Can it really be three weeks ago that Nigel Farage and Elon Musk were posing adoringly at Mar-a-Lago, in front of that hilariously naff painting of Donald Trump in the tennis sweater? I am as surprised as Nigel that his holiday romance has been built on sand. Or, to put it another way, that the African billionaire who promised to deposit ££££££££££ in his account has turned out to be not what he seemed. The Farage dumping seems to have occurred after the Reform UK leader failed to agree with Musk that he should ally with the imprisoned career criminal Tommy Robinson over the latter’s stance on grooming gangs.
And so to grooming gangs – or rape gangs, as they are rightly and more accurately being called now. Maybe the first week of January has become the time when anger about things that have been going on for a long time reaches significant mass. Last year it was the Post Office, this year it is the rape gangs scandal. As for what it will be next year, the likeliest current forecast is: something that Elon decides. We all live in the Muskoverse now. It’s a quirk of the age that the genius leading the race to the stars is also the idiot leading the race to the bottom.
Some facts are worth restating. There has already been a national inquiry into child sexual exploitation, faultlessly chaired by Prof Alexis Jay, who had previously chaired the specific Rotherham inquiry. The rape gangs scandal was one part of this second inquiry. It led to a searing report and a number of urgent recommendations. They should have been adopted in full by the government of the day (Conservative), but were not. They should be adopted in full by the new government of the day (Labour).
However, there is now a deep, if belated, conviction taking hold that the rape gangs scandal has not been sufficiently understood or reckoned with in this country. This is correct. It is frequently alleged that in at least several of the multiple areas where gangs operated – not just Rotherham – police and local politicians may have been complicit in cover-ups. My own belief is that further sunlight in the form of a new, swift and specific inquiry can be the only disinfectant for that institutional aspect of this horrific story. Gangs are still operating. Do they do so beneath a kind of wilful blindness that amounts to deep-rooted corruption or support? It feels long past time we tried to find out.
But if you want to talk hidden agendas, just look at the men muscling in now. Please remember that Musk has done absolutely nothing about this issue he suddenly cares about except post about it. Jess Phillips, the serially stalked and threatened safeguarding minister, had a career in helping victims of domestic abuse before she even entered politics, so what a surprise to find her literally being called a “witch” by Musk. He’d like to put her in prison, as opposed to on a ducking stool or a stake. And that is the other grimness of the current spectacle: watching strongmen and would-be strongmen argue about how to protect women and girls. With all that entails – and all it may bode for the future.
Nigel Farage, Elon Musk, Robert Jenrick, Tommy Robinson – when have you ever heard these people give a shit about women’s issues, let alone make a speech or put forward a policy dedicated to advancing them? Robinson very deliberately nearly collapsed a grooming trial, which would have put the victims through months and months of the horror of having to testify twice. People threaten to rape and kill women pretty much every second on Musk’s platform and nothing gets done about it – if I were him I’d be cleaning up my own streets. If he can’t manage it, maybe he should immediately call for himself to be imprisoned?
In the meantime women – and girls who will become women – should not be in doubt as to Elon’s views on their ultimate role: handmaidening the world out of its problems. Musk is an aggressive pronatalist. “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy,” he wrote recently, “we should teach fear of childlessness.” His father says even more out loud. Six weeks ago, Errol Musk told Sky News: “One need only go to England and go to the Cheltenham area, the horse breeding area, and say, ‘Look, we’re not going to breed the horses any more by any form of standard. I’ve got a few old horses I’ve found in Nigeria and we’re going to just mix them with your race horses …’.”
As for the political denizens of the knacker’s yard, I boggled at the Tory shadow minister who was thrilled that Musk had shared a Badenoch post, and crowed to the Mail about Musk’s dismissal of Farage by declaring: “This is a big moment. Not just the Kemi retweet, but the split with Farage. It’s like Hitler turning on Stalin and invading Russia.” Mm. I want to say “remind me how that went” – and yet, a huge part of me simply cannot get past the phrase “the Kemi retweet”. What can you say about the little tragedy of The Kemi Retweet, other than that it was not as good as The Bourne Identity? When leaders of once-serious parties and their allies are reduced to celebrating a retweet, they are completely beaten, even if they don’t yet realise it.
And maybe most of them are. Please don’t forget that Boris Johnson, a hero to a lot of those calling for a new national inquiry, described holding national inquiries into child sexual abuse as money “spaffed up the wall”. A truly grotesque choice of words in the circumstances. Yet while all grotesquery might not be equal, it has definitely not been limited to one mainstream party. I find it difficult to forget now, and wrote about it at the time, but less than two years ago Keir Starmer approved and stood by an attack ad, disseminated on all the social media platforms, which used a picture of Rishi Sunak, next to the words “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.” Sunak’s famous signature was added for good measure. Joining in the race to the bottom benefits no one, as the prime minister is now finding out. The sense that people like him have played politics rather than done politics is well entrenched.
Certainly, those starting the new year angry should not be lumped into one convenient mass of “deplorables”. I have followed and admired for many years the campaigning work of Sammy Woodhouse, one of the Rotherham victims. Much as I might wish it were not the case, I can well see how she and others might feel they have been driven towards the hard right by what they have experienced as the failings of the mainstream political spectrum. Many of these people don’t (currently) mind that the world’s richest man, who they will never be able to eject at the ballot box, is rapidly assuming the power to control their lives. Traditional politicians need to mount an urgent rearguard action to show them there is a better way – and not simply keep telling them there is.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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