David Starkey

• 1. Introduction

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  David Starkey was born on the 3rd of January 1945 in Kendal, Westmorland, with two club feet, into a household that often had no income coming in at all. His mother Elsie had been a cotton weaver; his father Robert, son of a cotton spinner, worked as a factory foreman. Both had come down from Oldham to Kendal during the Great Depression. The boy grew up in what he later called an environment of near-poverty that taught him "the value of money". He would go on to become one of Britain's most watched historians and, in the same breath, one of its most reviled public figures.

  By the time Starkey signed a two-million-pound contract with Channel 4 in 2002, his face was on prime-time television, his voice was on national radio, and The Daily Mail had given him a nickname that he reportedly told friends was worth at least a hundred thousand pounds a year. Yet within two decades, virtually every institution that had honoured him would strip those honours away in the space of a single week. How does a scholarship boy from Kendal Grammar School rise to such prominence, and how does that same man bring so much of it crashing down? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Difficult Start

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  Polio, club feet, and a nervous breakdown at the age of thirteen were the opening chapters of Starkey's life. After the breakdown, his mother took him to a boarding house in Southport, where he spent several months away from school. He later attributed the episode to the shock of being placed in a highly competitive environment for the first time.

  His mother Elsie is a recurring, ambivalent presence in his account of his own formation. He described her as both "wonderful" and "monstrous" - intellectually frustrated, he said, and inclined to live 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." His father, by contrast, was "poetic, reflective, rather solitary," and their own relationship was "distant," improving only after Elsie's death in 1977.

  Starkey recovered from the breakdown, went on to win debating prizes at Kendal Grammar School, and appeared in school plays. A scholarship took him to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he earned a first-class degree, a doctorate, and a fellowship - the trajectory that Elsie had apparently willed into existence.

• 3. Tudor Obsession

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  Starkey's doctoral thesis focused on the inner household of King Henry VIII, supervised by Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, a leading authority on the Tudor period. The relationship eventually soured. In 1983, when Elton received a knighthood, Starkey publicly derided one of his essays, Cromwell Redivivus. Elton retaliated with what Starkey described as an "absolutely shocking" review of a collection of essays Starkey had edited. Starkey later said: "I regret that the thing happened at all."

  The fascination with Henry VIII never left him. His 1998 BBC documentary Henry VIII, which won an Indie Award, launched his television career proper and inaugurated a long run of Tudor-focused programming. He went on to present The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Henry: Mind of a Tyrant in 2009, and the sprawling Monarchy series, which traced English kings and queens from Anglo-Saxon times forward. Reviewer Brian Viner of the Independent called the 2009 Henry series "highly fascinating," while A. A. Gill was less generous, dismissing it as "Hello! history".

  In a Radio Times interview about that same series, Starkey complained that too many historians had focused on Henry's wives rather than the king himself, and attributed this to what he termed a "feminised history". The historian Lucy Worsley publicly described those remarks as misogynistic. The pattern of provocative commentary generating institutional backlash was already well established long before 2020.

• 4. The Rudest Man in Britain

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  The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 gave Starkey his first mass audience. He joined the debate programme in 1992, sparring alongside Rabbi Hugo Gryn, Sir Roger Scruton, and journalist Janet Daley. He admitted in a 2007 interview that his personality carried "a tendency towards showmanship... towards self-indulgence and explosion and repartee and occasional silliness and going over the top." The Daily Mail eventually crystallised all of this into a single label: "the rudest man in Britain."

  Starkey reportedly received the nickname with characteristic calculation, telling friends it was worth at least a hundred thousand pounds a year and describing it as a "convenient image." One episode on The Moral Maze illustrated the persona vividly: he attacked George Austin, the Archdeacon of York, over what he called the man's "fatness, his smugness, and his pomposity". After nine years, Starkey quit the programme. He said he was bored with being "Dr. Rude" and disliked its move to an evening slot.

  At Talk Radio UK from 1995, he presented Starkey on Saturday and later Starkey on Sunday. An interview with the former Chancellor Denis Healey during that period ended badly. Starkey had expected an "amiable old buffer" willing to make conversation; instead, he recalled, "he tore me limb from limb. I laugh about it now, but I didn't feel like laughing about it at the time." His first television appearance had been in 1977 on Granada Television's programme Behave Yourself with Russell Harty, a full fifteen years before his radio notoriety was at its height.

