Keir Starmer defends his record on grooming gangs

Keir Starmer’s speech this morning served as a neat microcosm of his six-month premiership. There he was, all primed to explain his plans for cutting NHS waiting lists – and yet he ended up having to talk about grooming gangs. After a frenzied week in British politics, it served as the latest example of a carefully-crafted set piece occasion being hijacked by events overseas.

Labour has sought to avoid confrontation with Elon Musk in the past six months, downplaying his increasingly vocal criticisms of the government on X. But after the Tesla billionaire attacked Starmer’s handling of child rape cases when he was director of public prosecutions, the Prime Minister clearly decided that silence was no longer an option. In his words today, ‘a line has been crossed’.

Still, this being Starmer, he did not launch into Musk straight off the bat. His initial response when asked if he was ‘angered’ by Musk’s taunts was to suggest that ‘most people are more interested in what is going to happen to the NHS, frankly, than what is happening on Twitter’.