UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will hold talks with French President Emmanuel Macron in Britain on Thursday, a Downing Street spokesman said Wednesday.
The meeting comes after the two leaders earlier this week hit out at tech billionaire Elon Musk over his increasingly strident interventions into domestic European politics.
Starmer will host Macron at his country house retreat of Chequers in Buckinghamshire near London, the prime minister’s official spokesman told reporters in parliament.
“The meeting will focus on areas of cooperation and shared global challenges, including support for Ukraine, tech and AI, growth and tackling illegal migration,” the spokesman said.
“They will also discuss their ambitions for the UK-France summit taking place later this year,” he added.
Musk, who is set for a role in US President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, has provoked fury across Europe with a string of hostile attacks on Starmer and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The billionaire has spent days posting incendiary comments on his X platform over historical sex offences against children in northern England.
Musk has called for Labour leader Starmer, elected by a landslide in a general election last July, to be removed from office.
He has also urged the release from jail of Tommy Robinson, one of Britain’s best known far-right agitators.
On Monday, Starmer condemned those “spreading lies and misinformation”, adding that “a line has been crossed” with some of the online criticism, in a thinly veiled swipe at Musk.
That same day, Macron said Musk was “directly intervening in elections”, including in Germany where Scholz has condemned the Tesla boss for backing the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of next month’s snap elections.
Musk is set to host a discussion on X with AfD’s leader Alice Weidel on Thursday.
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