Ruth Dudley Edwards: It looked like he’d been cancelled but David Starkey has had the last laugh
I was chatting with my old friend David Starkey at a party recently when several people came up to tell him they loved his YouTube performances. A couple had also said nice things to me about my writing.
”We've turned into ancient monuments, David,” I said.
“Easter Island,” he responded, with a characteristic snigger.
I've known David since the late 1960s when we met as postgraduate students in Cambridge.
We became friends over coffee in the university library and he and my then husband, Patrick Cosgrave, got on swimmingly.
Both of them were highly articulate contrarians, with David, in those days, being much more left-wing.
Although my biography of Patrick Pearse had annoyed quite a few Irish nationalists, I had a low profile, first as a civil servant and then as a full-time writer on largely non-controversial subjects.
Time’s winged chariot hurried on, and although David and I lost touch for some years, during which time he became a best-selling Tudor historian and a broadcaster famous as “the rudest man in Britain”, our friendship rekindled and intensified when as a journalist from 1994 my denunciations of the appeasement of paramilitaries by British and Irish politicians, and my support for Brexit, landed me alongside him in the dock of respectable opinion.
My support for Brexit lost me quite a few friends.
These days, we are both warriors for free speech, but while I’ve simply had to learn to laugh off the abuse from Shinnerbots, fanatical Europhiles and trans extremists, in June 2020 David had what appeared to be a career-ending cancellation by the academic, literary, publishing establishments and other pillars of polite society.
He was a prized trophy in the culture wars. He’s 75 and finished, they smirked.
His crime was a clumsy sentence in an obscure podcast interview which gave his manifold critics their chance to accuse him (unjustly) of racism.
Among those expelling him were his agent, who happened also to be mine.
Having heard the story from David, I was so livid that I wrote to her that I had been under the impression that the job of an agent was to look after her clients.
Assisted by our friend, Douglas Murray, who is a warrior’s warrior, we would both find a safe haven with a person of rare courage in the literary world who is known as “the pariahs’ agent”.
David plotted his revenge carefully and ruthlessly. “David Starkey Talks”, his YouTube channel, was launched in October 2021, and became a stunning success.
From trenchant and controversial opinions on history and current affairs and his belief that the Blair years were an attack on the British constitution and everything good the country stands for, the merchandising of his profile has expanded from innumerable lectures into images of his face on posters, tee shirts, mugs and glasses with messages like “Uncancelled”.
I watched his newest video last night called “Trump was right to humiliate our prime minister” - an utterly brilliant, entertaining, passionate and often hilarious defence of Trump as a great man of history.
Don’t miss it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxIoKHZkgyI
Talk about having the last laugh!
l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of ‘The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions’ and 'Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice’
l Ruth’s website is www.ruthdudleyedwards.com, Twitter is @RuthDE, Facebook is Ruth Dudley Edwards