David Robert Starkey was born with two club feet, a physical condition that required multiple surgeries and left him with a permanent limp, yet it was the invisible weight of his upbringing that would shape his future more profoundly. Born on the 3rd of January 1945 in Kendal, Westmorland, he was the only child of Robert and Elsie Starkey, Quakers who had married a decade earlier in Bolton. His father, the son of a cotton spinner, worked as a foreman in a washing-machine factory, while his mother, following her own father's path, became a cotton weaver and later a cleaner. Both parents were born in Oldham and moved to Kendal during the Great Depression of the 1930s, placing the family in an environment of near-poverty where unemployment was frequent. Starkey later described this austere and frugal upbringing as teaching him the value of money, but the psychological impact was far more complex. He viewed his mother as both wonderful and monstrous, a Pygmalion figure who wanted to create a creature rather than raise a son. Her dominance contrasted sharply with his father, whom he described as poetic, reflective, and weak. The relationship with his father was distant, though it improved after his mother's death in 1977. At the age of 13, Starkey suffered a nervous breakdown in a highly competitive secondary school environment, leading his mother to place him in a boarding house in Southport for several months of recovery. Despite these early struggles, he excelled at Kendal Grammar School, winning debating prizes and appearing in school plays, eventually securing a scholarship to read history at Cambridge.
The Tudor Obsession
Although Starkey showed an early inclination towards science, he chose instead to study history, a decision that would define his entire career. At Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, he gained a first-class degree, a PhD, and a fellowship, all while developing a fascination with King Henry VIII that would become his life's work. His doctoral thesis focused on the Tudor monarch's inner household, a subject that allowed him to explore the private life of the king rather than just his public deeds. His supervisor was Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, an expert on the Tudor period who later became a source of significant conflict. 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, stating, I regret that the thing happened at all. This academic rivalry was just the beginning of a career that would see him move from the quiet halls of Cambridge to the loud, often controversial, world of television and radio. He was a fellow at Fitzwilliam College from 1970 to 1972, but 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.
Starkey first appeared on television in 1977, on Granada Television's Behave Yourself with Russell Harty, but it was his role as a panellist on the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze that earned him a notorious reputation. Debating moral issues of the day alongside fellow panellists such as 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, as he mistakenly thought that Healey had become an amiable old buffer who would engage in amusing conversation, and Healey tore him limb from limb. His first television appearance was in 1984 on ITV's 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, and his breathless delivery of the script, with noticeable breaths and choppy cadence, is widely imitated.
The £2 Million Contract
In 2002, Starkey signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 to produce 25 hours of programming, 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. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1984 and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1994. 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 in 2017, Visiting Professor of History of Canterbury Christ Church University from 2018 to 2020, and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Buckingham from 2019 to 2020. 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, he said, 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.
The Brexit Historian
Starkey is very critical of the European Union and supported the Leave vote in the 2016 EU referendum because he argues that the United Kingdom is best off as a self-governing nation. He makes comparisons between Brexit and Henry VIII's split from Rome and the Reformation that followed, believing that the Reformation sowed the seeds of Euroscepticism, particularly in England. It was Henry who turns England into a defensible island, who literally fortifies the English coastline, he claimed. It really is Henry that turns England into a genuine island. He claimed that Henry VIII could be considered the first Brexiteer. As Starkey explained in an interview in 2018, The Roman Church was a super-national organisation with its own system of law, its own language, governance and own system of taxation. In other words, exactly like the European Union! And it's no accident at all that the EU was founded by the Treaty of Rome. He argues that Remainers have somehow got the notion that we get our rights and liberties from Europe but that, in fact, the English created their own values over their 800-year history. He believes that Brexit was a reaffirmation of those values, but was nevertheless a deeply irrational vote, not about what will make us better off, but rather, we'll be poorer, but we'll be free. His 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. 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.
