worth saying that even if a formal alliance between Musk and Reform is (for now) off the cards, Musk and Farage will stay swimming in the same ideological seas. The billionaire will keep tweeting about subjects where Farage feels comfortable: immigration, free speech, trans rights etc. This helps normalise Reform’s own politics by osmosis and pushes the agenda onto terrain where Farage can win, because Musk’s megaphone is bigger than any other. It may end up being that Farage enjoys the best of both worlds from all of this.

Nonetheless Farage will, in the short term be diminished- it shows poor judgment, and in this crucial year, he can’t afford too many screw ups. He has to consistently demonstrate momentum, because that’s what insurgencies are propelled by. His is a media and political phenomenon, not one based yet in governance, in elected office across the country, or yet a mass local infrastructure. He is shorn even (ironically) of what the Brexit and UKIP parties used to have which is the European Parliament and its PR electoral system as a base of operations. He must get to the Welsh and Scottish parliamentary elections of 2026, off the back of a strong locals performance this year. So bad news stories like this, which disrupt the wave, are more dangerous to him than normal politicians, from normal well-established political parties.

But reputationally, the person this is worst for most of all is Musk himself. He is a poor reader of political dynamics. In technology he is clearly deeply gifted, in politics he is simply a terminally online hard right conspiracy theorist. He has been exercising astounding influence in British politics these last weeks, and that influence was partly based on an informal alliance between himself and Farage- that Reform would become his vehicle for British political influence. For the time being, that has been destroyed- by his own hand. And for what? A dance of death with Tommy Robinson. Musk’s cheerleaders in the British press and the illiberal metropolitan elite will be forced to choose, and most, in these circumstances will choose Farage. His voice will remain important but will be less important than it was, at least in the short term- tainted by association with Britain’s best known far-right figure.

In all this, of course, in global terms, it' is mere sideshow. What matters most is not the Elon/Nigel b-movie, but the Musk/Trump main showing. And all this augers very poorly for that. There’s just too much main character energy going on there. And a more basic type of energy as well.

Musk remains a quixotic figure and dangerous for individual politicians who enter his cross-hairs, for the health of British debate and for the government. Many of his acolytes- much of the right wing media establishment, people and publications (shamefully) looked the other way as he pumped fire, fury, conspiracy and lies into the British political bloodstream because they felt he was one of theirs and for sticking it to the libs. They defended him under the vacuous justification of “free speech”, believing he had not only a right to his own voice but his own facts, and his right to pollute the body politic with them. They’ve opened the year playing Icarus, a whole establishment of British politics, flown far too close to a Sun King.

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