#063 - David Starkey - Britain Has Been A Disaster Since 1945 (And The Crown Is Busy Losing Itself)

David Starkey is a historian, broadcaster, and bestselling author. Known for The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Monarchy, David now runs the popular YouTube channel David Starkey Talks and has written extensively on the British monarchy, including Monarchy, Crown and Country, and Henry, a Virtuous Prince.

In this episode David and I think out loud about why history, properly taught, is the basis of our civilisation, why we should be terrified of the current political class for their lack of historical awareness, his thoughts on what drover Axel Radakubana to commit the terrorist atrocities at Southport, what the decline of historical education means for governors and the governed, how the emergence of modernism saw the disintegration of cultural heritage, why any proper study of history requires cultivating a profound awareness of mortality, why David does not like revolutions, the future of the British monarchy and its diminishing role in British identity, David's political evolution from libertarianism to conservatism, why ritual is a necessity for proper governance, why we return to traditional values and much, much more.

Enjoy the show, Classmates and don't forget to subscribe.

You can find David’s work here:

• David’s Website
• David’s Books

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class. I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Professor David Starkey. David is a historian and broadcaster. His popular television documentaries included The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Monarchy. David now runs the very popular YouTube channel David Starkey Talks, and he has also written several books on English and British monarchy, including Monarchy, Crown and Country, and Henry, a virtuous prince. While he has also written a book on the history of Magna Carta. In this episode, David and I think out loud about why history, properly taught, is the basis of our civilization, why we should be terrified of the current political class or their lack of historical awareness, his thoughts on what drove Axel Radicubana to commit the terrorist atrocities at Southport, what the decline of historical education means for governors and the governed, how the emergence of modernism saw the disintegration of cultural heritage, why any proper study of history requires cultivating a profound awareness of mortality, why David does not like revolutions, the future of the British monarchy and its diminishing role in British identity, David's political evolution from libertarianism to conservatism, why ritual is a necessity for proper governance, and why we need to return to traditional values and much, much more. David is the sharpest octogenarian I have had the pleasure of meeting. I don't include my own grandmother. And if not that, he's certainly one of the most engaging. I mean, what a storyteller. You can see why he was a highly favoured broadcaster and teacher of history throughout the course of his life. And I'm sure there are many of you who won't agree with his take on what drove Axel Rabbi Kobana to do what he did. However, this is an episode that offers plenty of food for thought to chew on. And for those of you who wish to listen to 10 minutes of subscriber-only QA, the end of the episode, then please visit Thinking Class on Substack and become a paid subscriber. Before we dive in, you would be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching the show on. Because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows. Enjoy the show, classmates. David Starkey, welcome to Thinking Class. Thanks so much for joining me. A pleasure. Well, David, it really is my pleasure, and I don't think you need too much of an introduction. You're one of the most eminent historians that we have on these British Isles, and you're known far beyond those. And you've written much about the importance of um understanding history, understanding the importance of the crown to the nation of England and Great Britain. And we'll be exploring some of those things today. But let's begin with historical understanding, because you say, and in fact, you write on your website, that history properly taught is the basis of our civilization. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_02 3:11

