David Starkey: ‘I’ve Witnessed the Disintegration of Everything That I Loved in Britain’

“I am an impertinent old bugger,” says Dr David Starkey, “and I refuse to be shut up.” I meet him at his London flat, sit and brace myself for a delicious, dizzying chat with the historian once dubbed “the rudest man in Britain”. He speaks energetically and clearly, as if to the back of the class, in that “you need to know this” style he perfected on television.

The monarchy is “fading into irrelevance”, he discloses. The King is woke. William is “hopeless… Nature intended him to be the manager of a second-division football team.” (And he’d be “rather stretched at that”.) Much blame lies with the late Queen, who was “obsessed about the Commonwealth” and spent too much time “sucking up to African dictators”.

Between the gasps and laughs of every Starkey lecture shines a pertinent point. Britain was ruined by its elite; he thinks we need to undergo a “cultural restoration”. The theme has resonance in his own life.

Starkey is dressed down in a green jumper and slacks. His flat, close to the British Museum, has been lovingly restored, from former council property, with chintzy wallpaper, to its late Victorian panelling – painted pink, hung with oils.

The owner is planning what I call a “late Starkey revival”. At his height, he was a bestselling author famous for popularising the Tudor period via documentaries such as The Six Wives of Henry VIII or Monarchy; watched by millions and being paid millions to make them. Always controversial – joking about female historians, saying white rioters had “become black” – he was profoundly cancelled in 2020, accused of racism.

Since then, he has rebuilt his fan base via his YouTube channel, David Starkey Talks (he’s just received a silver plaque for reaching 100,000 subscribers). He’s become a leading light of the Popular Conservatism movement, which aims to reconstruct the intellectual basis of the centre-Right. And in April, he’s giving a talk at the Oxford Literary Festival; the festival is noted for its defence of free speech. The subject? “A 21st Century Perspective: Our Life and Times Today.”

In the 1960s, he tells me, Britain became freer, but the prudes and the Lefties used the law – notably the Race Relations Act – and social media to restore censorship. The fight-back has started; he sees the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Elon Musk as a turning point. “I follow practically every tweet of Elon Musk. He is a genuine liberator.”

Many look at Starkey the same way. I’ve known him since the age of 18, when he came to speak at my school, and he was the most exciting person I’d ever met. When we ran into each other again at Cambridge – with me doing a BA, him a fellow at Fitzwilliam College – I took to heart his advice that history is, above all, “the telling of a story”, that a well-written biography can illuminate a society.

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{snip} I struggle to believe it. If nothing else, it meant he had to handle cancellation by himself.

That happened in June 2020, during a silly podcast interview with pundit Darren Grimes; David was asked about slavery and proactively – lazily – said that had it been as genocidal as some claim, the world wouldn’t be full of “so many damn blacks”. The slip was condemned. Organisations he’d worked with for years telephoned to give him five minutes to resign or be pushed.

He lost friends, his fellowship, his publisher, various honours and positions, and his literary agent, who, as fate would have it, was named Fairweather. The police opened an investigation, which they later dropped (Priti Patel, the Home Secretary at the time, advised the police to respect “freedom of speech”). It was “profoundly hurtful”, yet “mixed with the most wonderful farce. Three guesses what was happening on that day? I was having a new fridge-freezer delivered. My universe collapsed and I was surrounded by decaying piles of frozen food.”

He’d said such things before, so why on this occasion did he get the full Gulag treatment? He offers historical context: “This is 2020, the year of Covid-19, Black Lives Matter… George Floyd… The world went mad, and I was a very peripheral victim of it.” I sense we’re building up to the big question of what’s going wrong with Britain and how he proposes to fix it.

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Starkey explains that just as Britain began opening up, in the 1960s, the establishment felt it had to impose order on the looming chaos. Immigration, he cites as an example, created community tensions, but rather than acknowledge the worries that drove those tensions, the Labour government passed the Race Relations Act to stop us talking openly about them.

“The world of the Left is a series of complete lies,” and thus it cooked up the “noble lie” of multiculturalism – “diversity is strength” – to which we must pledge loyalty.

“It was a deeply illiberal revolution that began out of a desire to be nice,” to “handle the process” of social change “without hurting feelings”. The result was a “legal framework which limits, which censors, which punishes”.

New Labour embedded the revolution further with equality and green laws, plus devolution – “a disaster” – and the old guard, terrified of sounding “nasty”, offered no protest. This is his serious point about the late Queen: she “effectively abandoned” her “essential function as government under the King”, preferring to tour the world talking to tin-pots rather than define and promote the British character.

Today, the monarchy “has no visible function at all… Look at the continental monarchies, particularly the Dutch – what colour does the Dutch soccer team wear? Orange. The House of Orange. Because the various monarchies can act as an exceedingly effective focus of an historic nationalism.” By contrast, the members of our Royal family, embarrassed by the Empire, project a drippy cosmopolitanism, their castles packed with “jaw-dropping wealth” that “makes the Elysée Palace look like a corner shop”.

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In his heady youth, Starkey saw himself as a libertarian; today, he’s a conservative, because he’s witnessed “the disintegration of everything that I valued, everything that I loved, everything that I have researched, everything that I taught”. Good education – “fundamentally, the transmission of culture” – British identity, Britain itself. “It is comparable to the fall of Rome,” a society on the verge of bankruptcy. “I think we’ll have the IMF bailing us out, “and it’ll be exactly like the 1970s”.

He notes that Elon Musk and the tech bros are “profoundly historically aware”, and regard the collapse of English civilisation as a warning. “They’re trying to avoid our mistakes, which is why I think Elon Musk is a genuinely world-historic figure. I think we’ll look back and we see a ‘long 20th century’ [defined by] a great opening up and the sudden closing” of free thought. Since Musk bought Twitter, and drove out the woke, there’s a chance that discourse will reopen. The story of free speech is “bound by two pieces of porcelain” – he chuckles: “Duchamp’s urinal at the beginning, and Musk with his sink being carried into the headquarters of Twitter at the end of it.”

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