POLITICS as spectacle has started 2025 in fine form, with the world’s richest man demanding regime change in Britain while falling out with his erstwhile bestie Nigel Farage.

Elon Musk wishes to imprison Keir Starmer, among others, replacing Labour, it seems, with a government resting upon the far-right grifter Tommy Robinson — unavailable to serve — and the somewhat seedy businessman Reform MP Rupert Lowe, who is presently unwilling to.

The immediate issue animating Musk’s call for US intervention to liberate Britain from Starmerism likewise tends eccentric — a refusal to establish a national inquiry into the scandal of grooming gangs which abused thousands of girls in the recent past.

That may be a wrong call by a government which does not make many right ones. But to deploy the 101st Airborne Division in order to hold the police in Oldham and Rotherham to account for their failings does smack of imperial over-reach.

But perhaps we should take Musk seriously rather than literally. He is also promoting a far-right government in Germany, while preparing to help Donald Trump shrink all those parts of the US state that do not involve bombs, bullets, uniforms and prison keys.

So he is a very rich man on a very plain mission, to instal right-wing authoritarianism as the governing norm in as much of the world as possible.

It may be a consolation that he is not very good at politics. Falling out with Farage, who clearly has some political vim at present, over the hapless and useless Robinson, who hasn’t and likely never will, speaks to a lack of judgement.

Farage will only benefit by Musk drawing attention to the Reform leader’s unwillingness to embrace overt fascists. It may be worth even more than the 100 million dollars Farage now does not look like getting for his party, which I would guess is not going to want for funds in any case.

And Musk’s demand that King Charles simply dissolve the government indicates that constitution-by-tweet has its limitations.

The Tesla owner is following in the footsteps of Henry Ford, the Musk of his time, who eagerly promoted fascism and anti-semitism in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet today, Ford is remembered for cars, not the efficacy of his political interventions.

Still, Musk has the nose of a successful fascist, if not yet the nous. He has sniffed out the right question. The grooming gangs scandal is precisely the sort of issue that the far right has used down the ages to mobilise support behind its agenda because it engages the sympathies of people who are not necessarily right-wing at all.

It is at one and the same time anti-establishment — it was the police, the local authorities, and the government that let the girls down — yet also pro-state in that it can be used to mobilise the organs of coercion for reactionary purposes.

A national inquiry might establish little that is not already known, yet would provide a focus and forum for anti-migrant and Islamophobic rhetoric and posturing over the misconduct of a small number of Pakistani-origin criminals, very many of whom have already been brought to justice.

It would simply be a forum for the Badenochs and Jenricks, with the Farages and Robinsons in pursuit, to advance a xenophobic anti-equality programme which, as with their agitation against the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, seeks to enlist the police more aggressively on the side of imposing their attitudes.

Another issue traditionally useful to the far right is political corruption. Remember how enraged the country became in a matter of days over the MPs’ expenses row in 2009?

Now we have freebie-gate, which saw Starmer, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and others help themselves to free clothes, lodgings, spectacles and tickets from Lord Alli, without breaking the law.

And watch the unfolding issue of City Minister Tulip Siddiq’s apparently cheap housing arrangements courtesy of figures connected to her aunt, the recently deposed Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina.

Siddiq denies any wrongdoing and has submitted her conduct to investigation. But a narrative is developing here.

Labour’s rather strangulated response to the Musk demarche speaks to two problems. The first is Starmer’s evident determination to keep in with Trump. That limits his scope for criticising the President-Elect’s boon companion, at least until their inevitable falling out.

Whether even Trump supports the idea of enforced regime change in Britain may be doubted and, with Greenland, Panama and Canada in his sights, he has other priorities immediately.

The second difficulty is the Starmer-McSweeney strategy for re-election which involves ignoring the dangers of defections to the left and focusing solely on the threat to Labour seats from Reform or the Tories.

That is a threat they plan to counter in large part by pandering to rather than challenging the prejudices to which Farage and Badenoch appeal.

Hence an embarrassed silence and shuffling of feet in the face of the Muskian onslaught. Only the suggestion that Starmer had personally failed the victims of the grooming scandals while head of the Crown Prosecution Service, a charge that does not seem to have much merit, prompted the Prime Minister to find his voice.

So an alternative plan to tackle Musk and whichever British surrogate he next bestows his benediction upon would turn on two points. One, separate British policy entirely from Washington, bringing an overdue end to the bellicose and reactionary “special relationship.”

Two, address the underlying social concerns of those sections of the putative Reform vote not animated purely by prejudice, through the means of the radical policies of the left, a plan which would also restore some of the lost Corbyn-era vote.

There is little chance of that plan being adopted. Instead, we will continue to wander in a technocratic wilderness signposted by ten pledges, five missions, six first steps, five milestones and whatever, all crumbling monuments to a government adrift.

Evidently, a third pole of political attraction is needed. Perhaps the biggest issue for 2025 is whether the left can provide it.

If it fails, preferring to just grab the popcorn and watch the Elon, Nigel and Keir show, which suffers from a surfeit of villains to boo and a crippling shortage of both good guys and happy endings, it can hardly protest at its own marginalisation.

It is not that there is no demand for a programme of extended public ownership, a serious attack on inequality, and action to restore public services and strengthen the manufacturing industry while ending support for Israel’s genocide and Nato’s wars.

Indeed, millions not only want such a radical social democratic alternative, but they actually voted for it very recently.

Partly this is due to the legacy of the Corbyn leadership of Labour, but most of it is the product of both reasoned and instinctive reflection on reality, from the Gaza solidarity movement to 15 years of economic slump.

That sentiment should constitute an irresistible force, were it not actually being resisted quite effectively by an established left finding it very hard to respond adequately.

A solution could start with the three socialist parliamentary camps — the progressive independents, the suspended left Labour MPs and those left MPs still in the Parliamentary Labour Party — discussing how to give effect to what they agree on, which is most things, and what institutional forms are required.

The alternative is dancing to the tweets of plutocratic populism while hoping that either Starmer’s Labour delivers — or that Labour unburdens itself of Starmer.

That is not impossible, but must rank as highly unlikely. At present, at any event, there must be a sense that the leadership of the left is in danger of letting its supporters down.