Your article (Elon Musk turns on Nigel Farage and calls for new leader of Reform, 5 January) raises fascinating insights as to how international interests play an ever more direct role in the British political system. Discretion is not assured. What is becoming clear is that the likes of Nigel Farage seem to have dispensed with the illusion that Brexit was about political independence. Instead, the need to comply with far-right US agendas, the infantile inconsistencies of rogue James-Bond-type billionaires, and to accept millions of pounds in overseas income are openly accepted.
The positioning of Reform UK’s development in relation to overseas interests is at odds with the earlier rhetoric of national sovereignty. If ever there were a moment of amnesia in British politics, it is now. Given this focusing on the idiosyncratic turns of overseas business people, perhaps the government can seize the moment and complete an aspect of Brexit’s failed project that did have one moral feature: ensuring that it was the British people who should finance British politics.
While Brexit is thought to have failed – thankfully – what would help is confronting the issue of political funding to help sustain British sovereignty.
Miguel Martinez Lucio
Leeds
Elon Musk’s recent interventions into UK politics have been staggering. It was striking to me that he should be calling for a UK public inquiry. As a media lawyer, I am reminded of the Leveson inquiry, formed in 2011 after the phone-hacking scandal, which investigated the connection between press and politicians.
Leveson found “the evidence clearly demonstrates that over the last 30-35 years and probably much longer, the political parties of UK national government and of the UK official opposition, have had or developed too close a relationship with the press in a way that has not been in the public interest”.
He found that the connection created a perception of a conflict of interest (in both directions: the responsibility of the press to hold politicians to account, and politicians’ responsibility to hold the press to account on issues such as regulation and media policy). He recommended steps to impose transparency on these relationships.
Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s team and his intervention into UK politics makes the discreet kitchen-supper relationships of UK editors and politicians of the early 2000s seem beyond innocent. But painful lessons were learned when those relationships were exposed. The media landscape has changed dramatically since then and is under new control. We are now witnessing what it looks like when political leadership and media ownership combine on a dramatic scale. In the UK, we must use our experience to oppose Musk’s interventions, irrespective of the political, financial and diplomatic risks that brings.
Dominic Crossley
Partner, Payne Hicks Beach
Does anyone else share my feeling that we’re all being gaslit? Musk’s criticism of Farage is having the effect of making Farage look like a moderate. Surely this is their intention. Musk has nothing to lose with this good cop/bad cop ploy, and Farage everything to gain. Or am I giving the self-obsessed billionaire and the sycophantic “politician” too much credit?
Matthew Campbell
Sheffield
