2025… The year of Farage and Maximus?

So, Christmas and New Year witnessed the start of Nigel Farage and his new best friend Kekius Maximus’s campaign to conquer Britain and reshape our politics and society in their right-wing image. Farage and who? For the uninitiated, that’s the alternative name Elon Musk has given himself on his X platform, along with a new profile avatar image of Pepe the Frog, clad in gladiator armour and waving a video game console. The world’s richest man (and eccentric extremist) ducked any explanation, while followers speculated it was a combination of one of his favourite movie characters Maximus, played by Russell Crowe in Gladiator (a film that aired several times on UK TV over the festive break) and Pepe the Frog, hero of the US Boy’s Club comic series which has been symbolically adopted by several far right groups loyal to Donald Trump, Musk and dedicated to ‘destroying wokery’.

Bonkers or a mischievous joke? Either way, like it or not (I don’t), there’s no denying that it was Farage and Musk / Maximus who won the war for the biggest print and broadcast news attention over the holiday season — a pattern they are pledged to try and repeat throughout 2025. With the May Day local elections a prime target for Farage’s Reform party’s ambition to delivery bloody, crushing defeats on both Keir Starmer’s wounded Labour government and Kemi Badenoch’s lacklustre leadership of an ailing Tory party struggling to avert terminal decline.

Fake membership numbers?

Even before party leaders filmed their traditional New Year messages, Farage and Reform pricked Badenoch’s party balloon with a headline / bulletin grabbing tracker on Reform’s website boasting the party’s signed up membership figures had surpassed the 131,680 (and falling) Conservative party’s membership total declared earlier this year. To the horror of most of my Tory MP contacts, Badenoch rose to the bait, accusing Reform of ‘fakery’ and claiming the Reform counter was ‘coded to tick up automatically’. Savouring the moment, Farage took to the pages of friendly papers to threaten to sue her and called in independent analysts (including Sky News) who couldn’t find any evidence of ‘fakery’.

Although Farage probably won’t press ahead with a High Court case and settle for the PR victory and {as yet undelivered) ‘public apology’ from Badenoch, the despair in the Tory ranks far outweighs any monetary legal winnings. As one senior ex Tory cabinet minister confided privately: “Farage played Kemi for a naïve fool” after the nascent Conservative leader posted on Musk’s X platform on Boxing Day: ‘Manipulating your own supporters at Xmas, eh, Nigel? It’s not real’.

Farage countered on air, on X and in several UK papers, including the increasingly supportive Daily Telegraph, with: ‘The youngest political party in British politics has just overtaken the oldest political party in the world’.

By common media consent, including left-leaning titles, Farage also outscored his rivals on the Christmas Message front by filming his in the historic surrounds of Blenheim Palace with its Churchillian heritage. Even as a Labour commentator, I had to concede on air that Farage words impacted: “We’re in societal decline , we’re in economic decline, most people are getting poorer with every year that passes, we’re losing any sense of national identity and we’re actually teaching kids at school that people like Winston Churchill — born in this palace — are bad people and that our country’s history is something to be ashamed of.” Typical Farage, of course, a mix of bravura and bullshit, but I’m losing count of normally sensible MPs, both Labour and Tory, who are not only so spooked by the Farage / Reform / Musk and Trump alliance that they really do see him as potentially our next prime minister, either at the head of a Reform revolution or a merger or electoral pact with a Conservative party denuded of the ability to win back power on its own. (Declaration of interest: I’m sometimes a left-wing guest on Farage’s GB News show and, much as we disagree on many issues I can’t argue with his effectiveness as both a broadcaster and the most dynamic, charismatic political pacesetter in the UK right now).

Labour’s woes

By comparison, Sir Keir Starmer’s Christmas message was a tricky attempt to walk the tightrope between economic optimism and tough reality / pessimism and a call for national unity based on the 80th anniversary of VE Day and reviving the spirit and achievements of the postwar Attlee Labour government. Unfortunately for the prime minister, VE Day falls in May as well as the local elections, with high risk the political and media agenda could well be preoccupied with the fallout from a Reform triumph with a crowing Farage, echoed by his allies Musk and Trump, and both Starmer and Badenoch looking shellshocked.

