Britain Is Not Musky

Seven months ago, a party won a landslide at a General Election. Today, it is polling in third place, behind a party with no policies and a party with five MPs. Each of the Conservative Party and Reform UK has 25 per cent support, while Labour has 24, which would be its lowest share since 1918. Under any Leader this century apart from Tony Blair, by this time of night the likes of Peter Mandelson would already have staged a coup in response to such numbers earlier in the day.

Amid yet more bad economic news today, in Davos they would rather hear from David Beckham than from Rachel Reeves, and they have not even invited Keir Starmer, wannabe footballer and wannabe politician, spitting across the Sixth Form common room at "loners" and "misfits".

That Nigel Farage is still sitting pretty, while Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is still sitting in solitary confinement, gives the lie to any suggestion that Elon Musk had any influence in British politics. Yaxley-Lennon may demonstrate some upon his release; with very few votes per constituency, candidates endorsed by him could deny Reform scores of seats. But evidently, no one here is listening to Musk.

As to the Trump Administration generally, a country may call a geographical feature anything that it pleased. That has no bearing on any other country. Does Donald Trump's close ally Javier Milei talk about "the Falkland Islands"? Watch which, if any, countries adopted "Golfo de América" for the Gulf of Cuba. The Irish call Empire biscuits the "German biscuits" that they were called in Britain until the First World War. In renaming the German Ocean "the North Sea", we adopted what was by then the German name for it. Over to the Conservatives and Reform to outbid each other with suggestions. How about changing the Isle of Skye to the Isle of Trump? Yaxley-Lennon could then jump in, proposing that our capital city become Elondon.