Ben Lowry: Anti UK influence in America has been diminished by US election result

His commentary showed his eccentricity and unpredictability, which is might be a reflection of a turbulent personality or is perhaps part of his brilliance.

Mr Musk was much criticised for endorsing the Republican Party in the American mid term election which were held on Tuesday. In fact what he said was quite nuanced and resonable, as I will explain below.

I usually try to get to the US in election years but have not crossed the Atlantic for such a contest since 2016, so had hoped to be there this month.

For various reasons I did not make it, but the outcome of the race for the US Senate and House of Representatives has been fascinating.

The results were so evenly decided that it is still not clear who will hold the so-called upper house, the senate.

Four of the 100 seats remain undecided, but I think it will be either 51 Republicans to 49 Democrats, or 50 of both (as it was before the poll).

If the latter, the Democrats will hold the senate because the Democratic US vice president Kamala Harris will have the casting vote.

Regardless of who triumphs in the senate, American politics will be in logjam.

The Democrats hold the White House and as of last night the Republicans were on the brink of taking the lower house.

This makes it hard for President Biden to pass his programme, all the more so if he loses the senate.

Mr Musk said this: "To independent-minded voters: Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic."

There is much to be said for this perspective and I have sometimes shared it myself.

I often marvel at the fact that the ingenious American political system was established only a few decades after the first Belfast News Letter was lauched in 1737.

When you read those early papers you are peering into a society that was in many respects quite primitive, with democracy in its infancy and barely any indication of a middle class - most advertised properties for sale or let are ultimately owned by peers.

And yet by the 1780s the papers feel markedly more modern, and they reveal a much more sophisticated and prosperous society in Ulster.

While the 1730s papers have adverts for dancing teachers, the 1780s ones have ads for violin lessons.

While the 1730s editions carry ads for food stuffs, the 1780s mention dining clubs in places such as Hillsborough.

The middle class was suddenly apparent.

This was happening across the western world, and people were no longer prepared to accept rule by aristocrats, triggering revolution in America, then France, and almost in Ireland.

The US constitution emerged from that new order and has endured with very little modification.

It is the foundation of the system of 'checks and balances' to which Mr Musk refers.

The American founding fathers, some of them Scots Irish (ie Ulster Protestants), almost had Donald Trump in mind when they established a system in which the US government, the presidency, the courts and the parliaments kept each other in check.

I know more about the latter presidents than the earlier ones and certainly not one of those post World War II leaders needed to be constrained as much as the wildly unpredictable Mr Trump did.

At the same time, much of the Democratic Party has sunk into woke extremism, backing Black Lives Matters and Defund the Police radicals.

Among Irish American Democrats, support for past IRA terrorism is even more overt than it previously was.

Thus plenty of unionists in Northern Ireland who follow US politics will have felt very ambivalent about the prospects of either a Democratic or Republican victory last week.

I would say that we have ended up with perhaps the best result we could have had.

If the Democrats had held on to all three levers of political power - White House, Senate, House of Reps - there would have been ongoind pressure on the UK to capitulate to Dublin demands over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

But if the Republicans had swept the two houses of Congress, then Mr Trump would have been claiming vindication and perhaps the front runner for the 2024 election.

It would have been a victory for the majority of the Republican Party that embraces the despicable Trump lie that Biden stole the 2020 election.

Now, however, Trump is unable to claim vindication.

But the anti British obsessives in Irish America have diminished influence too.

I have written many times about the lamentable failure of the UK, and indeed of unionists, to capitalise on two things - the fact that the UK, unlike neutral Ireland, has long been a close ideological ally of America, and the fact that many of the most influential Americans are in fact Scots Irish (such as the most senior Republican Mitch McConnell) as opposed to the much noisier Catholic Irish (although the latter have gradually become very powerful in the US, and indeed increasingly connected to the Republican Party).

This is all very important for Northern Ireland's place in the UK, not that the media here convey that.

This week yet another influential Republican Party politician in Washington told her fellow US politicians to but out of UK negotiations with the EU over NI.

Senator Joni Ernst echoed the former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley who said that the Irish Sea border is a matter for the UK and EU, not America.

Senator Ernst said that Mr Pompeo and Ms Haley "are right, it's not for us to tell other countries as they are going through negotiations, what to do and how to handle it".

She was, like her two Republican colleagues, speaking to the influential London think tank Policy Exchange.

It was in comments to that think tank that the distinguished American general David Petraeus talked about the potential future implications for both the American and UK military of an NI legacy system that has turned against the UK security forces who prevented terrorists for pushing this society into civil war.

Why are these sorts of American voices, who are all the more influential after the elections, not reported here?

There has been barely a word about their support for London.

Yet when the pro Sinn Fein US politician Congressman Richie Neale toured NI with the outgoing Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, their endless criticisms of London were breathlessly reported.

Pelosi issued relentless threats that the UK would not get a trade deal.

Thank goodness she and her ilk are now less able to wield their anti British, anti unionist veto.