Short answers, pulled from the story.
David Starkey is an English historian and television presenter born on the 3rd of January 1945 in Kendal, Westmorland. He is known for presenting popular documentary series on Tudor history, including Henry VIII (1998), The Six Wives of Henry VIII (2001), and the Monarchy series (2004-2007), as well as for controversial public remarks that cost him numerous academic honours in 2020.
On the 30th of June 2020, in a podcast with Darren Grimes, Starkey said that slavery "was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there." The comments were widely described as racist. Lancaster University, the University of Buckingham, and Canterbury Christ Church University all revoked his honorary degrees, and Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge accepted his resignation as an honorary fellow, all within days of the broadcast.
Starkey studied at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, earning a first-class degree in history and a doctorate. His doctoral thesis focused on King Henry VIII's inner household, supervised by Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton.
The Daily Mail gave Starkey the sobriquet after his abrasive appearances on The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, which he joined in 1992. He reportedly told friends the nickname was worth at least a hundred thousand pounds a year and described it as a "convenient image."
Starkey argued that Henry VIII was in effect the first Brexiteer because Henry turned England into a self-governing, defensible island and broke from the Roman Church, which Starkey compared to the European Union as a super-national organisation with its own law, language, and taxation. He made this argument publicly in a 2018 interview.
Before 2020, Starkey held honorary fellowships at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and the Royal Historical Society, fellowships in the Society of Antiquaries of London, honorary doctorates from Lancaster University, the University of Kent, and the University of Buckingham, the Medlicott Medal from the Historical Association, and a CBE awarded in the 2007 Birthday Honours. Nearly all were revoked or resigned in July 2020.