‘You’d be forgiven for looking at Andrew Tate, especially at our age, and thinking: ‘This guy must be some niche figure,’” Matt Shea tells me, in a meeting room at the BBC headquarters in central London. What a courteous young film-maker, I think, because he is 31 and I am old enough to be his mum. “But there was a recent survey by Hope Not Hate which found that 52% of 16- and 17-year-old boys in the UK have a positive view of Andrew Tate, and were more likely to have heard of him than they were Rishi Sunak.”
I struggle to believe this: Tate is an ultra-misogynist provocateur, currently charged in Romania with human trafficking and forming an organised crime ring, with investigations ongoing into the trafficking of minors. He is also an obvious blowhard and attention-seeker, and I know enough teenagers to think that surely more than half of them would despise him on that basis alone. I’m wrong, though. Shea continues: “And that number goes a bit higher when [the respondents are] younger, similar surveys all across the world. US, Australia, India: he’s huge all across the world. You may not have heard of Andrew Tate, or you may have heard of him but think it’s universally accepted that he’s a bad person. But your children, your nephews, they are watching him right now and they may not have the same view.”
