Elon Musk, it would appear, is afflicted with the variant form of anglophilia, touched with imperial nostalgia and misplaced envy, often found among bright young men from the colonies. If everything about that sentence seems hopelessly antiquated and out of touch — well, yeah.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about: Some mishmash misreading of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” mixed with the myth of Winston Churchill, that unregenerate racist curmudgeon turned right-wing godhead, has curdled Elon’s brain. He longs for an England that never existed outside of movies and children’s books and, if it had, would definitely not have welcomed a geeky, introverted kid from one of the outermost bad-conscience outposts of the British Empire.
Musk’s obsession with British politics, and his bromance with the far-right hustler who calls himself Tommy Robinson (more on him later), has heated up again over the last few months, after a lull during Musk’s brief and inglorious tenure at the head of DOGE. It seems, at first, to defy logical explanation. Yes, Musk also had a brief and fruitless fling with AfD, Germany’s not-quite-Nazi party, but then he went away again. Britain, or “England,” the word he almost always uses in his overheated tweets, is clearly a special case.
A recent report by David Gilbert for Wired suggests a straightforward follow-the-money motive, which should never be ruled out even when dealing with the alarmingly and fabulously wealthy:
Experts believe Musk’s current outpouring of support for the UK’s far right is part of a possible concerted effort to destabilize the region politically to prevent onerous regulations — such as the EU’s Digital Services Act or the UK’s Online Safety Act — being used to punish X.
Sure, in broad terms that’s plausible. But I don’t think it’s sufficient. Musk’s fascination with the land of Hope and Glory strikes me as blending his commercial interests and his incoherent techno-libertarian philosophy with more intimate and emotional elements. His recent claims that civil war is “inevitable” in the U.K., or that such a conflict “already began quietly several years ago,” are alarmist and delusional. But they also seem heartfelt rather than calculated or driven by the corporate bottom line.
As far as I can tell, Musk has never spent an extended period of time in Britain, although he’s visited many times on business or as a tourist. He is largely of English ancestry and was raised in the Anglican Church, and has spent his life in a series of anglophone settler-colonial nations: First South Africa, then Canada, where he emigrated as a teenager to avoid apartheid-era military service, and finally the United States.
No doubt that describes millions of human beings, and it’s scant evidence for a personality profile. But still: In Musk’s attitude toward Britain, or at least toward his notion of “England,” we see all the signs of unconsummated romance. On his own dunderheaded level, Musk is like the disillusioned American narrator of Henry James’ short story “The Author of Beltraffio,” who discovers that 20th-century England doesn’t bear much resemblance to the genteel, aristocratic society of Victorian fiction.
In Musk’s attitude toward “England,” we see all the signs of unconsummated romance. On his own dunderheaded level, he’s like the disillusioned American visitor in Henry James’ “The Author of Beltraffio.”
We could extend this unlikely analogy even further: James’ Yank visitor attaches himself to a manipulative, narcissistic English novelist, the marvelously-named Mark Ambient, who may or may not be the villain of the piece (depending on how one reads the story). At least Ambient is a seductive and intelligent personality; his relationship to the narrator is sometimes understood as a reference to James’ closeted or ambiguous sexuality.
I’m not making any such suggestions about Musk’s embrace of aforementioned English rabble-rouser Tommy Robinson, who is often described as an anti-Muslim or anti-immigrant activist but is really just a shameless professional grifter. More than anything else, it offers further evidence that Musk is a lot dumber than he ought to be, given his immense worldly success.
We could certainly speculate that Musk admires Robinson — whose real name, by the way, is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, which sounds more like an Oxbridge classics scholar in a polyamorous household — for the same reason he admires Donald Trump: Game recognizes game. Musk has unquestioned talents as a salesman, showman and performer, and no doubt values those qualities in others. But things rapidly get embarrassing in both cases: Musk, after all, is a hopeless, hapless fanboy, who gleefully wore hats proclaiming “Trump was right about everything” and appears to have bought into Robinson’s discount-store Guy Ritchie act all the way.
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In a delirious tweet-storm last week that began with an especially idiotic misreading of “Lord of the Rings” as a right-wing warmonger fable — the gentle hobbits “were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor” — Musk then turned to “the tide of illegal immigration” and an apocalyptic warning: “It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all die.”
