ANDREW NEIL: We're ruled by the most useless government in living memory. Elon Musk threatens their monopoly... bring it on!
Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are in cahoots to upend British politics as we've known it, bringing down Keir Starmer, capo dei capi of the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, in the process.
That's what The Mail on Sunday reported on its front page yesterday, quoting unnamed government sources.
It certainly had more than a whiff of truth about it. So much so that smelling salts had to be passed round the more faint-hearted of our progressive politicians and liberal intelligentsia.
How could our democracy survive this onslaught, they wailed when they came to, from the combined forces of the richest man in the world and the eminence grise of Boris Johnson's Downing Street – before collapsing again into an uncomprehending stupor.
Signs of the growing power of a Musk-Cummings axis are being seen everywhere. Why, Musk even tweets (on the X platform he owns, naturally) about 'Two-tier Keir'.
Only a British hand, it is argued, could guide him in such colloquial language, just as the Cameron government got President Obama to threaten Britain being relegated to the 'back of the queue' on a trade deal with the US if it voted for Brexit, when the American phrase is 'back of the line'.
Even more sinister, many Musk tweets mysteriously emerge when it is morning in Blighty but the middle of the night in America, clearly confirming there's complicity at work in the UK time zone. Of course, it may just be that Masters of the Universe never sleep. Or that Musk has worked out the 'schedule' facility on his own platform.
Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are in cahoots to upend British politics as we've known it, bringing down Keir Starmer in the process
But then Musk recently turned on Nigel Farage saying he wasn't 'up to the job' of leading the Reform Party. Everybody knows Cummings can't stand Farage, seeing his former Brexit comrade-in-arms as just another Westminster career politician. So Musk and Cummings are obviously in league plotting an insurgency against all parties, Reform included.
Frankly, given the current state of British politics, I think there's a lot to be said for insurgents. We are ruled by the most useless government in living memory (and after 14 years of lacklustre Tory rule there was a lot of competition for that accolade).
The Conservative opposition is all at sea, marooned on a desert island called 'Irrelevant'. The Liberal Democrats are led by a man whose only contribution to the gaiety of nations is to periodically fall into the sea. And the ruling Scottish Nationalists are doing their best, from schools to the streets of Glasgow, to take Scotland back to the dark ages.
So maybe a bit of insurgency wouldn't go amiss. The politicians don't see it that way. Especially Labour politicians, who are up in arms at the very thought of a foreign billionaire aiming to have any sway over our politics.
Of course, they were curiously silent when the American financier George Soros and Microsoft founder Bill Gates sought to influence our public debate. But then, in Labour's eyes, they're a better sort of billionaire – the sort that largely agrees with Labour.
So the airwaves and public prints are full of Left-wing politicians crying for Musk and his kind to be reined in (even arrested!) and for social media platforms to be more rigorously policed for thoughts unacceptable to the fashionable consensus.
They'd also like media regulators at Ofcom to dole out exemplary fines – even to determine what is 'true' and what is 'untrue' – and to have tighter controls on foreign donations to political parties (something strangely never mooted when Labour was the beneficiary of offshore funds).
Social media has given a platform to far more voices than before, some good, some bad. When that voice is as powerful as Musk's – who is not just rich beyond comprehension but a consigliere of Donald Trump – it can have a seminal influence on political debate
But more than just narrow party self-interest is needed to explain why politicians are in such a stooshie over Musk: it is because he and others like him threaten the politicians' monopoly of political discourse. Social media has given a platform to far more voices than before, some good, some bad.
When that voice is as powerful as Musk's – who is not just rich beyond comprehension but a consigliere of Donald Trump – it can have a seminal influence on political debate which can drown out most politicians, who are used to being listened to and don't relish being upstaged.
Just look at how, almost single-handed, Musk has managed to get the scandalous matter of British Pakistani rape gangs back on to the political agenda, so much so that Labour is under mounting pressure to concede a new public inquiry. This is exactly what the politicians didn't want. Though it involves the most evil and barbaric acts to shame modern Britain, the political consensus was to move on.
Some of the perpetrators had been jailed, lessons had been learned, nothing more to see – all the usual boilerplate bilge you get when so many across the political divide are complicit. After all, the evil festered under Labour and Tory governments. Local government, social services and the police all failed some of the most vulnerable people in our midst.
Too much of the media sought to shut down proper reporting of what was going on. It was hardly in the interests of the political establishment to rake over it all again. But for Musk and his like-minded social media followers we wouldn't even be talking about it now.
The media is reeling from insurgents almost as much as the politicians. During last year's US elections, podcasters like Right-wing American polemicist and interviewer Joe Rogan (19 million subscribers on YouTube) emerged as just as important – if not more so – than America's traditional broadcasters and newspapers.
Piers Morgan has smelled the coffee: he's striking out on his own, leaving the well-funded embrace of Rupert Murdoch with his Uncensored TV programme on YouTube with 3.6 million subscribers. More important, for a show dependent on ad revenues, 75 per cent of his audience is under 45, a hard-to-reach demographic. No TV network on either side of the Atlantic has as young an audience as that.
Not for the first time, the BBC is its own worst enemy. Musk's latest tweets are hilariously shoe-horned into almost every interview, no matter the subject. Even if it's about Welsh basket-weaving you can be sure Musk will somehow be dragged into it.
It's an obsession that merely feeds the Musk publicity machine – and underlines how digital media is the future, legacy broadcasters the past.
A clash is coming in Britain between the old and the new, between politicians who want to regulate social media the way they've regulated the broadcasters, and the social media giants who've discovered a new appetite for free speech.
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg plans to scrap their 'diversity, equity and inclusion' yardsticks when it comes to hiring. Interestingly, he announced this in an interview with Joe Rogan, pictured
Social media is preparing for four more years of Trump by junking its previous predilection to censor anything thought too conservative. That's why Facebook has replaced Nick Clegg with a Republican lobbyist. It's why boss Mark Zuckerberg now admits they went too far in the past censoring unfashionable opinions and plans to scrap their 'diversity, equity and inclusion' yardsticks when it comes to hiring.
Interestingly, Zuckerberg chose to announce all this in a long interview with Joe Rogan.
Welcome to a new world in which politicians don't dominate politics. It will be uncomfortable for Labour, which will be out of its depth dealing with the social media giants. But it won't be a breeze for the Tories either.
After all, one of the reasons we don't hear much about Kemi Badenoch is because she's being drowned out by Musk and other social media warriors.
The Musk-Cummings cabal, if that's what it is, could peter out as quickly as it's risen. Musk's attention could soon be diverted elsewhere, especially if he starts to fall out with Trump.
Cummings' plans for a new political party have as much chance of taking off as I have of taking off for Mars. But supporters of the status quo should not be complacent.
Even if Musk-Cummings is a brief aberration there will be other insurgents in their wake. Major change is coming. We just can't be sure yet what it will look like.
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