Sir Keir’s 2025 got off to a painful start with a front-page Times / YouGov poll on January 1st headlined: ‘Poll gives Starmer a new year headache’. It showed a majority of voters seeing Labour as ‘incompetent’, ‘dishonest’ and ‘unsuccessful’ and unlikely to achieve any of the six milestones (millstones?) Starmer set out for his government. The poll showed Labour losing its election lead on the economy, while clinging on to it on the NHS, with only 31% of voters overall feeling optimistic and only 40% of Labour voters saying they felt ‘confident’ about the future. Brutal statistics indicate Sir Keir’s government has suffered the biggest collapse in support so soon after a landslide election victory as any previous British government.

While some Labour backbenchers are starting to speculate on whether Sir Keir could be ousted before the next general election, following in the footsteps of certain Tory predecessors, a front-page Mail on Sunday headline: POLL: STARMER WILL BE OUT OF NO10 IN A YEAR’ (January5th) seems fanciful.

Historical perspective

But there was a degree of comfort from Britain’s most respected biographer of prime ministers, Sir Anthony Seldon, in a New Year’s Day guest column for The Guardian, headlined ‘Rocks ahead: Keir Starmer needs to set a clear course’. The historian reminded us: “The dismissive verdicts and dire polls after his first few months in power should not unduly perturb him. Britain’s best prime ministers all faced considerable challenges, especially early on. Clement Attlee may rank as Labour’s most outstanding leader but his position was far from secure at the time and would have been ousted early but for the loyal support of the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin. Margaret Thatcher endured many dark days and months, only feeling confident of her position after victory in the Falklands war, three years into her premiership. The end-of-year verdicts on Starmer’s premiership have highlighted his errors and the bad economic news, but they have little positive to offer beyond ‘he must find a narrative.”

Ah, the narrative question. It’s one readers of this column will be familiar with; it’s the perceived inability to sell a compelling narrative that some Labour backbenchers increasingly fret about and a Starmer flaw that Britain’s leading psephologist Sir John Curtice focused on in a recent GB News interview. While it’s true Tony Blair’s election victory came with a far healthier economic backdrop, he, Campbell and Mandelson knew how to communicate a vision that continually eludes Team Starmer and only magnifies media criticism, even among sympathetic outlets.

In his Guardian column, Seldon pointedly argued that Starmer’s prospects, one way or the other, rest on being — “Captain of the ship. Starmer agonises over whether he is chair or chief executive, preferring the former. Neither designation is right. The job is to stay on the command deck at all times, surveying the horizon. Prime ministers go wrong when they try to sort out divisions and details below decks themselves, or wander off spending too much time abroad. Other prime ministers who had shaky starts went on to make the cut. So can Starmer. But if he has not significantly improved by mid-2025, his party and his country may conclude that his start was not an aberration but an indication of chronic unsuitability. Were Britain to have a seventh prime minister in less than ten years, foreign investors and governments, on whom national prosperity depends, will draw the same conclusion as rising numbers at home; a new leader is needed.”

If Seldon’s column offered a modicum of comfort for Sir Keir, the Guardian’s leader on the facing page of the same edition less so. Under the headline, ‘Re-engineering the NHS while slashing waiting lists is a big ask’, it forensically criticised the government’s ‘contradictory plans for the health service and its new community-based healthcare model’.

Disrupting the status quo

Meanwhile two men who undoubtedly DO see themselves as firmly captains of their ships look ahead to 2025 and the ‘Ides of May’ (apologies to the Immortal Bard). Farage and Musk are allied on a voyage to scupper both the Starmer and Badenoch boats with the local elections on the horizon. For his part, Musk continued his obsessively personal targeting of the prime minister, repeating his X platform claims of a Britain descending into ‘civil war’ , asserting only Farage and Reform can save the nation, branding Britain a ‘wasteland for international investment’ and demanding an ‘heroic Tommy Robinson’ should be immediately freed from jail — the latter a demand Farage himself felt obliged to disown when he launched Reform’s local election campaign on January 3rd.

The world’s richest, most meddlesome man generated headlines again by crashing way his way into the domestic Oldham child grooming gangs issue, suggesting government safeguarding minister Jess Phillips should replace Robinson in jail for favouring a local investigation over a national public inquiry. In a series of X rants, the Tesla and SpaceX tycoon turned key Trump administration figure, lashed out; “Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice? Keir Starmer,2008-13. Who is the boss of Jess Phillips right now? Keir Starmer. The real reason she’s refusing to investigate the rape gangs is that it would obviously lead to the blaming of Keir Starmer (head of the CPS at the time).” The vendetta-like rant included; “Starmer was complicit in the rape of Britain... Starmer must go and he must face charges for his complicity in the worst mass crime in British history.” When does free speech become personal vendetta, Elon?

