David Starkey

For the maritime historian, see David Starkey (maritime historian). For the American poet and academic, see David Starkey (poet).

David Starkey CBE
Starkey when a lecturer at LSE in the early 1980s
Born	David Robert Starkey (1945-01-03) 3 January 1945 Kendal, Westmorland, England
Occupation	Historian, television personality
Alma mater	Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge

David Robert Starkey, CBE (born 3 January 1945), is an English constitutional historian and a radio and television presenter. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before studying at Cambridge through 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 history 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.

In June 2020, Starkey became a victim of cancel culture following a podcast interview in which Starkey stated that "Slavery was not genocide" because "so many damn blacks" survived. Following these comments, he resigned or was fired from fellowships and other senior positions at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, Canterbury Christ Church University, the Mary Rose Trust board of trustees, History Today editorial board, his fellowships of the Royal Historical Society and Society of Antiquaries of London, his present book deal and also his previous book publisher, withdrawal of the Medlicott Medal awarded to him by the Historical Association, and the universities of Lancaster and Kent both opened formal reviews of his honorary graduate status. Starkey later issued an apology for his comment, stating: “It was intended to emphasise, in hindsight with awful clumsiness, the numbers who survived the horrors of the slave trade. Instead, it came across as a term of racial abuse..... I am very sorry for it and I apologise unreservedly for the offence it caused".

Early years and education

David 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. 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.

The Tudors simply is this – it is a most glorious and wonderful soap opera. It makes the House of Windsor look like a dolls house tea party, it really does. And so these huge personalities, you know, the whole future of countries turn on what one man feels like when he gets out of bed in the morning – just a wonderful, wonderful personalisation of politics.

– David Starkey

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.

Starkey was fascinated by King Henry VIII, and his thesis focused on the Tudor monarch's inner household. His doctoral 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

Bored at Cambridge and attracted to London's gay scene, in 1972 Starkey moved to the London School of Economics and secured a position as a part-time junior associate lecturer. He claimed to be an "excessively enthusiastic advocate of promiscuity", seeking to liberate himself from his mother, who strongly disapproved of his homosexuality. A 30-year career as a teacher ended in 1998 when, blaming boredom and modern academic life, he gave it up.

Starkey entered a wider public awareness in 1992 on the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, where he debated morality with his fellow panellists Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Roger Scruton and the journalist Janet Daley. 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."

Starkey is well known for his historical analyses of Henry VIII and his Court

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.

The core of history is narrative and biography. And the way history has been presented in the curriculum for the last 25 years is very different. The importance of knowledge has been downgraded. Instead the argument has been that it's all about skills. Supposedly, what you are trying to do with children is inculcate them with the analytical skills of the historian. Now this seems to me to be the most goddamn awful way to approach any subject, and also the most dangerous, and one, of course, that panders to all sorts of easy assumptions – ‘oh we've got the internet, we don't need knowledge anymore because it's so easy to look things up'. Oh no it isn't. In order to think, you actually need the information in your mind.

— David Starkey

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 given an Honorary Fellowship at his Cambridge College, Fitzwilliam College. He was until 2015, a visiting professor of the University of Kent. 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. "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.

Politics

Starkey 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". "I suppose my politics remained essentially in the middle-of-the-road Labour left until the end of the 1970s". Starkey blames the Callaghan administration for "blow[ing] the nation's finances". 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.

He bemoaned the Conservatives when they were 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 claimed 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 was a supporter of the Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality ("Torche"), and during one of many appearances on the BBC's Question Time he attacked Jeffrey Archer over his views on the age of homosexual consent. However, 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 September 2019, he referred to Dominic Grieve as "a lying and deceiving shit" for his actions in the Commons in relation to the UK's withdrawal from the EU.

Controversies

In 2009 Starkey criticised female historians for turning Tudor history into a "bizarre soap opera" by focusing on Henry VIII's personal life. A year later, in April 2010, Starkey further criticised female historians, describing their works as "historical Mills and Boon", and the authors as "usually quite pretty" and keen to show off their good looks on their book covers, with names that "usually begin and end with A".

