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ELON MUSK’SNHSUK MPYour browser does not support the element. barrage of posts about sexual-abuse scandals in Britain tells you a lot about the temperament of the owner of X, a man with the ear of America’s president-elect. The predation by largely Pakistani gangs on girls in English towns was first seriously reported on in 2011. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister (who was chief prosecutor back then), was “complicit in the rape of Britain”, Mr Musk wrote; he mused about whether America should “liberate” the British people.But the reaction to Mr Musk’s rant also reveals something about the prime minister and his principal political opponent. The most important biographical difference between Sir Keir and Kemi Badenoch, the new leader of the Conservative Party, is not that she was brought up in Nigeria and he in Surrey; nor even that he is a self-declared socialist and she a Thatcherite. It is that he came of age professionally before social media transformed politics, and she afterwards. British politics is now a contest between an offline prime minister and a very online leader of the opposition.In 2004, two years before the launch of X (then Twitter), Michael Goldhaber, an American thinker, published an essay arguing that the internet would produce a new type of human, just as printing had. would be followed by His “mentality significantly altered” by the effects of intense internet use, would be unmoored from time and space, disrespectful of old sources of authority and facing a constant battle for his attention.Sir Keir is a politician of the pre-internet age. He was born in 1962, and he became a national figure in 2008 as director of public prosecutions (a fine job for ). Britain’s low-tolerance approach to wild talk online was shaped during his tenure, with the prosecution of a man who joked on Twitter about blowing up an airport. As prime minister in 2024 he insisted that prosecutors throw the book at those who encouraged riots on social media—and drew a first salvo from Mr Musk.In a sympathetic biography of Sir Keir by Tom Baldwin, social media appear as either a nuisance or a threat. Trolls say vile things about him; his strategists warn that Labour activists should spend less time in their online bubbles. On the brink of electoral victory, Sir Keir promised that a Labour government would cool online populism. He can, Mr Baldwin says, be the prime minister “for the 80% of normal people who don’t abuse each other as ‘rape genocide enablers’ before they have had their cornflakes”.And so Sir Keir tried to brush off Mr Musk’s onslaught. “I think most people are more interested in what’s going to happen to the , frankly, than what’s happening on Twitter,” he told a press conference at a hospital on January 6th. His rivals, he said, needed to decide if they wanted politics rooted in truth or in lies.If for Sir Keir social media are a distraction from real politics, for Ms Badenoch they are the essence of it. She is the right honourable member for . Born in 1980, she took a course in Apple repairs and later a computer-engineering degree. She is reputed to have been busy on Nigerian-diaspora message-boards; a job on the website of the , a conservative magazine and keen participant in the culture wars, would follow., wrote Mr Goldhaber, would attach himself to new communities based on affinities “unshackled by space, unbounded by borders”. So the causes that most animate Ms Badenoch are litigated online and heavily influenced by America: gender identity; critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion schemes. She wants her party to think deeply about the civilisational questions the internet poses, such as the loss of presumption of innocence that emerges from online “pile-ons”. She was quick to defend Allison Pearson, a conservative journalist questioned by police over remarks on X.Whereas Sir Keir speaks with lawyerly caution, Ms Badenoch does not so much talk as post, whether online or off. When she stood for the leadership, Tory members (though mostly older than Sir Keir) loved her pithy, contrarian hot-takes, served up in a style familiar to those who dwell on X. Sir Keir is criticised for being dull; she is unusually interesting.Little wonder that she embraced the intervention of Mr Musk, who she says has made X much better since buying it in 2022. Soon after his onslaught began, she proposed a new national inquiry into the grooming gangs; she brought a vote (though doomed by Labour’s huge majority) in Parliament on January 8th.Sir Keir was baffled: had her party not been in power for 14 years, while reports into the abuse gathered dust? Why was she tweeting about it now? Yet, wrote Mr Goldhaber, the internet would erode notions of time, because unlike musty books which immediately betray their age, pixelated text is continually refreshed. would live in a “space devoid of chronological ordering…an ever-changing now”. And so the court judgments of over a decade ago pinging round X seem as urgent as if they had been written yesterday.Mr Musk was also rumoured to be mulling a donation of $100m, a huge sum in British politics, to Reform ,until a spat—on X, naturally—with the populist outfit’s leader, Nigel Farage. (Mr Farage, as it happens, was early to see the potential in YouTube and Facebook for propelling the fusty Eurosceptic movement.) Yet Mr Musk’s posts on sexual abuse had s gyrating without his spending a cent.Neither Sir Keir nor Ms Badenoch has the balance right. Sir Keir is too slow and unagile to react to developments online, his colleagues complain, and does not give the real debates on race and gender that play out there due credence. In 2024 online platforms overtook television as Britons’ main source of news; amid the vitriol, millions of voters of all ages head there.Ms Badenoch, though, seems too online for her own good. Even on Boxing Day, as Britons digested their turkey, she was rowing on X with Mr Farage over whose party had more members. Yet she has little to say about public services, still the most important issue to voters, polls suggest.It is possible to be both interesting and irrelevant. A decade ago another prime minister, David Cameron, crowed that his defeated rivals had tangled themselves in online debates: “Britain and Twitter—they’re not the same thing.” Or as Mr Goldhaber put it: “For cyberspace is most of the real world, and the rest is an appendage of it.“
