A good friend has solicited my opinion on David Starkey, and for once I had none to offer.
I never watch ‘serious’ programmes on TV, precisely because the modifier invariably requires quotation commas. Moreover, frequent presence on TV tends to put me off a chap’s other activities, such as his books.
Hence my ignorance of Dr Starkey’s work and life story, beyond the more salient details that even those who don’t watch much TV can’t fail to absorb from ambient air.
But my friend’s wish is my command, and it so happens that Dr Starkey has just given an extensive interview to The Telegraph. Normally I’d give it a miss, but this time I didn’t, against what I thought was my best judgement.
The judgement has turned out closer to worst than best, for I was quite impressed. Though Dr Starkey didn’t plumb any unexplored depths (one can’t be expected to do that in a newspaper anyway), he displayed much of that most uncommon of commodities misnamed common sense.
What struck me, among other things, is the inference I’ve put in the title. Dr Starkey isn’t a real ‘poofter’ (his own word) in the same sense in which Margaret Thatcher or, say, Jeane Kirkpatrick, weren’t real women.
These days womanhood isn’t just a sex, homoeroticism isn’t just sexuality and negritude isn’t just a race. They have become so politicised as to become, above all, forms of political self-expression.
I remember talking to a proper English gentleman years ago, when I had just moved to London from New York. My interlocutor opined that most black people in America were leftwing specifically because they were black.
“It’s the other way around,” I countered. “They are black because they are leftwing.”
That was obviously a joke, but one based on reality. At the time there were countless black people prominent in politics, law, journalism, philosophy, science and the arts who weren’t recognised as fellow blacks by activists like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton.
To be really black one had to turn race into a political career. Getting ahead simply because one was intelligent, talented and hard-working wasn’t good enough – one had to devote one’s life to making sure blacks would advance simply because of their race.
Also at that time Margaret Thatcher was British PM and Jeane Kirkpatrick was the driving force behind US foreign policy. Yet militant feminists rejected them as examples of women in power because both ladies eschewed feminist activism, advancing instead on the strength of qualities not specific to either sex.
Similarly I’m sure Peter Tatchell types don’t recognise Dr Starkey as a fellow homosexual. Not only does he express conservative views in general, but he specifically refuses to accept the mantras of Peter Tatchell types.
For example, in common with other sensible homosexuals like Brian Sewell, he rejects homomarriage: “I see no reason… why a gay relationship should be the subject of public rules.” This, in spite of living with another man for 21 years.
Dr Starkey shares my contempt for the culture of liberation and victimhood: “I find it very, very sad the way there is now this perpetual procession of people – group after group – wanting to assume the status of victim. It’s catastrophic.”
It is indeed, and Dr Starkey extends this observation to blacks and women. He bemoans, for example, the negrification of our popular culture (“the whites have become black”), a development driven by the message of hatred and violence communicated by black rap and lapped up by our burgeoning white underclass.
Do blacks have a propensity for violence? “It would appear so,” says Dr Starkey, and amazingly no lightning came down from the sky to smite him. “If you look at muggings, shootings and stabbings. The figures I’m afraid are unchallengeable.”
Yes, but they aren’t uninterpretable. And Dr Starkey interprets them correctly, rejecting any possible accusation of racism. “The term has become totally without meaning. I think there are cultural differences, there are all sorts of differences.”
Quite. And the differences are indeed cultural, not biological. Which is more than Dr Starkey can say about women’s intelligence:
“The genders are different. And the whole thing is not just the result of wicked gender grooming… It is the result of biology.” And further:
“I think that the evidence suggests that there are different distributions of intelligence between men and women, that women tend to cluster more around the mean, [while] men are either very, very bright or very thick.”
I haven’t seen such evidence, but my empirical observation tallies with it. I’d also be tempted to add that women’s thinking tends to be more intuitive and less sequential than men’s, which to me doesn’t mean that women are less intelligent – quite the opposite.
Yet citing evidence of any kind on race or sex (unlike Dr Starkey, I refuse to use the word ‘gender’ in any other than a grammatical context) places Dr Starkey into the dwindling minority of sensible and increasingly marginalised people.
He goes on to reinforce this impression by delivering himself of forthright – and correct – views on a variety of subjects.
Miliband is ‘poison’ and “after our last experience of what a Labour government did, I cannot possibly see how anybody could vote for him.”
Easily, I’d suggest. All it takes is an electorate corrupted by socialist propaganda and dumbed-down by socialist education – exactly the kind of electorate we have now.
The Tories aren’t much better, feels Dr Starkey. They are just the lesser evil, a campaign slogan I once proposed as a guaranteed election winner.
“We are borrowing the equivalent of the cost of the NHS every year. It is totally unsustainable,” he laments. Quite. But our spivs know that if they stop doing it they’ll never stay in power, which means they’ll go on spending us into an economic grave.
Our politicians’ thinking is “muddled and sentimental”, but then again, “I don’t see anybody around with any prime ministerial qualifications at all.”
Neither do I, I’m afraid. In fact, I agree with Dr Starkey on just about everything he says, except the purely economic case he makes for leaving the European Union.
It’s not that I feel that the economic case isn’t strong – it is. But I’d expect a prominent constitutional historian to make the much stronger historical and constitutional case instead, or at least in addition.
Still, all in all a good man. Perhaps I ought to get around to reading his books.