David Starkey
David Robert Starkey is an English historian, radio and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before reading history at Cambridge on a scholarship. There he specialised in Tudor history, writing a thesis on King Henry VIII's household. From Cambridge, he moved to the London School of Economics, where he was a lecturer in history until 1998. He has written several books on the Tudors.
Starkey first appeared on television in 1977. While a regular contributor to the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, his acerbic tongue earned him the sobriquet of "rudest man in Britain"; his frequent appearances on Question Time have been received with criticism and applause. Starkey has presented several historical documentaries. In 2002, he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 for 25 hours of programming, and in 2011 was a contributor on the Channel 4 series Jamie's Dream School.
Starkey was widely censured for a comment he made during a podcast interview with Darren Grimes in June 2020 that was said to be racist, for which he later apologised. Immediately afterwards, he resigned as an honorary fellow of his alma mater, Fitzwilliam College, had several honorary doctorates and fellowships revoked, book contracts and memberships of learned societies cancelled, and his Medlicott Medal withdrawn.
Early years and education
Starkey was born on 3 January 1945 in Kendal, Westmorland. He is the only child of Robert Starkey and Elsie Lyon, Quakers who had married 10 years previously in Bolton, at a Friends meeting house. His father, the son of a cotton spinner, was a foreman in a washing-machine factory, while his mother followed in her father's footsteps and became a cotton weaver and later a cleaner. They were both born in Oldham and moved to Kendal in the 1930s during the Great Depression. He was raised in an austere and frugal environment of near-poverty, with his parents often unemployed for long periods of time; an environment which, he later stated, taught him "the value of money". Starkey is equivocal about his mother, describing her as both "wonderful", in that she helped develop his ambition, and "monstrous", intellectually frustrated and living through her son. "She was a wonderful but also very frightening parent. Finally, she was a Pygmalion. She wanted a creature, she wanted something she had made." Her dominance contrasted sharply to his father, who was "poetic, reflective, rather solitary...as a father he was weak." Their relationship was "distant", but improved after his mother's death in 1977.Starkey was born with two club feet. One was fixed early, while the other had to be operated on several times. He also suffered from polio. He suffered a nervous breakdown at secondary school, aged 13, and was taken by his mother to a boarding house in Southport, where he spent several months recovering. Starkey blamed the episode on the unfamiliar experience of being in a "highly competitive environment". He ultimately excelled at Kendal Grammar School, winning debating prizes and appearing in school plays.
Although he showed an early inclination towards science, he chose instead to study history. A scholarship enabled his entry into Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he gained a first-class degree, a PhD and a fellowship.
Starkey was fascinated by King Henry VIII, and his doctoral thesis focused on the Tudor monarch's inner household. His supervisor was Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, an expert on the Tudor period. Starkey claimed that with age his mentor became "tetchy" and "arrogant". In 1983, when Elton was awarded a knighthood, Starkey derided one of his essays, Cromwell Redivivus, and Elton responded by writing an "absolutely shocking" review of a collection of essays Starkey had edited. Starkey later expressed his remorse over the spat: "I regret that the thing happened at all."
Career
Starkey was a fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from 1970 to 1972. Bored at Cambridge and attracted to London's gay scene, he secured a position as a lecturer in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics in 1972. He claimed to be an "excessively enthusiastic advocate of promiscuity", seeking to liberate himself from his mother, who strongly disapproved of his homosexuality. He ended his 30-year career as a university teacher in 1998, later citing boredom and irritation with the administrative demands of modern academic life. Having already written and presented the 1984 Channel 4 documentary series This Land of England, he began to write and present several history documentaries for BBC television, beginning with the Indie Award winning Henry VIII.Starkey had already achieved notoriety as a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, debating moral issues of the day alongside fellow panellists Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Sir Roger Scruton and the journalist Janet Daley since 1992. He soon acquired a reputation for abrasiveness. He explained in 2007 that his personality possesses "a tendency towards showmanship... towards self-indulgence and explosion and repartee and occasional silliness and going over the top." The Daily Mail gave him the sobriquet of "the rudest man in Britain", to which Starkey was said to have told friends, "Don't worry darlings, it's worth at least £100,000 a year", claiming that his character was part of a "convenient image". He once attacked George Austin, the Archdeacon of York, over "his fatness, his smugness, and his pomposity", but after a nine-year stint on the programme he left, citing his boredom with being "Dr. Rude" and its move to an evening slot.
From 1995, he also spent three years at Talk Radio UK, presenting Starkey on Saturday, later Starkey on Sunday. An interview with Denis Healey proved to be one of his most embarrassing moments: "I mistakenly thought that he had become an amiable old buffer who would engage in amusing conversation, and he tore me limb from limb. I laugh about it now, but I didn't feel like laughing about it at the time."
His first television appearance was in 1977, on Granada Television's Behave Yourself with Russell Harty. He was a prosecution witness in the 1984 ITV programme The Trial of Richard III, whose jury acquitted the king of the murder of the Princes in the Tower on the grounds of insufficient evidence. His television documentaries on The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were ratings successes. His breathless delivery of the script, with noticeable breaths and choppy cadence, is widely imitated.
