Boris Johnson is turning the Rule Britannia affair into a Trump-style culture war – and the BBC is letting him get away with it

It’s no surprise that the PM’s response to the controversy – and that of his braying followers – should be both ignorant and simple-minded, writes our classical music critic Michael Church. But it’s tragic that the BBC should provide them with an opening

Johnson said ‘it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history’ (Rex)

You couldn’t make it up. First the chronology. On Sunday (23 August), in what seemed like a kite-flying piece, The Sunday Times suggested that “Rule, Britannia!” and “Land of Hope and Glory” were to be expunged from The Last Night of the Proms to placate the Black Lives Matter movement. The young Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska, who would be on the podium, was said to favour modernising the repertoire: a ceremony with no audience, she felt, would be the perfect moment to bring change.

Despite support for this entirely reasonable idea from respected figures including Wasfi Kani, chief executive of Grange Park Opera and of Indian descent, this was the cue for bedlam in the right-wing media. In the face of howls of outrage in Tory newspapers, and a deluge of hate mail for Stasevska, the BBC put out a meekly defensive statement on Monday (24 August) that included “the full programme” for the evening, which did not include the two songs in question.

A few hours later, that programme was revealed to be far from full. What was now revealed was a predictably anodyne exercise in multi-ethnic and social box-ticking. Come Tuesday morning, the message was different again: the songs would indeed be there, but in purely instrumental form, with no words. This was partly for Covid-19 reasons – even socially distanced singing by the audience would be a health risk – and partly for artistic ones: without 5,500 people belting out the songs with full welly, the point of the exercise would be lost.

Later that day, Lord Hall, the BBC’s outgoing director general, poured petrol on the flames by promising that next year the words would be back. This message was reinforced by his successor Tim Davie, who takes up office next week.

Meanwhile, as was inevitable, the politicians were weighing in. Culture secretary Oliver Dowden was one of many Tories who wanted the songs back in their traditional form. As was also inevitable, prime minister Boris Johnson saw in this situation a God-sent opportunity for one of his populist interventions: “I think it’s time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, and about our culture, and we stopped this general fight of self-recrimination and wetness,” he proclaimed in his best blustering manner. He was clearly relieved that he could at last sound prime-ministerial after cowering in the wings while his ministers messed up the education system. That word “wetness” was the infantile giveaway, harking back to the Bullingdon Club whose upper-class drunks knew (quite correctly) that one day they would rule the world.

It has been pointed out that Thomas Arne’s rousing song “Rule, Britannia!” predated imperialism: the servitude to which Britons would never, never surrender was at the hands of the Spanish, who were harassing British traders in the 1730s. But even if it had been about imperialism, so what? It was an exuberant reflection of one side of British culture three centuries ago. If we were to go through the works of Purcell and Handel, Verdi and Wagner, filleting out every phrase which was un-PC, we would have very few operas left. A stronger, more confident BBC would have dismissed such simplistic revisionism out of hand.

But as Jonathan Dimbleby has argued, what Johnson is doing is turning the whole affair into a Trump-style culture war. “Cringing embarrassment,” furnished a perfect Daily Mail headline; it’s no surprise that Vera Lynn’s rendition of “Land of Hope and Glory” has just topped the iTunes charts. From all this it is but a short step to demanding that the wimp-like lefties of the BBC should be defunded. And that plays straight into the Johnson-Cummings campaign – which had been losing ground, thanks to the BBC’s impressive coverage of the pandemic – to castrate the BBC by making the licence fee optional.

It’s no surprise that Johnson’s response to the controversy – and that of his braying followers – should be both ignorant and simple-minded. But it’s tragic that the BBC should provide them with an opening for this attack. The BBC has been guilty this week of a terrible own goal.

The Last Prom is no stranger to controversy: remember the fate of John Adams’s piece “Short Ride in a Fast Machine”, scheduled for the Last Prom in 1997 but hurriedly replaced after Princess Diana’s death, and then again for the 2001 Proms in the wake of 9/11? This week’s controversy may be a storm in a teacup, but there is a much more serious debate simmering behind the scenes.

Britain is now a quintessentially multi-ethnic country. And as I have argued in this newspaper for more years than I care to remember, it’s high time that this event – and indeed the Proms in general – reflected that fact. The BBC has long kowtowed to what it fondly imagines to be the requirements of “youth” – things like the “Ibiza Prom” – but its conception of classical music remains relentlessly and predominantly white-European and American. There are some wonderfully sophisticated classical musics out there – not just the Indian raga music which will be heard in the context of an electronic jam session in this forthcoming Last Night – and they should be heard at the Royal Albert Hall on equal terms. Then the Proms audience, when it eventually returns, will no longer be what it has always been, a sea of white faces.