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Reports that piqued Musk’s interest earlier this week claimed that Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips rejected a city council request for a government-led inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham, a town near Manchester in northern England, which was one. Areas where abuse from grooming gangs have been reported.
Although Musk and his allies claim this is part of a wider government cover-up, Phillips actually wrote in a letter that “rather than government intervention, the decision was made to commission an inquiry into child sexual exploitation locally only for Oldham Council”. The leadership rejected Oldham’s call for an inquiry.
Musk called for Phillips to be jailed and called him “a rape genocide apologist.” Both Musk and Phillips did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment.
Musk is again using the report to call for Starmer to be removed as prime minister.
“Starmer was involved in the rape of Britain when he was head of Crown Prosecutions for 6 years,” Musk wrote on X on Friday morning, in a post that is now pinned to the top of his timeline. “Starmer must go and face charges for his involvement in the most heinous mass crime in Britain’s history.”
Starmer, in his role as director of public prosecutions a decade ago, launched the trial of a grooming gang in Rochdale and introduced new rules aimed at allowing sexual assault cases to be prosecuted.
Starmer and the UK government’s press office did not respond for comment, but the health secretary did Wes Streeting told the BBC That Musk’s comments were “misjudged and certainly misinformed.”
Musk also drew a number of right-wing US figures in the conversation, including accounts such as Chaya Rychick, who runs TikTok’s virulently anti-LGBTQ account Libs, anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines, right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheung, and former US national security adviser Michael Flynn.
US Senator Mike Leo wrote in X: “Does the UK need to be freed?”
“Yes,” replied Musk.
Bill Ackman, a hedge fund manager and Trump supporter, repeated Musk’s description almost verbatim in a post on X. He then asked that the president-elect “consider appropriate sanctions against the UK until these concerns are resolved.”
In a post on Friday morning, Musk called on King Charles to dissolve the UK Parliament and order a general election. Although the UK monarch dissolves parliament before a general election, this is only done at the request of the prime minister and the monarch’s power is effectively nothing more than a rubber stamp.