But such is the Musk effect against the backdrop of his leading role in Trump’s re-election that Kemi Badenoch echoed him, dubiously earning herself front page leads in the Telegraph and Express, along with significant broadcast coverage. However Conservative Home website columnist William Atkinson took Badenoch to task for her blatant opportunism by asking, “If a full national inquiry into the rape gang scandal is long overdue (*as asserted by the Tory leader) why didn’t we launch one whilst still in office?” Privately, some senior Tories put her Musk-backing intervention down primarily to desperation to build bridges with him amid fears he really might stump up that much rumoured $100m donation to Farage and Reform UK.

Musk undoubtedly relished it when the Daily Mail on Saturday January 4th belatedly followed the Telegraph and Express with a Splash headline, ‘STARMER ‘GUILTY AS ANYONE’ OVER GROOMING GANGS — Former detective blasts PM as calls for Oldham inquiry grow’. Ditto the same day leader column headlined ‘Oldham Girls Failed’, condemning Labour for opposing the public inquiry the Tories themselves failed to initiate in office. The leader half echoes Musk by asking if the Labour government is ‘afraid the CPS’s failure to prosecute these vile gangs in Oldham and elsewhere earlier will be exposed to public glare’ — throwing the spotlight onto Keir Starmer’s role as Director of Public Prosecutions at the time.

It also appears Musk is largely ignorant of the many inquiries and prosecutions that have taken place, including the damning conclusions of the massive 7-year long independent public inquiry that reported fully in 2022.

Although most senior ministers did bite their tongues over Musk, Health Secretary Wes Streeting used his appearance on Laura Kuenssberg’s Sunday programme (January 5th) to directly accuse the tycoon of “disgraceful smears” over his attacks on the prime minister and safeguarding minister. Then — without mentioning Musk’s name — Home Secretary Yvette Cooper weighed in with a statement pointing out that the previous Conservative government had failed to fully implement any of the public inquiry’s twenty key recommendations.

Her statement could be viewed as a riposte to Kemi Badenoch writing a full-page Musk-pleasing Mail on Sunday article backing a new public inquiry call.

Having been mocked for being largely AWOL media wise over the festive season, the Tory leader’s PR advisers had obviously got busy, with the same edition of the MoS making Badenoch the cover story of its glossy YOU magazine with an ‘I’m an Outlier headline’ and a 6-page Lynn Barber interview and stylish photo session inside.

Targeting Starmer

In sharp contrast, the same day edition of The Guardian wasn’t dancing to Musk’s tune. Instead, it ran a page lead headlined “X owner politicising girls’ abuse, says woman who exposed grooming ring”. Sara Rowbothham, the investigator who famously exposed the Rochdale grooming gang and helped send nine men to jail (while Starmer was DPP) hit out at Musk saying: “What is his motivation for interfering? It seems very political. The person he is going after is Keir Starmer — it’s a political swipe that is nothing to do with the women and girls who have been abused time after time.”

But one left wing title’s headline would certainly have met with Musk’s approval this weekend. The Guardian’s “How Elon Musk’s X became the global right’s supercharged front page” in a sharp analysis by the paper’s US-based commentator J Oliver Conroy. Hard to argue with the point that Musk can afford to swallow the platform’s hefty financial losses in return for the huge power base and influence it guarantees him.

Arguably Matthew Syed in his January 5th Sunday Times column struck a neat balance under the headline, “Excusing the child rape gangs only gives Musk’s ideologues more fuel... On one side the proto fascists. On the other the hyper liberals. It’s hard to know which pose a bigger threat”, posed Syed.

Meanwhile some Labour and Tory backbenchers are talking secretly (so far) about backing calls for legislation outlawing election donations by mega billionaires like Musk from UK politics. But so far, it’s an idea that Keir Starmer — much to the campaigning chagrin of The Observer newspaper — seems disinclined to adopt. But pressure is set to mount after UK newspapers at the weekend established that Musk quietly set up on December 12th a London-registered company “X.AI London” headed by a longtime British financial associate. Potentially, this could circumnavigate restrictions on direct political donations from non-British citizens and open the door to Farage and Reform receiving millions ahead of the May elections. Significantly, perhaps, the new company was set up two days after Musk held high-profile talks with Farage and Reform’s newly appointed treasurer, billionaire London property magnate Nick Candy.

