The critics will call it “space marine meets the Valkyrie”, but Elon Musk’s interview of Alice Weidel, co-chair of the Alternative fur Deutschland party, was fascinating. It started in Germany and ended in space, with the revelation that Elon’s philosophy ain’t Marx or Nietzsche – it’s Douglas Adams.

This wasn’t a real interview, of course. Elon said “only the AfD can save Germany”, asked soft-ball questions and declined to examine any of the extremist controversies surrounding his guest. They spoke for far too long about nuclear power; it felt as misdirected as interrogating the Khmer Rouge about traffic calming.

Weidel came across as reasonable, albeit with an insane laugh, and labelled herself as libertarian, not far-Right. The media, claimed Musk, had slandered her.

Whether this is true or not, I cannot say: I knew nothing about Alice before the discussion and precious little after, for this was agitprop for the AfD – with as much cross-examination as Tucker Carlson vs Putin or Michael Parkinson and Miss Piggy.

Let us take her at face value: it seems immigration in her country is out of control (seven million let in), education has gone woke, and regulation runs wild (Elon had to fill out a building permit that ran to 25,000 pages in length). In short, Germany has become Britain, which is a fate worse than France.

Weidel did, however, get one thing demonstrably wrong: Hitler “was a communist”, she said, because he nationalised business. Elon agrees with this, too; it’s a popular theory among capitalists. Sick of being compared to Nazis, they’ve turned the slur on its head by suggesting Hitler was a socialist motivated – to quote Alice – by “envy”. Balderdash. The first people locked up were the socialists, and his politics was not defined by the Four Year Plan but his hatred of Jews and Bolshevism.

But if we learnt little about German history or the AfD, we did pick up a lot about Elon – as Alice made it clear that she wished to know more. When will be the first human expedition to Mars, she asked? Within two years, he replied, which blew my tiny mind.

The goal is not merely to get there but make the base sustainable without Earth’s support, lest we get annihilated by a nuclear exchange. After surveying the mind-numbing vastness of space and the possibilities of alien life, Weidel asked if Musk thought all this was a coincidence or proof of God? He does not know, and neither does she. I find it odd that our leading contemporary conservatives are agnostic.

It turns out that Elon is a big fan of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, arguing that the answer to the meaning of life – “42”, according to the comic novel – only makes sense once one asks the right questions, ergo life is a mission to expand one’s “consciousness” to the point that we can better understand ourselves and our universe.

Listening to him describe the book with such reverence, I wondered if he realised it is also very funny – as much an indictment of philosophy, religion and science as an endorsement.

Adams would find it hilarious/appalling to discover that a deadly serious South African boy had taken his book to be a manifesto and translated it into a Right-wing project to reorder the entire galaxy.

Adams was not a pro-growth libertarian; he always struck me as a Nimby. After all, he has the Earth being destroyed by a Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for a hyperspace by-pass.