This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
When asked what is the best historical exhibition I have seen — and, as a former editor of History Today I have seen a few — I usually opt for the British Library’s Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, which opened in 2009, the 500th anniversary of the Tudor monarch’s accession.
It was guest-curated by David Starkey, then in his pomp as a public historian — arguably the best this country has produced — and well worth his £2m Channel 4 contract (yes, kids, Channel 4 was once a serious outlet).
The exhibition showed why (as does its superb catalogue, edited by the Oxford historian Susan Doran). Not only did Starkey vividly recreate Henry’s story and the turbulence of his time and place, emphasising the contingency of the Tudor monarch’s uneasy predicament, but it also illuminated, literally, how historians know what they know, focusing above all on what Henry wrote himself, “The primum mobile of his universe,” in David’s words.
Crucial documents, including the love letter Henry wrote to Anne Boleyn in 1527 — the trigger for English history’s central event, the Henrician reformation “and everything that flowed from it” — were judiciously highlighted to reveal how truth was sifted from conjecture. It was the first time that my young son, accompanying me, grasped what historians actually do. I doubt he was alone in that.
By then I knew David. I became editor of History Today at the end of 2008, and he was on its advisory board. I was duty-bound to contact its members, and David was the one I most wanted to speak with, but also the one I imagined would be most intimidating. When I did call him, it was from the steps outside UCL hospital’s haematology ward, where my wife was receiving treatment for a grave illness.
David could not have been more encouraging, discussing his early love of the magazine, his opinions, usually positive and typically gossipy, of my predecessors, including, in his description, the “belle-lettriste” Peter Quennell. Whenever from then on I sought his advice he gave it: always generous, always incisive, and never just what one wanted to hear.
David is not the ogre of myth. There is the mask and there is the thoughtful man
It was then of considerable irony, amidst pools of regret, that I had to ask him to resign his position — I would not sack him, despite pressure — from the advisory board in 2020 following his “damn blacks” comment on a podcast hosted by Darren Grimes, an episode he recounted frankly in The Critic. “I cannot defend the phrase ‘damn blacks’,” David recalled me writing to him. “If anyone used it in the workplace, they would be out.”
Looking back on our civil correspondence during that wretched time, I was touched by David’s reflections, often couched in historical analogy, which remain private. He was apologetic and deeply hurt, and I looked on as, worst of all, his Cambridge alma mater, Fitzwilliam, withdrew his fellowship.
It must have pierced him all the more that some of those fellows, and even more the ghouls that jumped on the bandwagon, were intellectually barely fit to lace his drinks, never mind his boots.
I also remember feeling, amidst the regret, some anger towards David. I had defended him before, at some cost to myself, when, on BBC’s Newsnight, in the wake of the riots of 2011, he claimed “the problem is that the whites have become black”. I knew what he meant, seeking to describe the iniquities of so much imported American street culture, but why would a man so intelligent and eloquent not seek a sharper language of clarity rather than easy outrage? Now he had taken a step too far. Worse, I thought I might not speak with David again.
I did, however, bump into him some months later at a Soho club for the launch of Dan Jones’ latest book. As a former student of David, and an admiring friend, Dan had remained quietly supportive, hence David’s presence at the party.
We acknowledged each other, somewhat frostily at first, and began a robust discussion at which, I think, I gave as much as I got, earning, perhaps, David’s respect. Like me, he is not easily offended. Boys from our working-class backgrounds can’t afford to be.
David is not after all, the ogre of myth. There is the mask and there is the man, thoughtful, sometimes vulnerable, always courageous — that rarest of virtues — with an extraordinary resilience, revealed in the aftermath of the self-inflicted Grimes episode and, more profoundly, following the death of his beloved partner James.
His well-documented background, of poverty, of illness, his homosexuality, no doubt nourished that resilience and courage, as well as giving voice to the mouth that, his mother warned, would get him into trouble, and has.
But, as any historian worth their salt knows, times change. His prolific YouTube channel, David Starkey Talks (and God, can he talk) is deservedly popular, and David has become one of Britain’s most eloquent political commentators, his tone tempered by past experience and with a noticeable increase in benign wit, humour and self-deprecation.
At 80, his mind remains remarkable, set now on reversing the constitutional revolution of the Blair governments and the unthinking embrace of human rights law by Kier Starmer’s administration, both of which have done deep, untold harm to the peerless, hard-won constitution of England and its reputation abroad — I write “England” advisedly, for that is the nation David loves.
He argues, in our contested times, for a more combative, more active political Toryism, less concerned with the quietist aesthetics of Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott with their shades of Izaak Walton dangling a rod in a bucolic chalk stream. The preservation of order is meaningless, after all, when there is little order left to preserve. This “conservatism” failed some time ago.
The objective now is to reconstruct the ordered polity of old. This chimes with David’s preference for a mischievous, troublesome, populist — for which read “democratic” — conservatism rooted in the profound achievements of the past, not least those of his fellow dandy-outsider Disraeli.
And yet, if the “new country” of Blairite mythology is anathema to David, he is sceptical, too, of the Year Zero burn-it-all-down mentality of Reform. If Toryism is to be revitalised — a big “if” — an octogenarian historian for whom retirement is a dirty word offers the clearest roadmap to a generation for whom he is increasingly a prophet.
