Can ‘misogyny mentors’ help steer boys away from Andrew Tate?

Schools could be given powers to train older boys to prevent younger pupils from falling under the spell of sexist social media influencers, writes James Moore. What a brilliant idea...

Andrew Tate (left) is currently awaiting trial on rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, alongside his brother Tristan (AP)

How do you solve a problem like Andrew Tate? According to the Labour Party, you bring in “misogyny mentors” – and here’s the thing: it might just work.

The scheme, tabled by shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson, would see schools training up peer-group mentors to counter the negative impact of people like Tate. By introducing role models to classrooms who can show pupils how to question the material they see on social media, they hope to provide a “powerful counterbalance” to self-professed “misogynist” influencers.

Rishi Sunak, in a bid to combat some of the problems with smartphone use in schools, has already pledged to ban handsets and to empower headteachers to dramatically reduce mobile use in the classroom (though he stopped short of backing calls by the mother of murdered teenager Brianna Ghey for social media apps to be banned on smartphones for under-16s).