In August 2011 Starkey attracted some criticism for comments made on the BBC's Newsnight programme, where he was a panel member together with Owen Jones and Dreda Say Mitchell. The programme discussed the 2011 England riots. Starkey condemned "this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country", that listening to the voice of the black MP for Tottenham where the riots occurred "you would think he was white", and that "The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture". The comments were heavily criticised by MPs and other renowned media presenters, and described as a "career ending moment". He was criticised by fellow panellist Dreda Say Mitchell for focusing on "black culture", since "Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures". The then-leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, spoke about Starkey's remarks, saying that "they are racist comments, frankly". The author Toby Young, blogging in the Telegraph, defended Starkey by claiming that Starkey had been talking not about black culture in general. Rod Liddle argued in support of the remarks. Jones described the comments as "one of the ugliest episodes of the backlash", claiming that "multiculturalism and ethnic groups have nothing to do with what happened". Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Starkey argued his views had been distorted, he referred only to a "particular sort" of 'Black' culture, and that the "black educationalists" Tony Sewell and Katharine Birbalsingh supported the substance of his Newsnight comments. The BBC received more than 700 complaints (and broadcast regulator Ofcom a further 103) about the comments, and a petition to demand a public apology from the BBC attracted more than 3,600 signatures. Ofcom deemed the comments to have been part of a "serious and measured discussion" and took no action, and Starkey described the reaction as "hysteria about race".

In the aftermath of the Newsnight broadcast, 102 university historians wrote an open letter that demanded Starkey no longer be described as a "historian" on anything but his specialist subject, the Tudors. The letter criticised "[h]is crass generalisations about black culture and white culture as oppositional, monolithic entities demonstrate a failure to grasp the subtleties of race and class that would disgrace a first-year history undergraduate." The letter also criticised his supposed "lack of professionalism" and "some of the worst practices of an academic" in shouting down, belittling, and mocking, opposing views, rather than meeting them with evidence.

In a June 2012 debate Starkey was criticised for stating that the perpetrators of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring had values "entrenched in the foothills of the Punjab or wherever it is" and were "acting within their cultural norm". He was accused by his fellow panelist, writer Laurie Penny, of "playing xenophobia and national prejudice for laughs". Writing in The Independent, Penny subsequently described Starkey as a "dinosaur" with "violent prejudices" who had just that month "made the argument that English society has become corrupted by the influence of people from other cultures and races", before "marching up to me, wagging his finger in my face, shouting abuse, swearing and showering me with flecks of spittle".

In January 2015 Starkey was criticised after calling political journalist Mehdi Hasan "Ahmed" and claiming that "nothing important" had been written in Arabic for 500 years. He was also criticised for appearing to imply that a female victim of a child sexual abuse grooming gang, was at fault for the abuse she had experienced.

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.

In November 2015 the University of Cambridge dropped a fundraising video featuring Starkey after a backlash from staff and students. A letter signed by hundreds of students and staff criticised Starkey's involvement in the video due to him "repeatedly making racist statements".

On 30 June 2020, while being interviewed by Darren Grimes on a podcast, Starkey said: "Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived..." He had made the same point in a column published 8 days earlier: the new element in the interview, which proved especially controversial, was the introduction of the adjective "damn". Starkey's comments were rebuffed by former Chancellor Sajid Javid, who said they were racist and that they serve as "a reminder of the appalling views that still exist", and they were widely described as racist in the media. Historian David Olusoga, praised by Starkey in the same broadcast, described the comments as "truly disgusting. And by the same ridiculous, twisted logic the Holocaust would not be counted as a genocide". As a result, the Mary Rose Trust accepted his resignation from the board of trustees and the Historical Association announced on Twitter that it would withdraw the Medlicott Medal it had awarded him 20 years previously. Fitzwilliam College of Cambridge University distanced themselves from his comments and later accepted his resignation as an honorary fellow on 3 July 2020. Canterbury Christ Church University, where Starkey had been a visiting professor, removed him from that role in response to his "completely unacceptable" remarks. History Today also removed him from their editorial board. Lancaster University and the University of Kent both confirmed that they have launched a formal review of Starkey's honorary graduate status. HarperCollins announced it would terminate an ongoing book deal with Starkey; it is understood that they will no longer publish the two remaining books, including the second part to Starkey's autobiography. His previous publisher Hodder & Stoughton has also said that they "will not be publishing any further books by him". Vintage Books announced it would be reviewing the status of books by Starkey in their back catalogue. Also on 3 July 2020, at a meeting of the Royal Historical Society, the Society's Council resolved that Dr Starkey should be asked to resign his fellowship with immediate effect. On 6 July 2020, Starkey resigned his fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London at the request of its Council.

Starkey later issued an apology for his comment, stating: “It was intended to emphasise, in hindsight with awful clumsiness, the numbers who survived the horrors of the slave trade. Instead, it came across as a term of racial abuse..... I am very sorry for it and I apologise unreservedly for the offence it caused".

