Keir Starmer’s speech this morning served as a neat microcosm of his six-month premiership. There he was, all primed to explain his plans for cutting NHS waiting lists – and yet he ended up having to talk about grooming gangs. After a frenzied week in British politics, it served as the latest example of a carefully-crafted set piece occasion being hijacked by events overseas.
Labour has sought to avoid confrontation with Elon Musk in the past six months, downplaying his increasingly vocal criticisms of the government on X. But after the Tesla billionaire attacked Starmer’s handling of child rape cases when he was director of public prosecutions, the Prime Minister clearly decided that silence was no longer an option. In his words today, ‘a line has been crossed’.
Still, this being Starmer, he did not launch into Musk straight off the bat. His initial response when asked if he was ‘angered’ by Musk’s taunts was to suggest that ‘most people are more interested in what is going to happen to the NHS, frankly, than what is happening on Twitter’. When pressed, he preferred not to mention the billionaire by name, instead preferring to refer to a massed unknown number on social media. ‘Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible, they are not interested in victims’, he said. ‘Those who are cheerleading Tommy Robinson are not interested in justice, they are supporting a man who went to prison.’
It lived up to the ‘full-throated’ defence from the Prime Minister that we were all told to expect
The criticisms of him personally seemed to trouble him less than an attack on one of his colleagues. Musk last week insisted that junior minister Jess Phillips was a ‘rape genocide apologist’ for refusing to order a government inquiry into child abuse in Oldham. Starmer backed his fellow MP with vigour: ‘Jess Phillips has done a thousand times more than they have even dreamt about when it comes to protecting victims of sexual abuse throughout her entire career.’
He also offered up a defence of his own record as head of the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013. Starmer said that victims were ‘let down by perverse ideas about community relations’ and so ‘when I was chief prosecutor for five years I tackled that head on’. He noted: ‘I brought the first major prosecution of an Asian grooming gang’ and said that he ‘changed the whole prosecution approach’ to ‘challenge the myths and stereotypes that were stopping those victims being heard’.
It lived up to the ‘full-throated’ defence from the Prime Minister that we were told to expect. Starmer was at pains to make his case as passionately as possible – while taking care to avoid antagonising Musk unnecessarily. Yet he showed no such compunction when he turned on domestic foes. He accused the Conservatives of ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ and being ‘so desperate for attention that they’re amplifying what the far right are saying’. Given the strength of feeling on this subject, that line may come back to haunt him.
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