Starkey may be racist but he's no second rate historian

The comments made by David Starkey that “slavery wasn't genocide” on a right-wing video platform are beyond defensible. That he threw in the phrase “so many damn blacks” for good measure made it far worse.

Not surprisingly a huge storm of condemnation has rained on his head from Twitter and just yesterday his publisher, Harper Collins, dropped him as one of their authors. He also had to resign his fellowship at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and lost his role as visiting professor at Canterbury Christ Church College.

Among those piling in with invective was veteran journalist Michael White, who dismissed Starkey as an “obnoxious shit (& very second rate historian)” although he added the rider that "all those bodies" should have known what was coming.

While I would never leap to defend Starkey for his clearly very racist views (or at least form of expression), I would leap to defend his reputation as an academic. I'm a bit surprised at White, as he studied for a history degree at UCL, and is a respected journalist. But he does have form when it comes to kicking someone when they're down: think of his "Capn Bob bob bob" joke (which sparked a fight with Alastair Campbell) the day after Robert Maxwell died.

The one thing I would say about Starkey is he is not a second rate historian. Sure he is a deliberate controversialist and he's probably guilty of dumbing down some of his profession's usual rigour to carve out a career in telly. But when it comes to academic credentials I'd say he's up there with the best of them.

So who am I to comment? Well no one really, except I was one of his students when he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics back in the early 1980s and I've followed his career quite closely ever since.

In fact back in 1984, when I was a callow youth setting out on for a London University history degree, I was one of his biggest fans.

I would attend his lectures and tutorials and then tell everyone I knew what a great speaker he was. Of course I've spent the last 35 years regretting this enthusiasm as he's lurched from controversy to controversy, particularly with his trenchant views on BBC Radio's The Moral Maze.

The one thing you need to know about Starkey is that he is an automatic contrarian. The reason he's succeeded as a historian is because he has never been content to accept the prevailing point of view.

Probably his greatest body of historical research has come with his study of the court of Henry VIII, particularly during those maelstrom years from 1530-36 when the English king divorced Catherine of Aragon and married and then beheaded Ann Boleyn. In the process he created the Protestant Church in England and carried out the Reformation.

At Cambridge University, the unchallenged voice of authority on Henry's reign was the great British historian Geoffrey Elton. His depiction of Henry as a strong king who bent England's politicians and bishops to his whim so he could take on Rome was the conventional story that every schoolboy (and girl) had learned about our most famous monarch. Elton identified Thomas Cromwell as the scheming bureaucrat who made it all possible by revolutionising the medieval model of household-led government into a more sophisticated form of government that we might recognise today.

Imagine then if one of your students was one David Starkey. This whippersnapper from Westmoreland dedicated his doctoral thesis to a forensic dismantling of his mentor's work with an intimate study of King Henry's inner household, which suggested that the real power behind the throne rested with the king's 'groom of the stool'. This was the man whose daily task was to supervise the monarch's daily ablutions.

Starkey's central assertion was that far from Henry being a strong king who (with the aid of Cromwell) bent Parliament and Rome to his will, Henry was actually a weak and impulsive man who often succumbed to the plotting of his courtiers.

It began a feud between the two historians that reached its apogee in 1983 when Starkey chose the occasion of Elton's knighthood to deride one of Elton's essays, Cromwell Redivius (literally Cromwell Reborn). Elton responded with an equally damning review of a collection of essays Starkey had edited.

The source of Starkey's natural proclivity to seek out controversy probably stemmed from a troubled childhood. Starkey was born with club feet and suffered bullying at school. He also had a domineering mother who was determined to create a successful son in her own image.

Starkey needed several operations to correct his feet and at one time contracted polio. A nervous breakdown as well meant that he had to endure prolonged periods of isolation and spent a lot of his childhood reading. It probably didn't help that he was gay, at a time when it was still illegal to be gay.

After his studies at Cambridge, Starkey helped himself to some of the many sexual diversions available in London. Being gay and right wing was a conundrum he confronted by becoming a leading light in the Gay Conservatives.

During my time at the LSE I remember he made one of his early television appearances in a series about the Tudors on Channel 4. It surprised me, watching those programmes, that he seemed surprisingly low-key compared to the flamboyant lecturer I knew from his Senate House lectures.

Of course through his appearances on The Moral Maze and subsequent books and TV series, Starkey has more than made up for those far from overwhelming early TV appearances. By the early 2000s he had been labelled by the Daily Mail as “the rudest man in England”. In 2011, when several English cities were hit by rioting, he caused his first race storm when he asserted on Newsnight that “the whites have become black”.

The last time I saw Starkey speak in the flesh was about 12 months ago when he travelled to Brecon, of all places, to give a talk about Henry at the town's Theatr Brycheiniog. I was editor of The Brecon & Radnor Express at the time but attended the lecture in a private capacity. It seemed strange to me that a man of his wealth and renown had bothered to trek all the way to mid Wales to give a talk to a half-full theatre on a theme that he must have spoken many times in the past.

Compared to the irreverently funny firebrand lecturer I remembered watching in my University of London days, he seemed strangely flat and pompous. Having put on weight, he was physically twice the man I remembered but only half the performer. I guess, at 75, like all of us some of the fire has gone from his belly with age.

And judging by the sheer stupidity of his remarks in the past week, I'd hazard a guess that maybe his brain is not as sharp as it once was. Or maybe he is simply past caring.