TATE GALLERY

 

Andrew Tate has inflicted a second wound on the BBC after Elon Musk eviscerated one of their reporters a few weeks ago. Tate had granted the BBC his first interview after leaving a Romanian jail to be held under house arrest. As is so often the case with anyone even remotely right-of-centre politically – and Tate is over-qualified in this respect – the interviewer, a dowdy twenty-something woman, was hostile from what Americans picturesquely call the ‘get-go’.

But Tate both markets himself as and is an Alpha male, and soon let her knows the power structure which would be in play, and that it wouldn’t be hers but his. He told her that he had invited her into his home where she did not have a position of authority. This revives a wonderful and near-archaic belief that the owner of the domicile is the ruler of the domicile, and his wishes are to be respected. He demanded the right to ask her questions, and she said – every bit the uniformed interrogator – that she asked the questions.

Journalists have changed since the turn of the millennium. Whereas journalism still had a residual sense that it should be tracking down the truth and reporting it, journalists are now, as often as not, political activists with the imprimatur of Britain’s state broadcaster.

Tate is a braggart, but an articulate one. His company, Cobra, have a pledge scheme whereby Tate sends money to the developing world to be used to feed the hungry. Given that this is true, it is hard to score more highly on any virtue scale you care to use. But the BBC have no interest in swollen-bellied Ibo infants, they are far more concerned that schoolboys are paying attention to Tate, and all the lost values of masculinity he embodies. In a HOPE not Hate poll, incidentally, the highest statistical bloc among schoolboys asked if they admired Tate and answering positively, were Muslims at 61%.

Masculinity is not necessarily an attractive spectacle. It involves force and kinetics, power, self-aggrandizement and self-respect. These are not values the BBC condone, quite the opposite. But if it takes men like Musk and Tate, flawed as all men are, to insert men back into history, then we must hope there are more like them.