In 2002, he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 to produce 25 hours of television, including Monarchy, a chronicle of the history of English kings and queens from Anglo-Saxon times onward. He presented the 2009 series Henry: Mind of a Tyrant, which Brian Viner, a reviewer for the Independent, called "highly fascinating", although A. A. Gill was less complimentary, calling it "Hello! history". In an interview about the series for the Radio Times, Starkey complained that too many historians had focused not on Henry, but on his wives. Referring to a "feminised history", he said: "so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience." This prompted the historian Lucy Worsley to describe his comments as misogynistic. More recently, in 2011, he taught five history lessons in Channel 4's Jamie's Dream School, after which he criticised the state education system.
In 1984, Starkey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and in 1994 a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He was also made an Honorary Fellow by his Cambridge College, Fitzwilliam College in 2006. From 2007 to 2015 he was Honorary Visiting Professor of History at the University of Kent and subsequently Lecturer at Goldsmiths' College, Visiting Professor of History of Canterbury Christ Church University and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Buckingham. He has worked as curator on several exhibitions, including an exhibit in 2003 on Elizabeth I, following which he had lunch with her namesake, Elizabeth II. Several years later he told a reporter that the monarch had no interest in her predecessors, other than those who followed her great-grandfather, Edward VII. "I don't think she's at all comfortable with anybody – I would hesitate to use the word intellectual – but it's useful. I think she's got elements a bit like Goebbels in her attitude to culture – you remember: 'every time I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver.' I think the queen reaches for her mask." His remarks were criticised by Penny Junor, a royal biographer, and Robert Lacey, a royal historian.
On 25 June 2012, Starkey gave his lecture 'Head of Our Morality: why the twentieth-century British monarchy matters' at The Marc Fitch Lectures.
Views
Political views
Starkey's political views have changed over the years from what he called "middle-of-the-road Labour left until the end of the 1970s" to a conservative outlook, which he attributed to economic failures of the Callaghan government. Starkey blamed the Callaghan administration for "blow the nation's finances". He is a supporter of one-nation conservatism and believes that Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was a great symbol of this. He has written that Disraeli was "exotic, slippery and had a gift for language and phrase-making", drawing similarities with the rhetorical style of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He argues that the working classes need more explicit "nationalism" of the type demonstrated by Disraeli. He believes that Disraelianism could strengthen the Anglo-American "conservative" alliance between US and the UK. Despite Johnson being a Conservative Prime Minister, Starkey regarded him as "a liberal", so he doubted whether Johnson would ever take this view.During the 1980s he was an active Conservative Party member, and he was a Conservative candidate for Islington Borough Council in 1986 in Tollington ward, and in 1990 in Hillrise ward.
Following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election, he bemoaned the Conservatives in opposition, criticising Michael Howard in particular: "I knew Michael Howard was going to be a disaster as soon as he opposed top-up fees, either out of sentimentality or calculated expediency so that it might get him a bit of the student vote...Instead of backing Tony Blair, causing revolution in the Labour Party, the Conservatives have been whoring after strange gods, coming up with increasingly strange policies." He likened Gordon Brown to the fictional Kenneth Widmerpool, continuing, "It seems to me that with Brown there is a complete sense of humour and charm bypass." Of Ed Miliband, in 2015 he said "He is a man of high ambition and low talent – the worst possible combination. His whole language at the moment is soak the rich, hate the rich."
During the 2011 Conservative Party Conference he spoke at a fringe meeting, declaring Mayor Boris Johnson to be a "jester-despot" and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, as having "absolutely no strategy" for running the country. He urged the party to re-engage with the working class rather than the "Guardian-reading middle class". In 2015 he said that while Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, had introduced some meaningful reforms to education and welfare policies, they had not made large enough cuts to the UK's budget deficit.
Starkey prefers radical changes to the UK's constitution in line with the federal system used by the United States, although in an interview with Iain Dale he expressed his support for the monarchy, the Queen and Prince Charles. In the run-up to the UK Alternative Vote referendum, he was a signatory on a letter to The Times, which urged people to vote against the proposals. Starkey thinks the modern UK House of Commons has become a weak political institution and that it should return to its core value of being in defiance of state authority, as it was in its origin. He believes the House too often gives way to the state, such as with the police being allowed to search the place without a warrant. This occurred in 2008 with the searching of the Westminster office of Conservative politician Damian Green after the custodians of the House, the Speaker and the Serjeant at Arms, allowed the police to search the place without a warrant.
Starkey was a supporter of the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality, and during one of many appearances on the BBC's Question Time he criticised Jeffrey Archer over his views on the age of homosexual consent. In 2012, he described himself as "torn" on the issue of same-sex marriage, describing marriage as "part of the baggage of heterosexual society."
In 2009, Mike Russell, then the Scottish Government Minister for Culture and External Affairs, called on him to apologise for his declaration on the programme that Scotland, Ireland and Wales are "feeble little countries". Starkey responded that it had been a joke regarding the lack of necessity for the English to outwardly celebrate their nationalism, approvingly quoting H. G. Wells's observation that "the English are the only nation without national dress". He described Alex Salmond, then Scottish First Minister, as a "Caledonian Hitler" who thinks that "the English, like the Jews, are everywhere". In August 2014, Starkey was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue. In June 2015 in an interview for The Sunday Times Starkey compared the Scottish National Party with the Nazi Party. He said:
You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika. You have a passionate belief in self-sufficiency: known by the Nazis as autarky and the Scots as oil. And also you have the propensity of your elderly and middle-aged supporters to expose their knees.
SNP member of parliament Kirsten Oswald described Starkey's comments as "deeply offensive" to the Jewish community and SNP voters, and described Starkey as a "serial utterer of bile and bilge".