An Interesting Article in The Telegraph about Starkey and the Survival of the British Monarchy

What to make of the ongoing House of Windsor soap opera gripping the nation? Barely a day – actually make that an afternoon – goes by without some piquant new revelation making its way into the public realm.

I can think of no one better to place recent royal events in a long-view context than esteemed historian, broadcaster and self-confessed disrupter David Starkey. He will surely be able to tell us if the very future of the monarchy is in peril? On the morning we speak there is news aplenty to discuss; the Duke and Duchess of Wales have been winning hearts and minds as they brave the drizzle of Powys; Prince Edward’s ex, the musical theatre star Ruthie Henshall, has announced she is publishing a memoir; and word has slipped out that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been banned from riding by way of a punishment for his assorted sins. So, so much to unpack!

“Look it’s very simple as far as Andrew is concerned I’m afraid. A lot of people like humiliating others and there’s a witch hunt underway. We’re being treated to the spectacle of a pillory,” says Starkey, matter-of-factly.

“There’s a wonderful phrase from the great historian, Lord Macaulay: ‘There’s nothing as ridiculous as the British public in a periodic fit of morality.’ Right now, the British are in a periodic fit of morality. I’m not remotely defending [Andrew]; he’s an individual of no merit. If the police find a provable case against Andrew he should be tried, but that should be the end of the matter. I’m not interested in a ritual debagging for the sake of it.”

On the subject of William and Catherine, he is a particular fan of hers, describing her as well-educated and impressive with “an air of natural personal authority”. All the same, he remains doubtful about their ability to redefine – never mind redeem – royalty for the 21st century. “They are an attractive, youngish couple and that’s a very important symbol. But equally, just going around the country being nice to people wearing Wellingtons or turning up in the rain isn’t enough.”

Scandals and sensationalism have a disproportionate effect today, he adds, because nobody really knows what the function of monarchy is in the modern age. It survives by the grace of public opinion – but with every royal apparently doing their own thing and espousing their own pet causes, it’s increasingly incoherent and difficult to defend.

“If the combination of the monarchy and the political class can’t come up with a proper explanation of what the monarchy is for, then all of these little marginal attacks will eventually kill it,” asserts Starkey.

“The future doesn’t lie in Charles flying across the world to wear funny clothes and rub noses or William banging on about ecology and mental health, these are increasingly political causes. We should be restoring the monarchy to a unifying national symbol in the place of a vague meaningless mish-mash of words like tolerance and diversity.

“What we really need,” he says, “is a revived parliamentary monarchy as the apex of a revived parliamentary constitution.” He is thinking of a reset as potent as that of 1689, when James II of England was overthrown and replaced by William III and Mary II under parliament’s terms, ending the idea of absolute monarchy in England.

A similar recalibration of the relationship between crown and Parliament needs to happen now, he thinks, strengthening both. The process would start at the next Coronation, at which William would “solemnly promise and swear to govern the people of the United Kingdom of Great Britain Northern Ireland according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on and the laws and customs of the same”.

“At a stroke,” Starkey insists, “this would re-establish the sovereignty of Parliament both internally, against the unelected quangocrats and judges to whom Blair delegated so much power, and externally, against the spurious claims of international law or universal human rights.”

Such an oath would also buttress the monarchy, he notes, for the monarch who performs such a service to parliament “would be worthy of a strengthened oath of allegiance. We would swear to him because he had sworn us; his sovereignty would be our sovereignty, and his crown cease to be a bauble and become the symbol of a nation reborn.”

Now 81, David Starkey was once dubbed the rudest man in Britain due to his brusque, dismissive manner and overarching air of superiority. These days I’m not sure he’d even make the podium as there are now so many all-terrain egos in the running for the role – Jeremy Clarkson, Piers Morgan and, some would aver, Nigel Farage.

But the crown – the only one he’s ever getting – for odiousness is surely reserved for boorish, debauched and possibly criminal Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, described just this week by sitting MPs as “rude, arrogant and entitled”. What does Starkey think?

“I’ve had some dealings with Andrew,” he says. “I actually found him perfectly all right. That’s because I’m a tough cookie so he didn’t try any of his bad behaviour with me.”

