Wait until Elon Musk works out what’s really hurting investment in Britain

Do you remember how awful it was to wake up with Donald Trump? The sinking feeling that washed over us all on mornings between January 2017 and January 2021, shifting us directly from blissfully sweet slumber to feverishly sour imaginings of what madness might have occurred while we slept? A paranoia that ended only when we reached groggily for our phones, only to discover that on most mornings, the reality was even worse than the horrors we’d conjured up?

The Trump morning terrors won’t be as bad this time. Not because the president-elect is any more sane, but because his right-hand man Elon Musk is even crazier, and therefore the new one to worry about. His role at Trump’s department of government efficiency seems to involve spewing out torrents of effluent so regularly that you can set your watch by each scatological shower. Not so much Old Faithful as Old Faecal.

In the last few days alone, Musk has suggested that Jess Phillips should be put in prison and Tommy Robinson freed, that a new election should be called in Britain despite us only having had one last July, that the far right AfD should run Germany and that the far right AfD are not really far right at all because their co-leader is a lesbian with a Sri Lankan partner. “Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” wrote Musk, who is 53 years old (and who ignored the fact that Alice Weidel’s grandfather was a legal adviser to the Waffen-SS and was personally appointed a judge by Hitler).

But as Withnail & I reminds us, even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day, and the sheer volume of Musk’s toxic emissions means that he occasionally skirts close to being right. Last week he told diehard MAGA-ites to “take a big step back and fuck yourself in the face”, though this proved not to be a welcome Damascene conversion but rather an argument about whether some brainy migrants are allowed into the USA by the back door while Trump is kicking all the ones he doesn’t want out of the front.

And just the other day, Musk tweeted that “very few companies will be willing to invest in the UK with the current administration”. The government quickly responded that it had secured £63 billion of additional cash from an international investment summit in October, which Musk petulantly snubbed.

But Musk would have been right to say that over recent years, things haven’t looked good for foreign investment in Britain. Last December a Commons report revealed that “the annual value of the UK’s inward investment flows were 88% lower… in 2022 compared to 2016”.

Why? Although Covid and global recession were mentioned, the report also quoted a 2023 Financial Times article arguing that Brexit has ended the UK’s status as the “English-speaking bridge between the EU and the rest of the world”, wrecking the UK’s ability to attract “the sorts of investment that is focused on selling and generating products in the richest markets in the world, the [EU] single market”.

The Commons briefing also referred to the annual Ernst and Young (EY) attractiveness report on world economies, which last year noted that Brexit had “introduced barriers to trade between the UK and EU and led to significant political turmoil and uncertainty – which investors hate”.

Perhaps all this is something Musk should take up with a fellow frequent flyer to Mar-a-Lago before he hands his $100m over to Nigel Farage? At the very least, that would save us all from reading some angry tweets about it later.