A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Elon Musk's posts on X are suddenly filled with vitriol for the British government. He's called it tyrannical and says the prime minister is a national embarrassment. Britons are wondering why, as NPR's Lauren Frayer reports from London.
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RISHI SUNAK: All right. Well, good evening, everybody. Welcome.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: A little over a year ago, Elon Musk was at London's Lancaster House, where part of the TV show "The Crown" was filmed. He was there for a fireside chat with the then-prime minister, Rishi Sunak, a conservative. They were both kind of fawning.
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SUNAK: Elon, thanks for being here.
ELON MUSK: Thank you for having me.
SUNAK: We feel very privileged and very excited to have you.
FRAYER: But Sunak was unpopular and got voted out last summer, replaced with a new center-left prime minister, Keir Starmer, who Musk has made clear he does not like. For example, when Starmer's government jailed people for online hate speech that fueled race riots last summer, Musk, who spread some of the disinformation himself from afar, accused Starmer of running a police state and trampling on free speech. Musk's latest fixation, though, is a child sex abuse scandal that happened here more than a decade ago.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Nine Asian men who were convicted of sexually exploiting vulnerable girls have been given prison sentences of up to 19 years.
FRAYER: Mostly British-Pakistani men were convicted of grooming mostly white British girls. And the far-right seized on this, accusing politicians of failing to crack down out of fear of appearing racist. Starmer was a top prosecutor back then.
SUNDER KATWALA: There's a lot to be sorry about and to be shameful about, about the way Britain as a society was too late to deal with the grooming gangs. But Starmer was part of making the change that got prosecutions.
FRAYER: Sunder Katwala directs British Future, a nonpartisan think tank. He says justice may have been slow in that scandal, but there was no cover-up - certainly not involving Starmer who actually sped up those prosecutions. Musk is nevertheless calling for the U.K. prime minister to be imprisoned. He also endorsed a post calling on King Charles to dissolve Parliament and remove Starmer from power - something the monarch is not allowed to do. This is unprecedented from the incoming head of a White House advisory panel about a top U.S. ally, Katwala says. He doubts President-elect Trump approved it and says it does not reflect official U.S. policy.
KATWALA: I think this is very much Elon Musk freelancing. If he was thinking about his role as a member of the incoming U.S. administration, he would be playing by the diplomatic rules. And it's very clear that Elon Musk thinks that none of those rules apply to him.
FRAYER: U.K. officials' strategy had been to ignore Musk's trolling. But after he called another British cabinet minister, Jess Phillips, an evil witch and a, quote, "rape genocide apologist," she got death threats, and Starmer himself spoke out.
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PRIME MINISTER KEIR STARMER: When the poison of the far-right leads to serious threats to Jess Phillips and others, in my book, a line has been crossed.
FRAYER: That was at a press conference, where Starmer wanted to talk about much needed reforms to the U.K. health service but was instead inundated with questions about this grooming scandal, which was prosecuted and investigated years ago. Starmer condemned lies and misinformation that he says are undermining democracy.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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