Flood the zone with shit. So advised Steve Bannon, onetime chief strategist for Donald Trump, who understood long ago that if you want to get away with an outrageous act, follow it with another and then another. That way, the media will be sure to move on to the newest horror, so forgetting the one before.

Trump continues to live by that rule, making it hard to keep up with everything he and his circle do and say – and he’s not even back in office yet. It therefore requires a conscious effort to take a step back and see what’s happening. That might be easier this week than others because the most egregious outrages form a pattern, one that poses a severe and direct challenge to Britain and its neighbours.

Start with Elon Musk’s war on the UK government, now increasingly explicit. On Monday the X owner, who sits at Trump’s right hand, leading his new, if not formally constituted, department of government efficiency, polled his 212m followers on whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Naturally, they were in favour, by 58% to 42%.

It might be tempting to write that off as a joke, but it came in a blizzard of posts from, or amplified by, Musk, pressing the unfounded case that Keir Starmer and his ministers are guilty of a cover-up of horrific child abuse by gangs of British Muslim men. Drawing on a series of distortions and wholesale fabrications long circulated by the far right, Musk has also called for Starmer to be jailed.

Lest this be construed as nothing more than a rich man having fun – some like yachts, others toy with the politics of foreign countries, each to their own – the FT reported on Thursday that “Musk has privately discussed with allies how Sir........

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