Banal jingoism, embarrassing and profoundly un-British behaviour. Photograph: Guardian/Dan Chung
In my critically acclaimed novel Tits Out Teenage Terror Totty I envisaged the Last Night of the Proms surrounded by an army of risen zombie war-dead who stormed the Albert Hall and killed the audience with bayonets and sharpened entrenching tools. It is quite possibly the most satisfying thing I have ever written.
As a very small child I yearned to be in the crowd that pogoed furiously and waved union flags and roared its patriotic guts out while a man in a penguin suit waved his arms and an entire orchestra hammered its instruments with a gusto bordering on the demented. But then I also wanted to be a soldier. What an idiot I was.
Then I learned about the Somme and Passchendaele. And I met individuals from the braying, honking upper and upper-middle classes. Chaps called Hilary who didn't even seem to realise they had a girl's name. Who never examined their own unearned privilege and seriously thought that non-U accents were "put on". I mean, seriously, have you met the posh? With one or two exceptions (Paul Foot and the Gang of Four) they really are ghastly people.
There was a floppy-fringed, boarding school-educated young Conservative I met at the Oxford Union. We need to leave the European Union, he argued, because it threatens "our culture". When I asked what this culture we shared was, exactly, he seemed flummoxed.
In short, while I would like to pretend that the revulsion that twists my stomach and the hatred that races through my veins every time I see the Last Night of the Proms is principled and political. I know that it is not. It is aesthetic, instinctive and visceral. I am first-generation middle class and British. No other class in any other country is possessed of our collective rage and hatred (read the Daily Mail, read Jane Austen). And when I see the buck-toothed and chinless honkers and brayers desecrating Jerusalem, I cannot help myself. I see the Norman enemy before me and I want to destroy them.
Beyond that, the Last Night drags Britishness through the shitty mire of nationalism. The pogoing Ruperts and Camillas not only insult the war dead of all nations with their banal jingoism, they also embarrass Britain by engaging in what, frankly, is profoundly un-British behaviour.
There are few things that the British can be proud off. But cheese, pop music, beer and a marvelous lack of overt patriotism are among them.
When I'm in an American pub with a bunch of ex-pats watching an England game and the entire pub refuses to stand when our Germanic dirge of a national anthem is played, I get a little lump in my throat. It actually makes me proud to be British.
This inability to do rah-rah American style patriotism is one of our best defining national characteristics (second only to our lack of religion) - so much so that patriotism in Britain serves as a way to mark out the hateful, the imbecilic and the servile.
Which is why the red, white and blue waving proms buffoons raise the hackles of every true Brit. Who are these profoundly un-British idiots? Why are they engaged in such horribly un-British behaviour? And what should be done to stop them?
Nothing. The fact that I and millions like me despise the promenaders so intensely and irrationally is the reason the spectacle must be maintained. Every year the Last Night serves not only as a reminder that all talk of a classless society is utter bollocks, but that those who have long ruled over us are the most appalling freaks. So wave on you crazy inbred mothers.
And besides, a good hate is good for the soul.