There are a great number of differences between Starkey and Mountbatten-Windsor, but for starters is the fact that the latter’s overweening sense of superiority was inherited, not earned. Starkey, on the other hand, is a creature of his own assiduous invention. For all his exquisite diction and plummy vowels, his Kendal, Westmorland background is working class. Curiously, like Keir Starmer, his father was a tool maker – except Starkey doesn’t bang on about it so much. His father was also an autodidact, and his mother was a char lady but a schoolteacher manqué. Both were clever and could have succeeded academically given the chance; their son seized every opportunity with both hands.

The first hurdles the young Starkey had to overcome was being born with two club feet and contracting polio. This necessitated long periods at home, during which time his Quaker mother read to him and would recite Shakespeare. She also paid for elocution lessons as her boy excelled, earning a place at grammar school.

“When it comes to a disability, either you parade it and play the victim or you just decide it’s a nuisance and you get on with things,” he says, “the agonising pain notwithstanding.” Aged four, he was admitted to hospital, where all the bones in his feet were broken then reset. Later he had to wear special boots, and stood out in a schoolyard full of boys wearing shorts.

“When I was a child, I’ll be quite truthful, I tended to use it as quite a useful thing. I hated sport, so it was always a good excuse. Mind you I once got off cross-country running for six months with a sore thumb – I’d trapped it in the doors of Marks & Spencer – which I thought was a major testimony of my political skills, even at that age.”

As for school bullies, he was physically “too big” to become a target; on the rare occasions when he did, he would give far better than he got. But usually he relied on his quick wits and “exceedingly sharp” tongue. Used to fighting his corner from a tender age, it explains why Starkey gives such short shrift to all comers, swiftly dispatching those whose views he doesn’t share and effortlessly tearing the wings off liberal Lefties on Newsnight.

After school, Starkey won a scholarship to read History at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, gaining a first and then undertaking a PhD in Tudor history, focusing on Henry VIII and how his indefatigable pursuit of Anne Boleyn triggered the English Reformation. He went on to become a fellow, but hasn’t a good word to say about the place now.

“Cambridge is a disgrace.” he says. “Really. I’m ashamed that there are scholarships given by Stormzy that are only available to black and mixed-race people. It’s an absolute scandal and you can’t say anything, there’s no room for discussion. Oxford University with its new chancellor, William Hague – I don’t have a necessarily high regard for William – but the one thing he’s done, he and the Vice Chancellor, is nail their colours firmly to the mast of freedom of speech.”

Starkey took up a lecturing position at the London School of Economics in 1972, and by the end of the decade was breaking into television broadcasting. There were history documentaries but he was elevated to household-name status, at least among discerning Radio 4 listeners, when he was given a chair on the station’s Moral Maze in 1992, in which he and other members of the panel cross-examined various luminaries on ethical issues.

By the mid-1980s he had started writing books, including a volume on the Tudors, and has now written around two dozen in total. There were also hugely successful documentaries on Henry VIII and Elizabeth, Magna Carta and the Churchills. In 2015, he even made peace with fellow historian Lucy Worsley to co-present the BBC 2 documentary Britain’s Tudor Treasure: A Night at Hampton Court. It ended a five-year feud between the pair: he had made disparaging remarks about pretty-girl historians who wrote “historical Mills and Boon”, she had likened his appearance to that of a “cross owl”.

That same year he suffered a huge personal tragedy when his partner died. Starkey, who is gay, had been in a long relationship with James Brown, a publisher and book designer 27 years his junior. Brown died of alcoholism aged just 43 in the 18th-century manor house they shared in Kent. Despite being together 20 years, they never married as, with typical awkwardness, Starkey opposed gay marriage on principle.

Just as he was emerging from his grief, in June 2020 Starkey’s professional life came crashing down. During a podcast interview with pundit Darren Grimes, he was asked about slavery and retorted that if it had been as genocidal as some claim, the world wouldn’t be full of “so many damn blacks”. The blowback was instant as a Twitterstorm erupted. Starkey immediately apologised but organisations he’d worked with for years turfed him out, and he lost friends, his fellowship, his publisher, and various honours and positions, including his 40-year membership of the History Today editorial board. That could have been the end of his career. But something rankled.

“I was struck by the sheer ludicrousness of being ‘no platformed’,” he says. “This is one of the things that’s gone so terribly, terribly wrong with Britain. We were a country that pioneered the idea of government and opposition, His Majesty’s loyal opposition. That means that there are two sides to questions. It means that no one side has got a monopoly. It means that everything is debatable.

