LONDON — He demanded the release of a convicted criminal and far-right agitator. He falsely accused the prime minister, Keir Starmer, of failing to go after child rapists when he was head of public prosecutions. He endorsed a post calling on King Charles III to dissolve Parliament and call elections to remove Britain’s 7-month-old Labour government, a constitutional impossibility.

Elon Musk has again set his sights on Britain, putting the country in the bull’s-eye in the capricious world of his online obsessions.

In a fusillade of recent posts, Musk moved on from his enthusiastic boosting of a far-right party in Germany to targeting Britain on multiple politically sensitive fronts.

After mostly ignoring Musk’s trolling, which has been going on for months, the British government snapped back Friday, though in characteristically polite fashion.

“Elon Musk is an American citizen and perhaps ought to focus on issues on the other side of the Atlantic,” the government’s health minister, Andrew Gwynne, told LBC radio.

But on Monday, Starmer pushed back much stronger. Asked about Musk’s comments during a question session at a hospital near London, Starmer criticized “those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible” that he said are undermining U.K. democracy.

Undeterred, the world’s richest man posted an online poll Monday for his X followers on the proposition: “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.”

Britain is one of several European countries where Musk is trying to replicate the influence he wielded on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump in the U.S. election Nov. 5.

In addition to Germany, where his advocacy of a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties, Alternative for Germany, has roiled that country’s politics before elections next month, Musk has nurtured close ties to Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

In Britain, Musk’s antagonism toward the Labour government is rooted in part in its aggressive response to hate speech online.

Officials said false and inflammatory posts helped incite anti-immigrant riots that followed the killing of three girls in a mass stabbing in the town of Southport in July. They arrested more than 30 people, which prompted Musk to condemn the government for what he called an attack on the free speech that he extols on his platform, X.

Britain, he said, “is turning into a police state.”

Since then, however, Musk has waded into other volatile issues, from declaring his support for the anti-immigrant party, Reform UK, to stirring up anger over the government’s response to a decade-old child sexual abuse scandal in the northern town of Rotherham. An estimated 1,400 girls were exploited by “grooming gangs” composed largely of British Pakistani men.

Perhaps most provocatively, Musk has taken up the cause of Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-immigrant agitator whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. He has been in prison since October after being convicted of defying a court order by repeating false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee who had successfully sued him for libel.

Robinson was previously jailed for assault, mortgage fraud and traveling on a false passport to the United States, where he has sought to establish ties with right-wing groups.

“Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk posted last week as a pinned item atop his X account, which has 210 million followers.

Musk’s championing of Robinson has put his other right-wing allies in Britain in an awkward spot.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK and a close ally of Trump’s, has long shunned Robinson, who founded the English Defence League, an Islamophobic, nationalist group known for its violent street protests in the late 2000s and 2010s.

Farage, who previously reveled in Musk’s endorsement and has courted him in the hopes of winning a donation to Reform UK, echoed his demands for a new investigation of the child sex abuse scandal. But he had been conspicuously silent about Robinson.

However, after weeks of wrapping his arms around the British populist politician, Musk posted Sunday: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.”

Musk did not explain his change of heart. But it appears linked to Farage’s refusal to endorse Musk’s demand that Robinson be released from prison.

“Well, this is a surprise!” a studiously chipper Farage posted an hour after Musk. “Elon is a remarkable individual but on this I am afraid I disagree. My view remains that Tommy Robinson is not right for Reform and I never sell out my principles.”

As in Germany, where Musk’s promotion of the far-right AfD party provoked a widespread backlash against him, Musk’s interventions have won him few fans in Britain. But analysts say his proximity to and influence over Trump mean that his opinions, amplified by his social media platform, cannot be ignored by the government.

Sunder Katwala, the director of British Future, a research organization in London, argued that it made sense for the government to respond to Musk’s more extreme or erroneous statements, if only because his unpopularity makes him an inviting target for other critics.

“They leave an open goal by not saying anything,” he said.

Privately, British officials say they hope that after Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20, Musk will be too busy overhauling the U.S. government to continue his daily barrage of criticism of Britain and Germany.

But in the meantime, his online reach is broad enough that “it affects the political weather,” Katwala said, citing the child sex abuse scandal as a case in point.

Musk’s posts have helped whip up a tempest over a case that was the subject of local and national inquiries dating to 2014.

Starmer ran the Crown Prosecution Service from 2008 to 2013, when the abuses first came to light.

Although several men were imprisoned, the inquiries found that the police and prosecutors were slow to react to the allegations, in part because the victims were reluctant to come forward and in part because of worries about racism, given that most of the accused were British Pakistanis.

“Starmer was complicit in the RAPE OF BRITAIN when he was head of Crown Prosecution for 6 years,” Musk said in a post Friday.

In fact, in 2013, in the wake of the scandal, Starmer published new guidelines for how the Crown Prosecution Service should deal with cases of sexual exploitation of children.

Having won a landslide parliamentary majority in July, Starmer is in no immediate danger of losing his job.

But the drumbeat of disinformation and criticism from Musk combined with his financial resources has rattled people across the political spectrum in Britain.

Associated Press contributed.