We don’t need to talk about David Starkey
David Starkey has been opining about Black Lives Matter. His views are as predictable as if someone had asked me if I think beards are a good thing.
You can google his comments if you wish but take care out there.
Below for background is something I wrote in 2011 (edited for 2020 relevance) on Starkey which remains relevant, except Starkey is getting even more reactionary as he gets older.
In between he’s managed to attack the likes of Mary Beard, Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer too amongst others. Bigoted remarks of a racist and sexist nature are now his stock in trade. He usually claims when making them to be an historian of some sort (which he is) although the remarks have absolutely nothing to do with his historical work.
David Starkey [1945-] is a Tudor historian who has made the leap from being an academic to one of a small group of ‘TV historians’ who popularise history for a wider audience.
He caused outrage by appearing on a BBC Newsnight programme about the August 2011 riots in England and stating that Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech was right to argue that Britain was heading for civil unrest. He did qualify this by noting that Powell had been wrong to argue that this would be racially motivated.
Even so for someone to claim on a mainstream news programme that part of Powell’s far right and racist political agenda had turned out to be correct was something entirely worthy of the storm of protest that it has caused.
I have had the dubious pleasure of meeting Starkey and there is no doubt that he is, or at least was, a genuine research historian of the Tudor period. He can talk engagingly and interestingly about his subject in a way that one wishes more historians working on their latest monographs could.
Even so the fact remains that historians have their ‘periods’.
I am, for example, a nineteenth and twentieth British labour historian a not over populated area. If you find me opining on an historical issue outside of my ‘period’ it would be as well to consider that I’m more likely to be expressing an opinion rather than something I’ve actually researched.
Starkey has in recent decades made a name for himself as a right-wing ‘Kings and Queens’ historian of the sixteenth century in England.
Left-wing historians tend to be more interested in the next century, the seventeenth, which saw the English Civil War, so there are few effective counter authorities to Starkey on the left.
Starkey now seems intent though on promoting a second career as a right-wing controversialist and should be understood as such.
Dr Keith Flett,is the convenor of the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London
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