Russell Jones's Week Moment: A-Holes, K-Holes and Enoch Towel

The bestselling author of 'The Decade in Tory' on the British Right's continued descent into Elon Musk's racist gutter

Prime Minister Elon? An image many British right-wingers dream of

Here's a philosophical question for you: if Elon Musk says something in a forest, and nobody is there to hear it, is he still wrong?

It's an area of debate that seems ever more pressing as users swarm away from what he once predicted would become the “everything app”, but which has actually transformed into a turd-bestrewn playpen for every shade of awfulness, like a satanic Benetton. The platform has managed to lose 30% of UK users in a year, leaving a customer base comprised almost entirely of Russian bots, AI-generated spam, Elon Musk’s lavishly wrong opinions, and the single biggest audience for them: Robert Jenrick.

Jenrick was once as square, limp and wet as a used dishtowel, but such moderate attitudes wouldn’t get him very far in the modern Tory party, so he radically transformed himself into something square, limp, wet and brutally right-wing: Enoch Towel. He’s since leaned heavily into his new persona, professing to be a “great admirer” of an anonymised far-right account on X/Twitter, which calls for the raiding of mosques, the banning of the Quran and the removal of all benefits so that “They’ll deport themselves”. Jenrick sent a private message to the account, saying “I think we agree on what needs to happen”.

And this week he went one further, delivering a Rivers of Blood tweet that explicitly named British Pakistanis – and he didn’t differentiate, so presumably this includes his colleagues Sajid Javid and Sayeeda Warsi – as being from “alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes” and railing against the “myth that diversity is our strength”, before he insisted that officials who didn’t take action over grooming should be “sent to jail”. Let’s see how that works out.