A newly elected government organises a global summit to encourage inward investment. Hypothetically, it would be sensible to include the world’s richest man on the invitation list, but it seems as if Elon Musk (estimated net worth: $270.5 billion) has been snubbed by the British Government and will be absent from the event in London on 14 October.
This is not wholly unexpected. Musk, owner of social media platform X (formerly Twitter), provoked the fury of Keir Starmer and other Labour politicians in August with a series of inflammatory posts about the rioting in British cities. Most notoriously he predicted ‘Civil war is inevitable’. He is a contrarian and a provocateur, and wiser heads might have ignored his needling: instead, the Prime Minister warned social media companies that whipping up violent disorder ‘is also a crime… happening on your premises’; Minister for Courts Heidi Alexander called Musk’s remarks ‘pretty deplorable’; and two candidates to chair the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee vowed to summon the billionaire to be publicly cross-examined.
Shocking though the public disorder was, it died away almost as suddenly as it had exploded and many involved are now going through the criminal justice system. But Musk’s edgelord barbs rankled in Whitehall, leading to the apparent decision not to seek his involvement in this month’s conference. By contrast, Rishi Sunak conducted a 50-minute interview with the technology tycoon to round off the AI Safety Summit he convened at Bletchley Park last November. The Conservative leader, who earned an MBA from Stanford and worked with Silicon Valley firms as a hedge fund manager, is instinctively more at ease with tech bosses than the human rights lawyer and public prosecutor who succeeded him.
Starmer is undaunted, however. While attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York few days ago, he told reporters that Musk’s Tesla, Inc. would be welcome to invest in the United Kingdom.
‘Obviously, I encourage investment from anywhere. Good investment into the UK is what I’m very, very keen to promote… I’m absolutely determined to get the investment that we needed into the economy. And I do think we’ve got a real opportunity with a new chapter now.’
The Prime Minister appears not to see, or perhaps not to accept, any contradiction between his and his Government’s shunning of Elon Musk and the likelihood of Tesla investing in the UK. This is a foolhardly and reckless attitude. Musk is mercurial and unpredictable, and he is also thin-skinned and clearly minds this sort of slight. He used his social media reach to fire back at reports of the snub: ‘I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts.’
This fracas is reminiscent of the recent embarrassment of the Foreign Secretary David Lammy over comments he had previously made about Donald Trump. During the Republican presidential candidate’s tenure in the White House, Lammy, then an outspoken backbencher prone to fits of performative morality, had repeatedly attacked Trump on social media and in print, calling him a ‘racist and KKK/neo-Nazi sympathiser’, a ‘tyrant in a toupee’, a ‘dangerous clown’ and a ‘far right extremist’. Now he is in charge of British foreign policy, and there is at least a reasonable chance that Trump will resume the presidency next January.
The Foreign Secretary has brushed this off. ‘Donald Trump has the thickest of skins,’ he told an interviewer. ‘If the American people choose Donald Trump we will work with him as closely where we can and we will seek to influence him where we disagree.’ In fact Trump, like Musk, can be intensely sensitive to insults and bears long grudges. Lammy’s cheap lunges for moral superiority have left him having to work hard to build bridges with leading Republicans just in case Trump is victorious.
We all know how easy it is to fire off an intemperate message on social media in a flush of anger or outrage. It is also axiomatic that the internet never forgets. For politicians aspiring to high public office, this freedom with barbs and insults indicates a lack of seriousness and an underlying arrogance. It is as if they imagine their sense of virtue will shield them from any potential consequences of their actions.
The French politician Pierre Mendès France famously declared that ‘to govern is to choose’. But to govern is also to compromise and to temper instincts and reflexes, to avoid remarks which have the potential to return and haunt. Even by allowing the suggestion that Elon Musk was not invited to the investment summit for moral or ethical reasons, Starmer has ensured that every single attendee will be scrutinised through the same lens for a consistency of approach. The Government has recently been courting the Gulf Cooperation Council, of the six members of which most are absolute or semi-constitutional monarchies and some have appalling human rights records. Are they to be graded more acceptable than an American self-made billionaire?
This is a political, reputational and ethical quandary entirely of the Government’s making. Ministers need to understand that casually flaunting one’s impeccable conscience is a luxury denied to them now they are in power. Words have consequences. The truth is that they need to grow up.
You can watch ‘Open for Business: How the UK can attract foreign investment’, one of today’s Centre for Policy Studies panels at the Conservative Party Conference here.
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