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He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain\u2019s seven-month-old Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.<\/p>\n
Elon Musk has once again set his sights on Britain, putting the country in the bull\u2019s-eye in the capricious world of his online obsessions. In a fusillade of posts that began before the new year, Mr. Musk moved on from his enthusiastic boosting of a far-right party in Germany<\/a> to targeting Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.<\/p>\n After mostly ignoring Mr. Musk\u2019s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government on Friday snapped back, though in characteristically polite fashion.<\/p>\n \u201cElon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,\u201d the government\u2019s health minister, Andrew Gwynne, said in an interview with LBC radio. Mr. Gwynne\u2019s boss, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, told reporters, \u201cSome of the criticisms Elon Musk has made, I think, are misjudged and certainly misinformed.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Britain is one of several European countries where Mr. Musk is trying to replicate the influence he wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald J. Trump in the American election last fall. In addition to Germany, where his advocacy of a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties<\/a>, Alternative for Germany, has roiled that country\u2019s politics before elections next month, Mr. Musk has nurtured close ties<\/a> to Italy\u2019s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.<\/p>\n In Britain, Mr. Musk\u2019s antagonism toward the Labour government is rooted in part in its aggressive response to hate speech online. Officials said false and inflammatory posts<\/a> helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport last July. They arrested more than 30 people, which prompted Mr. Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the free speech that he extols on his platform, X.<\/p>\n Britain, he said, \u201cis turning into a police state.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Since then, however, Mr. Musk has waded into other volatile issues, from declaring his support for the anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., to stirring up anger over the government\u2019s response to a decade-old child sexual abuse scandal<\/a> in the northern town of Rotherham. An estimated 1,400 girls were exploited by \u201cgrooming gangs\u201d composed largely of British Pakistani men.<\/p>\n Perhaps most provocatively, Mr. Musk has taken up the cause of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigrant agitator whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon<\/a>. He has been in prison since October after being convicted<\/a> of defying a court order by repeating false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee who had successfully sued him for libel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Robinson has been previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties<\/a> with right-wing groups.<\/p>\n \u201cFree Tommy Robinson!\u201d Mr. Musk posted on Jan. 2 as his pinned item atop his X account, which has 210 million followers.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s championing of Mr. Robinson has put his other right-wing allies in Britain in an awkward spot. Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform U.K. and a close ally of Mr. Trump\u2019s, has long shunned Mr. Robinson, who founded the English Defence League, an Islamophobic, nationalist group known for its violent street protests in the late 2000s and 2010s.<\/p>\n Mr. Farage, who has reveled in Mr. Musk\u2019s endorsement and has courted him in the hopes of winning a donation to Reform U.K., echoed his demands for a new investigation of the child sex abuse scandal. But he has been conspicuously silent about Mr. Robinson.<\/p>\n As in Germany, where Mr. Musk\u2019s promotion of the far-right AfD party provoked a widespread backlash<\/a> against him, Mr. Musk\u2019s interventions have won him few fans in Britain. But analysts say his proximity to, and influence over, Mr. Trump mean that his opinions, amplified by his social media platform, cannot be ignored by the government.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHis message doesn\u2019t work in Britain and Germany, and yet the governments are constrained by their relationships with Trump,\u201d said Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research organization in London. \u201cIt will be hard enough to have a relationship with Trump. What Musk does is put this nongovernment official in the center of the court.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Katwala argued that it made sense for the government to respond to Mr. Musk\u2019s more extreme or erroneous statements, if only because his unpopularity makes him an inviting target for other critics. \u201cThey leave an open goal by not saying anything,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Privately, British officials say they hope that after Mr. Trump\u2019s inauguration later this month, Mr. Musk will be too busy overhauling the American federal government to continue his daily barrage of criticism of Britain and Germany. But in the meantime, his online reach is broad enough that \u201cit affects the political weather,\u201d Mr. Katwala said, citing the child sex abuse scandal as a case in point.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s posts have helped whip up a tempest over a case that was the subject of local and national inquiries dating back to 2014. After one of Mr. Starmer\u2019s ministers, Jess Phillips, pushed back on calls for yet another national investigation \u2014 saying it was a matter for the local council \u2014 the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, followed Mr. Farage in castigating the government. \u201cNo one in authority has joined the dots,\u201d she posted on X on Jan. 2.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On Friday, Mr. Musk claimed that Ms. Phillips, the under secretary for safeguarding and violence against women and girls who has long campaigned<\/a> for women\u2019s rights, was a \u201crape genocide apologist\u201d \u2014 language that women\u2019s rights supporters said jeopardized Ms. Phillips\u2019 safety. He has also tried to turn the scandal against Mr. Starmer, who ran the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013, when the abuses first came to light.<\/p>\n Although several men were imprisoned, the inquiries found that the police and prosecutors were slow to react to the allegations, in part because the victims were reluctant to come forward and in part because of worries about racism, given that most of the accused were British Pakistanis.<\/p>\n \u201cStarmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,\u201d Mr. Musk said in a post that was pinned to the top of his account earlier on Friday. \u201cStarmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in the history of Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, in 2013, in the wake of the scandal, Mr. Starmer published new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children.<\/p>\n