That is painfully stupid on multiple levels, of course — but to be clear, the social and political crisis in the U.K. to which Musk is responding is entirely real. It’s partly fueled by unresolved tensions over immigration and even more by the grim condition of the post-Brexit economy. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour government are on shaky ground, and Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK party appears poised to become a major political force. But even amid perceived widespread disorder, including a series of right-wing street riots and a handful of widely publicized violent crimes, there are no troops in the streets (ahem!), nor anything close to the level of violence that has become entirely normalized in American life.
Given that, let’s consider the “hard man” who Musk believes will lead “the English” — a category that I suspect excludes all the English people with dark skin — in a “fight for their survival.” Musk is apparently fronting the legal fees for Robinson’s latest prosecution (there’s an impressively long list), which does not involve racist street battles or anti-government conspiracy or any other “fight for survival”-type activity. Instead, “Tommy” was apprehended at the British entrance to the Channel Tunnel last July, apparently on his way to Spain in a Bentley SUV registered to someone else and with about $20,000 in cash. Asked for the password to unlock his phone, he claimed to be a journalist (which he is not) and replied, “Not a chance, bruv… You look like a c**t so you ain’t having it.”
Tommy Robinson’s latest prosecution does not involve racist street battles or anti-government conspiracy. He was apprehended at the Channel Tunnel while fleeing to Spain in a borrowed Bentley with a suitcase full of cash.
Robinson’s trial on what is essentially a misdemeanor charge was interrupted by his more recent trip to Israel as a guest of that government. Despite what look like clear-cut neo-Nazi ties in his past, he has lately reinvented himself as a friend to the Jewish people and an ally of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in the fight against the evils of Islam — although I’m not sure how that squares with reports that Robinson pretended to be a Muslim in an effort to gain admission to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque. Leading Jewish groups in Britain wanted nothing to do with this grotesque political theater, issuing a joint statement that called Robinson “a thug who represents the very worst of Britain” and stated that “the vast majority of British Jews … utterly and consistently reject Robinson and everything he stands for.”
Nothing about those episodes should surprise anyone who has followed this “hard man” through his illustrious career. Robinson’s previous convictions or criminal charges include two different episodes of harassing or stalking journalists, a criminal mortgage-fraud scheme, numerous charges of defamation, disorderly conduct and contempt of court, and using a false passport to enter the U.S. He has falsely accused a journalist’s husband of being a pedophile and falsely accused a teenage Syrian refugee of being a rapist. None of his early convictions for violent offenses, we might add, were explicitly “political” or overtly racial: He was involved in football-hooligan brawls in 2010 and 2011, and assaulted a police officer who was trying to stop Robinson from assaulting his girlfriend in 2005.
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Robinson emerged from the then-notorious world of football hooliganism — the nicest thing you can say about him is that he’s a lifelong supporter of Luton Town, a lovable underdog team — as a founding member of the English Defence League, a glorified street gang that opposed “Islamic radicalism,” and then, very briefly, as vice chair of the far-right British Freedom Party. In the early 2010s he left both groups, apologized for his previous actions and promised to help police investigate “far-right extremism” and racist violence. That period of repentance lasted exactly as long as his then-current parole (“license” in Brit-speak), which concluded in 2015. He immediately returned to overtly racist politics and anti-Muslim agitation, but has avoided directly committing or endorsing acts of violence.
Along the way, Robinson has courted allies on the American right, and the list is depressingly familiar: He’s been interviewed by Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon, and befriended either online or IRL by Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., former Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Donald Trump Jr. And, yeah, there’s also Elon Musk, who reversed Robinson’s lifetime Twitter/X ban in 2023 and pinned “Free Tommy Robinson” to the top of his feed during Robinson’s most recent prison sentence, the one for spreading lies about the teenage immigrant, which ended in May.
It’s not just that Robinson-Yaxley-Lennon, or whatever he wants to call himself, is too extreme for normal politics. As we see in the parallel case of Nick Fuentes on this side of the Atlantic, nobody knows where that line is anymore. It’s more that he’s so obviously a shameless operator, a pseudo-political parasite who exploits other people’s bigotry and hatred for his own ends. (Which is exactly why Nigel Farage, who knows one when he sees one, wants nothing to do with him.) The same guy who tried to flee to Spain in someone else’s luxury car with a suitcase full of cash reportedly owes $2.6 million to creditors and $430,000 in unpaid taxes. Is this the hard man of Gondor, ready to save Elon’s fantasy England for the hobbits? Not a chance, bruv.
