Both Rishi Sunak and Andrew Tate are two of the most recognisable names in this country right now. The prime minister has been clogging column inches with his anti-trans crusade, making maths lessons compulsory to age 18, and even taking a private jet from London to Leeds. Similarly, the self-styled “success coach” Andrew Tate has been dominating headlines for the best part of a year with his vile, misogynistic content, and was most recently detained in Romania for sex trafficking offences.

However, a recent poll conducted by the advocacy group HOPE not hate has revealed that more teenage boys have watched Andrew Tate’s videos than heard of Rishi Sunak. The poll was conducted on more than 1,200 members of the public between the ages of 16 and 24, and found that those boys in the 16-17 age bracket were 21 per cent more likely to have heard of Tate over Sunak.

It’s an uncomfortable statistic on its own, but even more so coupled with the fact that only one per cent of 16-17-year-old girls had a positive perception of Tate, and a massive 82 per cent thought of him in a negative light. In comparison, the poll also found that only 26 per cent of boys had a negative image of Tate, while 45 per cent had a positive one. This huge gender disparity comes as no surprise, as Tate has repeatedly referred to women as property or status symbols, and compared them to animals.

HOPE not hate, the organisation that carried out the poll, focuses on exposing far-right extremism and protecting the communities that are most susceptible to radicalisation. It’s a scary thought that, in this case, the targeted group is any teenage boy with an internet connection.

Rosie Carter, director of policy at HOPE not hate told The Independent that Tate’s “confidence, money and lifestyle are all carefully crafted to make his brand of hateful content seem aspirational”, before adding that “the shocking disparity in how teenage girls and boys feel about him suggests that Tate’s targeting of young men has had a direct negative impact on young women as his ideas are carried by young men both on and offline.”

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