Keir Starmer has received a boost in his grooming gangs row with Elon Musk after the head of the national child sex abuse inquiry backed the Prime Minister. Professor Alexis Jay backed Sir Keir by saying there is no need for a new national investigation into the issue.

Britain’s government has been pushed onto the defensive by comments from Elon Musk accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer of complicity in a decades-old scandal over child sexual exploitation gangs.Listen to the Bloomberg UK Politics podcast on Apple,

Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips’ decision to block a public inquiry into the Oldham grooming gangs seems, from the outside, to be almost inexplicable. Children were raped and abused by gangs of men while the authorities failed to protect them.

Sir Keir Starmer has accused tech billionaire Elon Musk and right-wing populists of spreading lies about child abuse grooming gangs and warned “they have crossed a line”.

Musk’s posts, which have racked up hundreds of millions of views on X, are his latest effort at inserting himself into UK politics.

The prime minister says those who spread misinformation about child sexual exploitation are "not interested in victims".

Keir Starmer defended his record investigating “grooming gangs,” after Elon Musk inserted himself into British politics and called on the prime minister to resign.

Without naming Mr. Musk directly, Prime Minister Keir Starmer denounced the billionaire’s spreading of falsehoods about a child sex abuse scandal.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has criticized those “spreading lies and misinformation” about child sex grooming gangs in the United Kingdom, responding to an online storm whipped up by Elon Musk.