• 5. Historian and Provocateur

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  Starkey's intellectual range ran well beyond Tudor courts. He presented a documentary and wrote a book on Magna Carta, arguing in Magna Carta: The True Story Behind the Charter, published in 2015, that the eight-hundred-year-old royal charter was a "steadying force for constitutions" and had produced what he called a "constitutional edifice" in Britain. Medieval historian James Masschaele, reviewing the book, noted that Starkey presented the barons as republican figures.

  He also constructed a grand historical argument around Brexit. Drawing a direct line from Henry VIII's break with Rome to the 2016 Leave vote, he claimed that Henry was in effect the first Brexiteer. "Nobody before Henry would make any argument about England being much different from the rest of Europe. It was Henry who turns England into a defensible island." He extended the analogy to the Roman Church itself, arguing in a 2018 interview that it functioned as a super-national organisation with its own law, language, and taxation system, and that "it's no accident at all that the EU was founded by the Treaty of Rome."

  At the same time, Starkey regularly drew charges of racism for remarks about race and culture. In August 2011, on BBC Two's Newsnight, he invoked Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech while discussing that year's England riots, claiming that a section of the white population had adopted what he called a "violent, destructive, nihilistic, gangster culture" from black communities. The broadcast generated 696 complaints to the BBC and 103 more to Ofcom within days. One hundred and two university historians subsequently signed an open letter in the Times Higher Education magazine asking broadcasters to reconsider platforming him on subjects outside his field of expertise.

• 6. The 2020 Collapse

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  On the 30th of June 2020, a podcast interview with commentator Darren Grimes set in motion the most consequential week of Starkey's public life. Discussing the Black Lives Matter movement, Starkey argued that people should not "go on about" slavery because it had been abolished in 1833, adding: "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." Historian David Olusoga, whom Starkey had praised in the same broadcast, described the comments as "truly disgusting."

  Within days the institutional response was comprehensive. Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge accepted his resignation as an honorary fellow on the 3rd of July 2020. The University of Buckingham revoked his honorary doctorate on the same date, as did Canterbury Christ Church University, which removed him from his visiting professorship. Lancaster University revoked the honorary degree it had awarded him on the 21st of July 2004. The Historical Association withdrew the Medlicott Medal it had given him two decades earlier. HarperCollins terminated his book deal; Hodder and Stoughton said they would not publish further books by him. The Royal Historical Society resolved at a council meeting on the 3rd of July that he should be asked to resign his fellowship. He resigned from the Society of Antiquaries of London on the 6th of July at the request of its council. The Mary Rose Trust accepted his resignation from its board of trustees. History Today removed him from its editorial board.

  The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation in October 2020 for suspected stirring of racial hatred. On the 14th of October they dropped it, saying continuation was no longer proportionate. Former Home Secretary Priti Patel called on the law to protect freedom of expression. Starkey and Grimes then filed a formal complaint against the Metropolitan Police, accusing officers of acting in deference to the Black Lives Matter movement.

• 7. Personal Life and Enduring Legacy

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  Starkey lived for many years with his partner James Brown, a publisher and book designer. The couple maintained three homes: a house in Highbury, a manor house in Kent, and a property in Chestertown, Maryland. Brown died in 2015.

  Starkey was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2007 Birthday Honours for services to history. By 2020, most of the academic and civic honours he had accumulated were gone. The television catalogue, however, remains: from the Indie Award-winning Henry VIII in 1998 through Elizabeth in 2000, The Six Wives of Henry VIII in 2001, the Monarchy series running from 2004 to 2007, and Reformation: Europe's Holy War in 2017, the programmes are a substantial body of popular history.

  In 2003, Starkey curated an exhibition on Elizabeth I, after which he had lunch with Queen Elizabeth II. He told a reporter several years later that the monarch had no interest in her predecessors beyond those who came after her great-grandfather, Edward VII, adding that her attitude to culture reminded him of the Goebbels line about reaching for a revolver at the word "culture." Royal biographer Penny Junor and royal historian Robert Lacey both criticised the remark. It was, in miniature, the pattern of his entire career: a precise, memorable provocation, followed by a wave of criticism, followed by defiance. The programme Britain's Tudor Treasure, co-presented with Lucy Worsley in 2015, is a reminder that even the most adversarial relationships in public history can occasionally produce collaborative television.