Personal life

Starkey lived for many years with his partner, James Brown, a publisher and book designer, until the latter's death in 2015. The couple had three homes: a house in Highbury, a manor house in Kent, and another in Chestertown, Maryland, US. Starkey previously lived at John Spencer Square in Canonbury, Islington.

He has described the Catholic Church as being "corrupt and riddled with corruption".

Honours

• David Starkey was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2007 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to history.

Commonwealth honours

Commonwealth honours

Country	Date	Appointment	Post-nominal letters
United Kingdom	2007 – Present	Commander of the Order of the British Empire	CBE

Scholastic

University degrees

Location	Date	School	Degree
England		Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge	First-class honours Bachelor of Arts (BA) in History
England		Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge	Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil) in History

Chancellor, visitor, governor, rector and fellowships

Location	Date	School	Position
England	– 2015	University of Kent	Visiting Professor of History
England	2006–3 July 2020	Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge	Honorary Fellow
England	– 3 July 2020	Canterbury Christ Church University	Visiting Professor of History

Honorary degrees

Location	Date	School	Degree	Status
England	21 July 2004	University of Lancaster	Doctor of Letters (D.Litt)	Under Review
England	11 July 2006	University of Kent	Doctor of Letters (D.Litt)	Under Review
England	March 2019	University of Buckingham	Doctor of Letters (D.Litt)

Memberships and Fellowships

Location	Date	Organisation	Position
United Kingdom	1984 – 3 July 2020	Royal Historical Society	Fellow (FRHistS)
United Kingdom	1994 – 6 July 2020	Society of Antiquaries of London	Fellow (FSA)
United Kingdom	2008 – 3 July 2020	Mary Rose Museum	Trustee

Work

Books

• This Land of England (1985) (with David Souden)
• The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (1986)
• Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (1986) (Editor with Christopher Coleman)
• The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (1987)
• Rivals in Power: the Lives and Letters of the Great Tudor Dynasties (1990)
• Henry VIII: A European Court in England (1991)
• Nick Harris: An Un-Official Biography (1998)
• The Inventory of Henry VIII: The Transcript, Volume 1 (1998) (with Philip Ward and Alistair Hawkyard)
• Elizabeth: Apprenticeship (2000) (published in North America as Elizabeth: The struggle for the throne)
• The Stuart Courts – Foreword (2000) (Edited by Eveline Cruickshanks)
• The Inventory of Henry VIII: Essays and Illustrations, Volume 2, (2002) (with Philip Ward and Alistair Hawkyard)
• The Inventory of Henry VIII: Essays and Illustrations, Volume 3, (2002) (with Philip Ward and Alistair Hawkyard)
• Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (2003)
• Elizabeth I: The Exhibition Catalogue (2003)
• The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives – Introduction and Preface (2004) (James P. Carley)
• The Monarchy of England: The Beginnings (2004)
• Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity (2006)
• Making History: Antiquaries in Britain, 1707–2007 – Introduction (2007) (Edited by Sarah McCarthy, Bernard Nurse, and David Gaimster)
• Henry: Virtuous Prince (2008)
• Introduction to Henry VIII; Man & Monarch (Susan Doran, ed. published by the British Library, 2009)
• Crown and Country (Harper Press, 2010) (A compilation of The Monarchy of England: The Beginnings, Monarchy: From the Middle Ages to Modernity and some new material)
• Introduction to Fatal Colours: Towton 1461 – England's Most Brutal Battle by George Goodwin (2011)
• Magna Carta: The True Story Behind the Charter (2015)
• Henry: Model of a Tyrant (2020)

Television

• Henry VIII (1998, revised 2001)
• Elizabeth (2000)
• The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2001)
• Edward and Mary: The Unknown Tudors (2002)
• David Starkey: Reinventing the Royals (2002)
• Monarchy by David Starkey (2004–2007)
• Henry VIII: The Mind of a Tyrant (2009)
• Kate and William: Romance and the Royals (2011)
• Jamie's Dream School (2011)
• The Churchills (2012)
• David Starkey's Music and Monarchy (2013)
• David Starkey's Magna Carta (2015)
• Reformation: Europe's Holy War (2017)

Applications

• Kings and Queens by David Starkey for iPhone and iPad (2011)

References

Footnotes

Notes

Further reading

• Billen, Andrew (20 September 2007). "The lure of David Starkey". entertainment.timesonline.co.uk. Retrieved 28 September 2007.

External links

• Debrett's People of Today
• David Starkey at IMDb