If you thought Elon Musk was bad, look at his dreadful mini-mes and shudder for America | Emma Brockes

They are young and seizing the reins of government on their master’s behalf with an imperial swagger. It will end in many tears

You would be forgiven for thinking we were back at the Bullingdon Club, in the company of Jonty, Munty, Stiffy, Kipper, Chugger and, to use the polite version, Pig Botherer – only in this case it’s Big Balls and a guy with a history of racist tweeting. This is the sudden, startling emergence into American political life of a type deeply recognisable to Brits: that is, jaunty young men with juvenile nicknames and a firm belief they should be running the world.

This being America, the class signifiers are slightly different from those in Britain. But in most regards, the cohort of young men hired by Elon Musk for his cost-cutting taskforce, the department of government efficiency (Doge), will be familiar to anyone who lived through the era of Boris Johnson’s weapons-grade flippancy or reports of David Cameron’s youthful hijinks. (Donald Trump is very flippant, of course, but his style skews locker room rather than debate chamber – or, in this case, maths olympiad.) And while politics has always run on young, volunteer energy, less common in the US, perhaps, is the imperial swagger, the sheer frivolous entitlement accompanying a crowd that has seemingly been given the keys to the kingdom.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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