How to respond

Perhaps one key to Starmer’s reluctance came in a perceptive January 3rd Times column by Patrick Maguire, headlined: “What is Starmer to do about Musk the troll?”

Maguire, no particular admirer of Musk, Farage or Trump, said of the world’s richest man: “Proud grandson of a Liverpudlian though he may be, Britain exists in his imagination, and on X, as a dystopia of wokery, totalitarian thought police and violent crime. Just doom and gloom and constant attacks on a prime minister Musk believes to pose a mortal threat to free speech.

“There’s a world in which Musk’s constant criticism of the government might merely be an irritant. But then he is not merely a wealthy businessman. It would be unwise to write Musk off as a keyboard warrior. For now, at least, he is an adopted member of the Trump family. He owns the social network that makes dead-eyed junkies out of Washington and Westminster and still drives much of our political agenda. So, yeah, you would probably not want to be this guy’s whipping boy if you were Starmer. You’d probably want a constructive relationship with him instead. But what can the PM do?”

What indeed? Among other things, reasons why Keir Starmer is urging his ministers to bite their tongues rather than lash out at Musk’s more outrageous rants and why Lord Mandelson with his studied (or creepy?) appetite for the darker arts of diplomacy is his controversial choice to be Our Man in Washington with a brief to court the Trump administration (Musk included).

For its part, The New European’s current issue sports a front-page image of Elon Musk holding a small cartoonish one of Donald Trump with the headline, “Meet the new boss” and they don’t mean the president-elect. Inside, beneath a “Puppet regime” headline, commentator Matthew D’Ancona begins: “America voted for Donald Trump. But in just over two weeks’ time, they will be getting Elon Musk”; going on to argue “Trump can do plenty of damage in four years, but he will leave the Oval Office for the last time in January 2029, Musk on the other hand, is just getting started. The twist in the tale is that unlike the many previous advisers and office holders that Trump has cast aside like toys, Musk will simply move on to his next deranged obsession. Already, he is trying to disfigure UK politics by giving Nigel Farage and Reform more money than any other party can match.”

As someone who once knew Trump well personally, I feel certain the thin-skinned narcissist must be squirming inside at the mocking cartoons and memes variously portraying him as Musk’s First Lady, as a toddler sitting in front of Musk’s desk, as Musk’s court jester, Musk’s pet poodle et al. But it’s a sign of that Musk Power Factor that Trump felt obliged at a December 22 USA rally to remind the audience that HE is the president-elect not Musk, while trying to make an uneasy joke of it by throwing in, “No, he isn’t going to be president, and I’m safe. He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country. Ha ha ha!”

But D’Ancona also highlighted: “What is remarkable is that Trump continues to indulge Musk’s power grab and divisiveness. He intervened in an escalating row between Musk and his own hardcore MAGA nativists over skilled immigrant workers — on the side of the tech tycoon.”

No wonder, then, that one Labour minister confided to me this week: “Keir is probably right to bite his tongue for now in the face of the Musk provocations and insults. Inside Number Ten, fingers are crossed that two such colossal egos are bound to implode eventually. The danger is that Musk is now so rich, powerful and influential that even Trump can’t drop him and he’ll be free to carry on trying to decide who wins British elections and to seek to reshape our very democracy according to his own extreme vision.”

Chilling words for those of us of a left-leaning, moderately liberal conviction, depressed by the prospect of Farage / Musk / Trump triumvirate bent on dominating British politics and culture. It’s worth noting that last week’s flood of Musk rants on X included a call for the parliament to be dissolved and a new general election called (presumably in the hope of Nigel Farage in Downing Street?). In a book I co-authored to coincide with the 2024 general election, I predicted the big political story of 2025 could well be the future / survival prospects for the Conservative party set against a populist surge favouring Farage’s Reform UK. It’s truer today than when I wrote it then, not least turbocharged by the supportive power axis of Musk and Trump.

Personally, I can both respect Elon Musk as a tech and business genius while also fearing him as an autocratic danger to democracy.

Ultimately, the UK mainstream media will have to find a balancing act between free speech and giving free print space and airtime whenever the world’s biggest, richest ego decides to ‘decree’ how the country should be run and who by.

Perhaps that old media saying ‘Watch this space’ has never been more pertinent, challenging and yes, scary.