The Race Controversies
Starkey attracted widespread criticism in August 2011 for comments he made on BBC Two's Newsnight programme, in an episode discussing the 2011 England riots. Citing Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech, he said, His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham. But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong. What has happened is that the substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black. The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, 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. He also said that when listening to the voice of David Lammy, whom he described as an archetypal successful black man, one would think he was white. Following the programme, both of Starkey's fellow panellists condemned the remarks: Jones described it as a career-ending moment for Starkey, while Mitchell wrote in The Guardian that it is very difficult to argue with crass stupidity, calling his views on the matter ignorant and confused. The then-leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, said that the remarks were racist comments, frankly, and there is no place for them in our society. David Lammy called them irrelevant. The programme was broadcast on Friday night; by the following Monday, the BBC had received 696 complaints, and the broadcasting regulator Ofcom a further 103, about the comments, and a petition demanding a public apology from the BBC had attracted over 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 signed an open letter, published in the Times Higher Education magazine, asking broadcasters to think carefully before inviting Starkey to discuss topics beyond his field of expertise. They asked that, if he was invited, to not allow him to bring our profession into disrepute by introducing him as the historian, David Starkey, as the BBC had done previously. The letter said that his 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 and that he displayed some of the worst practices of an academic in his interactions with the other panellists, saying that he belittled and derided them instead of responding thoughtfully.
The Podcast That Ended It All
On the 30th of June 2020, in a podcast interview with Darren Grimes, Starkey spoke about the Black Lives Matter movement. Starkey suggested that people should not go on about slavery because it had been abolished in 1833 and that 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 eight days earlier except without the use of the word 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. 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 the 3rd of 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. The magazine History Today also removed him from their editorial board. Lancaster University revoked Starkey's honorary degree after an investigation found that his comments were racist and contradictory to the values of the University. The University of Kent launched a formal review of his honorary graduate status. HarperCollins terminated its book deal with Starkey and 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 the 3rd of July 2020, at a meeting of the Royal Historical Society, the society's council resolved that Starkey should be asked to resign his fellowship with immediate effect. On the 6th of July 2020, Starkey resigned his fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London at the request of its council. On the 25th of September 2020, the Metropolitan Police opened an investigation into the interview over an allegation of a public order offence, which Starkey has stated was strongly supported by Labour leader Keir Starmer. In October, Starkey was investigated by the police for stirring up racial hatred through the comments he made in the podcast with Darren Grimes. In regard to the allegations, Starkey said that he did not intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so and also that the investigation by the police was neither proportionate nor in the best interests of preserving proper freedom of expression. On the 14th of October the police dropped their investigation saying that it is no longer proportionate that this investigation continues. A backlash in favor of free speech followed, from several major UK politicians such as then Home Secretary Priti Patel who said the law should protect freedom of speech as a general principle which should not be violated. Following the news of the ending of the investigation, Starkey said: The investigation should never of course have begun. From the beginning it was misconceived, oppressive and designed to misuse the criminal law to curtail the proper freedom of expression and debate... freedom is our birthright; and it is more important than ever at this critical juncture in our nation's history. Grimes and Starkey subsequently launched a formal complaint against the Metropolitan Police accusing them of being biased against them and acting in deference to the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Final Chapter
In May 2023 at the National Conservatism Conference, organised by the Edmund Burke Foundation, Starkey said that white culture is under threat from the Black Lives Matter movement and proponents of critical race theory who are not what they pretend to be and who he described are attempting to destroy the entire legitimacy of the Western cultural tradition. He stated that said conservatives had to defend the uniqueness of the Anglo-American tradition against barbarians. He disputed the idea that they are there to defend black lives as preposterous, saying that they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture that they see as fundamentally morally defective, comparing it to exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust. Starkey commented that the determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery and this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, because there is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery. 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 was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2007 Birthday Honours for services to history. Despite the controversies, he remains a figure who has shaped public understanding of Tudor history and British constitutionalism, even as his own legacy has been fractured by his own words. His career, from the quiet study of Henry VIII's household to the loud, often incendiary, debates on race and culture, reflects a man who has never shied away from controversy, believing that his role as a historian is to provoke, challenge, and sometimes offend. Whether viewed as a brilliant expositor of the past or a cautionary tale of modern free speech, Starkey's impact on British public life is undeniable, and his story continues to unfold in the pages of history books and the headlines of newspapers.