“Everything is discussable. But the high pieties of the Left have created a situation where we’ve been stopped from speaking about things like race because it’s deemed ‘too difficult’.”

And so, after a few years in purdah, he announced in the pages of The Spectator: “I have uncancelled myself. I’m not consumed by bitterness. I’m not consumed by rage. I’m a very determined person and I feel I have things that are worth saying.”

I wonder aloud why more of the cancelled don’t just reject the notion? Starkey’s cancellation had real-world consequences, but often the pile-on is purely virtual.

“Why don’t more people do what I did? Because they lack courage!” he cries. “The whole thing of cancellation is silly and childish. Like the thing that happened at the Baftas, where the fetishisation of language meant that someone with Tourette’s saying the N-word was the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off. I refuse to believe in childishness or childish values.

“There’s only one public virtue that matters, and it’s courage. Without that, it doesn’t matter how good you are, how clever you are, how noble you are. You will never be heard.”

And so, in order to be heard, he launched his very own YouTube show, David Starkey Talks,with shamelessly provocative titles like “The British civil war has already started” and “BBC’s pomposity is beyond belief”. He is due to speak at the Oxford Literary Festival in conversation with Jeremy Hunt on the subject: Can Britain Be Great Again?

He’s also touring the country with PopCon, aka Popular Conservatism, a movement founded before the general election in 2024 to galvanise Britain’s “secret Conservative forces”. Liz Truss was at the launch, pledging that Right-wing Tory MPs would restore democratic accountability to Britain and deliver popular conservative policies.

That was clearly an offer the voting public managed to resist come polling day, but the movement is hoping to gain more traction for next time round. Starkey is under no illusions. “If the name Popular Conservatism were true, there would be no need for it,” he notes with a rueful smile.

In his youth, Starkey saw himself as a libertarian; today, he’s a born-again Conservative, who cares deeply about British identity and Britain itself. Which brings us back to the future role of the monarchy.

Throughout history, the monarchy has adapted superbly to the changing world; at the beginning of the 20th century it introduced the notion of extraordinary, elaborate and beautifully staged public ceremonies. Why? Because the introduction of democracy put the monarchy on public show so it needed to deliver set pieces.

In 1917, George V changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the House of Windsor, and shifted away from the tradition of arranging marriages between other royal houses, allowing members to marry into the British aristocracy.

Just over a century later, fundamental change is again needed, says Starkey, to counter the lack of respect for the institution. “The public doesn’t take the monarchy seriously because they don’t feel it represents them in any way, it’s more like a branch of celebrity,” he says. “A monarch should have a clearly defined role and a close relationship with the Prime Minister, refereeing the political process not engaging in silly diversionary behaviour like dancing or copying local customs.”

But he concedes that before this can happen, a Right-leaning government must be in place. The most realistic prospect at present, he admits, is one led by Nigel Farage. Yet in the same breath he notes the “calibre” of Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet.

“We had hugely intelligent people speaking to the public, explaining change and why it was necessary. What we have now is the dog-whistle politics of manipulation. The popularity of the royals is in inverse proportion to the popularity of politicians; if anyone thinks Charles is having it tough, they need only look to Starmer, who is having a much, much worse time.”

Starkey regards the result of the Gorton and Denton by-election as a bellwether of deep malaise, the traditional parties edged out by two challengers; the Greens and Reform. It is, he says, a reflection of a nation that lacks cohesion, a sense of self and self-confidence.

“We have to recover our confidence and restore free speech. If we forbid everyone from talking about an issue, it doesn’t go away. It suppurates. And so you stick an increasingly disgusting plaster on it and then it turns into an abscess.”

Fortunately he stops just short of describing necrotising fasciitis on the body politic, but I feel I’ve had a close call. There’s no disputing Starkey’s energy and commitment, even if there’s a touch of the zealot about him.

“I could easily just retire and do nothing very much,” he muses. “But I have the sense we are witnessing a genuine moment of national crisis, and I think it’s one that is only comparable to war.

“It’s that worst of things, it’s the war of all against all – when the rules of civility and the rules of civilisation show signs of acute tension and collapse. We must harness the symbolic power of monarchy to pull us together rather than tear us apart.”