Busted Special Relationship
We’ve just learnt that the noxious disrupters Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are, allegedly, plotting to sabotage our elected PM Keir Starmer. This comes soon after Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson, published ‘humorous’ columns asking America to take over GB. ( If an influential British Muslim played these foul games, he would be taken off to prison and not seen again for 10 years)
Thankfully, the nation is no mood to indulge the egomaniacs. I was on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions last Friday with the Times columnist and Tory peer, Danny Finkelstein, Labour MP Meg Hilliers, and Greg Svenson, an American investment banker and chairman of Republicans Overseas. We were in Trinity College, Oxford. The event was sold out.
The question submitted by most people was about Musk. From right to left, his arrogance, audacity and destructive interventions were declared unacceptable. None of the British panellists backed the richest man in the world. But Svenson, a fervent Trump supporter, did. He also defended red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism and argued against climate change. His views provoked waves of disapproval and contempt. The anti-American mood was palpable. By the end of the show, the long vaunted, unbalanced, ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US seemed to be cracking, at times, busted. I silently cheered.
It has been a bad, long marriage, with us always having to please them. Tony Blair allying himself with George Bush’s immoral and unjustifiable war on Iraq was the lowest point in the coercive and controlling ‘partnership’. The EU, in contrast, is committed to the Nato alliance, but has maintained its own values and principles. After Brexit, our Tory government became even more slavishly pro-American, believing the adulation was reciprocated.
Some are still caught up in this unhealthy fixation. Matthew Syed, a much lauded, public intellectual, recently argued in the Sunday Times that America had done much to ‘civilize’ the world and that the US led ‘post war age’ has been the ‘most magical in history’. He admitted that US foreign policy had, at times, been disastrous, but still remains in thrall to the western superpower. Here is just a shortlist of places which the US caused such havoc that the countries are still in recovery: Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, South American republics.
Syed’s views, shared by some Brits, now, seem quaintly out of date and out of synch with British public opinion, and a very good thing too. The UK was always a loyal ally in the US’s various colonial adventures. Now Brits know how illegitimate US interference feels.
Anticipating four years of Trumpism, and witnessing the harm caused by American insurrectionists like Musk our people are angry, not only lefties like me or agit prop regulars, but judicious, unexcitable folk. Dominic Crossley, a partner in the law firm Payne Hicks Beach, writes in a letter to the Guardian: ‘ Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s team and his interventions into UK politics makes the discreet kitchen-supper relationships of UK editors and politicians of the early 2000s seem beyond innocent. The media landscape has changed dramatically since then…We are now witnessing what it looks like when political leadership and media leadership 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’. 10th Jan 2025
An email just arrived from someone with the initials AR who heard me on Any? He does not hold back : ‘Corporate America has raped Britain and the world…Trump is a side show. Musk is a danger to the world. The Internet is the Wild West and Musk and his Frontiersmen see no need for the US Marshall. Keir Starmer has no idea what he is up against. We have all misunderstood an American Oligarchy that pretends to be a Democracy and we are failing to protect ourselves.’ Such views are appearing all over our media. The good, obedient wife has turned.
Mainland Europeans are also concerned and panicked. Musk’s closeness to Italy’s Georgia Meloni and open backing for the far right, AfD party in Germany is making him feared and loathed. But the EU is one of the most powerful trading blocs in the world. It will better withstand this raid against liberal democracy than we can. Another reason to despair of Brexit.
The west now faces three enemies- totalitarian communism, the far right and the USA, The first two are enemies we know. But what to do about the third, our hitherto masculine partner and the flame carrier of liberal democracy, who is busy torching our elected leaders and the communications environment?
Published in the I newspaper, 13th January 2025