British constitutional historian
David Robert Starkey CBE (born 3 January 1945) is an English historian and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative. The only child of Quaker parents, he attended Kendal Grammar School before studying at Cambridge University through a scholarship. 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. 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"; he has also appeared on Question Time. Starkey has presented several historical documentaries for Channel 4. 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's Jamie's Dream School series.
Starkey was censured for comments he made during a podcast interview with Darren Grimes in June 2020 that was perceived as 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and fellowships revoked, book contracts and memberships of learned societies cancelled, and his Medlicott Medal withdrawn.
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[Advocating for 'leave' in the then forthcoming EU membership referendum] We have a very large trade deficit with Europe, we have a decent trade balance with the rest of the world. Is Europe going to cut off its nose to spite its face? It seems to me so infinitely unlikely. There's no risk.
There would be a risk if we were running a German-style trade surplus with Europe. But we're not. The problem of our leaving Europe is a problem for the Germans and not us.
The entire machinery of academic promotion and academic endorsement and of academic advancement has been taken over, and therefore heretics like me have to be routed out. It's very similar to what happened to German universities under Hitler. The group that is most vulnerable, I'm afraid, are intellectuals.
Right over the country, you have these kinds of implantations of Metropolitan wokeness. The universities are acting rather like Covid spreaders, these are the super spreaders.
These people wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue. We've been here before. This is Robespierre.
There’s no point in arguing against globalisation or Western civilisation – they are all products of it. We are all products of it [...] The honest teaching of the British empire is to say it was the first key stage of world globalisation. It was probably the most important moment in human history and it is still with us.
As for the idea that slavery is this terrible disease that dare not speak its name. It only dare not speak its name because we settled it 200 years ago.
Do you know what, we had Catholic emancipation at pretty much the exact same time we got rid of slavery – in the 1830s - we don’t go on about that.
What are the points of comparison? Well, we have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it’s either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union. You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews.
Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be.
They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition.
The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this.
The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust.
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[Shakespeare's date of birth (23 April) as a potential English national day] If we decide to go down this route of an English national day, it will mean we have become a feeble little country, just like the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish [...]
We do not make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns, and we do not have national music like the awful bagpipe. The Scots and the Welsh are typical small nations with a romantic 19th-century-style nationalism.
The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together.
This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country.