This phoney war over Last Night of the Proms is everything we deserve

Being British is very embarrassing, isn’t it? I first learned this when I was a child and saw an adult escalate themselves to actual anger over the order in which jam and cream go on a scone (it’s jam first; the conversation is now over), and have been reminded of it every time I’ve seen it happen since. We are constantly arguing, asserting and demanding that the strict structure of Britishness is upheld, respected and adhered to, and we turn our heads inside-out with rage when it isn’t.

You can set a bomb off in any British conversation with any of the following: “How do you think you say the letter ‘H’?”; “If you had to take a knighthood off anybody, who would it be?”; “Was my use of ‘off’ in that last sentence grammatically correct, or an unshakeable northernism?”; “Do you think we have enough bank holidays?” We reveal who we are by the things we let make us angry.

This is, of course, about the Last Night of the Proms, because what in life isn’t? The core of the story is: the Sunday Times reported that some people at the BBC held discussions about whether both Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory – both decent enough tunes, but no WAP – could be played as part of Last Night of the Proms. After some very mild consideration, the BBC announced that yes, they could. That’s the end of the story and the end of this piece, goodbye.

Related: Rule, Britannia! will be played at Proms but not sung, BBC confirms

Only, obviously not. We’re somehow now on day three of #Promgate, and the Daily Mail, Express and Telegraph – as well as about half of the government – are raging about what the Sunday Times in its headline gently refers to as the “BBC’s ‘Black Lives Matter Proms’”. The Times report hints at two theories as to why the songs might possibly have been up for review, one played on lead violin and one played quietly on the bassoon: either it’s because it’s logistically quite nightmarish to socially distance an 80-piece orchestra and 100 singers (Jan Younghusband, head of BBC music TV commissioning: “We have a lot of problems about how many instruments we can have. It is hard to know whether it is physically possible to do it”), or it’s because of some shady backroom BBC woke junta (a Times source, on Proms conductor Dalia Stasevska: “Dalia is a big supporter of Black Lives Matter and thinks a ceremony without an audience is the perfect moment to bring change.”)

In the end, the Sunday Times leaves it open to interpretation. Which is the biggest threat to the fine and hearty tradition of the Proms, do you think? The looming ever-present of coronavirus? Or the completely uninvolved Black Lives Matter movement, which hates this country and the little flags this country insists on waving once a summer?

Normal people would not care about any of this, but we do not live in a normal country. That is why we are now almost half a week into being mad about this. Cue the bombast: No 10 signalled, via a spokesperson, that Boris Johnson would be unhappy about changes to the Proms, and that while there are “strong emotions” about the line “Britons never shall be slaves”, “we need to tackle the substance of problems, not the symbols”.

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The same day the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, got his own flags down from the loft and waved them around as passionately as possible, adding: “Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory are highlights of the Last Night of the Proms. Confident forward-looking nations don’t erase their history, they add to it.” Nigel Farage looked up from the Wetherspoons app long enough to tweet: “So the BBC may drop Rule, Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory from the Proms because the Finnish conductor is too woke. Why not drop her instead?” Actor Laurence Fox mobilised his army of curious thinkers: “I feel so honoured to be British and part of the incredible and diverse modern nation we have become. Without the past, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I wish the BBC would stop hating Britain so much.” Some grey noise from Keir Starmer, if you want to hear it: the “pomp and pageantry” is “a staple of British summer”, apparently.

It was all so exciting that we almost missed the BBC confirming that both songs would be would be played, but as orchestral versions only, because there is no crowd to sing along. So, to clarify: it was a complete non-story from the off, an anonymous source said some ambiguous words about the Last Night conductor’s supposed intentions, the prime minister – still buzzing and shaking from a weekend on the Kendal mint cake – rushed to release a statement about it, and now that weird voting bloc of people who don’t watch Little Britain any more but were angry when it got taken off iPlayer are angry about the licence fee all over again.

I hate to be the one saying “you know we’re in a pandemic, right?”, but you know we’re in a pandemic, right? If I didn’t know better, I’d think the political right was deftly exploiting our national inability to ignore culture-war bait in order to obfuscate bigger stories, like, I don’t know, the fact that things are going badly for the government, literally all of the time. How many more times do we have to watch this happen? What do four more years of this government have in store for us? Five hundred children somehow catch the plague due to government negligence and the Express front page is “EU demands hungry Brits RENAME Cornish pasties”? After the 2022 banking crash, Boris Johnson stands behind a podium and vows that, despite the rumours, “the woke left will never make poppies illegal”? The 2023 winter crisis in the NHS is so bad that Rishi Sunak is wheeled out to politely announce ITV will run Benny Hill repeats for the whole of autumn because “pinching bottoms is what Britain does best”?

This country is just a dim eight-year-old, constantly in a tantrum, being distracted by the same penny-behind-the-ear magic trick and forgetting anything bad ever happened. Frankly, we deserve a manufactured Proms controversy every year until the sun explodes out of the sky.

• Joel Golby is a writer for the Guardian and VICE, and the author of Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant Brilliant Brilliant