EUROPE: Musk is the right man in the wrong continent.

If the next intellectual trend is Musk’s rethinking of government itself, one European nation in particular would notice. In the main, the British elite’s cringing obsession with America is a bad thing. On the left, it led to the importation of critical race theory and other fads. (If only there were tariffs on ideas.) On the right, there was the delusion that America was going to do the post-Brexit UK a favour on trade out of some ancestral attachment. But one advantage of this unreciprocated infatuation is that, if Musk does change Washington, the British political class will sit up, as it wouldn’t if the same achievement took place in Paris or Canberra. He might give them what is known in the jargon of the day as the “permission structure” to reform.

Britain needs that nudge. It hasn’t balanced its fiscal budget since the early millennium. The planning regime is a Surrealist joke. The NHS forever needs “saving”. The civil service is nimble in a crisis — see the banking crash of 2008 and the almost calamitous “mini” Budget of 2022 — but its wider sclerosis is the (private) complaint of both political parties. Britain can’t borrow much more. Tax? Another major revenue-raising Budget would ensure this government is a one-term affair, which is why the chancellor talked down that prospect this week. Britain’s only consolation is that France and Italy have similar problems, and Germany equal but slightly distinct ones. The need for outside inspiration is pan-European.

The EU chose centralization over innovation so the chances of them getting a Musk of their own are about nil.