Starmer was right to come out swinging against Musk

In recent days, the prime minister faced a dilemma about how to respond to the barrage of abuse from Elon Musk, troll-in-chief, owner of X (Twitter) and soon-to-be member of the Trump administration.

- JOHN RENTOUL

Keir Starmer wanted to rebut the falsehoods being pumped out, but he didn’t want to add to the publicity given to poisonous conspiracy theories.

He made the right decision, coming out swinging yesterday morning against “those that are spreading misinformation as far and wide as possible”.

Starmer said he wasn’t going to “individualise this to Elon Musk or anyone else”, and tried to turn his counterfire onto the Conservative Party – accusing it of echoing the unjustified attack on Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister.

But it is obvious that Musk is the source of the poison, and that Starmer has to make clear, as he said, that “a line has been crossed”.

The prime minister was right to take the inaccurate charges against him head on: to break them down into their constituent parts and rebut them patiently and factually. Thus, Starmer defended his role as director of public prosecutions, in which, far from “covering up” Muslim rape gangs, he led the way in rooting them out – working, as he pointed out, with a Conservative attorney general for three of his five years.