Very simply, a civilization is a kind of group self-consciousness. It's a group memory. We have our own and the memory of particularly Greece and Rome, but to a lesser extent, I think, and I would argue to an exaggerated extent, of the world of the Bible, of particularly the Old Testament and so on, lying behind that. And the way that I can best explain this is if we go right to the beginning, what I would regard as our modern culture. I'm doing all terrible things like semi-omitting the Middle Ages and whatever, but we'll go back to those at various points. And it's the moment at which we convention conventionally talk about the beginning of the Renaissance. And it's the moment also, which again is worth thinking about, of really the invention of English. Because what we forget is English is a very, very modern language. It only goes back a few hundred years. It only in anything like its recognizable form, it only goes back to the late 14th century, to the time of Jessory Chaucer in the very, very 1380s, 90s, whatever. And Chaucer's an extraordinary man. He's the founding poet of English. He is to English, what Homer is to Greek, or Virgil is to Latin. The point was actually made later on. And he invents English, this strange fusion of French, Norman French, and what was left of the original Anglo-Saxon, the Germanic language of England. As part of this process, it's his encounter with the new developments or newish developments in Italy, France and Italy, more particularly Italy, where he goes there as the diplomat, which we call the Renaissance. That's the rediscovery of the literature, the thought, the politics, the history of Greece and Rome. And the poem in which he celebrates all this, it's very characteristically English. It's deadly serious and it's a joke. It's called The Parliament, listen to the idea, the Parliament of Fowls, the Parliament of Birds. And what's happened is he describes his encounter with one of these rediscovered texts, the work of great work of Cicero, The Dream of Scipio, from Cicero's De Republica, which is his great text, Cicero's great text, on the Roman Republic. And the dream of Scipio is the climax of this thing. It's the vision of Romanitas of the Roman world. And he reads all about it, and he uh but do you know what he does? He goes to sleep. He gets bored, and he has a dream. And instead of the world of politics and national glory and whatever, he dreams about a parliament, which means exactly then what it does now, of birds. Not arguing about warfare, not arguing about taxes, not arguing about who is right and wrong, but arguing about love in the full Liverpudlian sense of the term. But there's one marvelous um uh quatrage, that's to say, of two couplets in this, which I think is right at the beginning of what I mean by our civilization. And he's obviously encountered this ancient text. It's bred something new in him. There's been a response. And the way he describes it is, just as each year from the dead coal, I'm translating into modern English, just as each year from the dead coal ground, new corn springs up. So from old books, new seance, new knowledge comes. In other words, it's the Burkean idea of Burke talked about a civilization, a culture, and politics as being, yes, a contract, but a contract between the generations, between the dead, the living, and those yet to be born. A civilization is the same. It's that process of accumulated memory, of the refinement of discourse, of the survivals of buildings, of thoughts, of a landscape which human beings have shaped. And the way that we understand that is essentially history. And again, the uniquest thing about us, the West, particularly Britain, England, where it all starts, is the very idea of history. No other civilization has this fully blown notion of the description of events in time. You won't find it in Chinese history, you won't find it in Japanese. It is, again, one of the astonishing uniquenesses of our civilization. Yes, the Romans had it, yes, the Greeks had it, but in nothing like the same sophisticated, developed way that we do. So history is the very foundation. The first thing, I've been a teacher for most of my life. The first responsibility of the teacher is to transmit. You're a vehicle through which cultural experience flows. It is the terrible problem when we just put the emphasis on, as it were, the creativity of the child. The creativity of the child is merely solipsistic, it's merely self-referential. It's got to be in dialogue with that inheritance. But of course, as that wonderful quote from Chaucer tells us, this isn't strangling, this isn't limiting. This stops you reinventing the wheel. Our modern notion of educational self-discovery merely means every child, if they do anything at all, wastes endless time reinventing the wheel. And again, the terrible mistakes that we make all the time are because we as adults don't really think on either our own history or the history of our society. At the moment, I mean Britain is going through its Dreyfus moment. We are realizing that the whole uh the horrors that indeed I've been dealing with today, the horrors of Southport, the horrors of the grooming gangs, these are our Dreyfus case. They are the mark that our very structures of our society have simply stopped working. Mutual trust, mutual respect has been lost, a very sense of who we are, what we are, why we are, the relations of the governed and governed are broken down to an extent that it may even be irretrievable. It's something very, very terrible. But it's happened before. I lived through it in the 1970s, the winter of discontent. Exactly the same thing. But do you know what? Modern politicians are not looking back. We are going through, as far as I can see, an entire rerun of the 1970s. The problem is that generally speaking, when we look at current problems, we reach for isms, we or whatever, we reach for economics, we reach for sociology, we reach for models. The whole thing as incarnated in that most destructive degree in the curriculum, PPE at Oxford, the catastrophe of PPE. Whereas the obvious way to begin to understand the human condition is what have other human beings done before? You know, it's not terribly difficult. Now, this doesn't mean that it's a magic solution, but it's where you start, it's where you begin. So, and again, it's peculiarly true in Britain. We have a historic constitution. Um again, if if we look at that pre-moment of our civilization, back to the world of Greece and Rome, and particularly to the world of Greece, the great founder text when it comes to politics. Well, there are two of them, of course. Those there are the analytical texts of Plato and Aristotle. But the key moment, it seems to me, is in Thucydides, the historian, describing the great Athenian leader, Pericles, giving that first funeral oration of the Peloponnesian War, in which he begins talking about what are we? What are we as Athenians? We are a democracy. This thing shapes us, it shapes everything about us. But it's a common, it's the invocation of a common memory, which leads to a common way of doing things, to a and I'm using common in the sense of things we have in common, not vulgar, to a common set of values, values in common. And it's a profoundly historic sense of what you are. Um is why if if I want to get people to try to understand England, the first thing I will do is take them to two places, to a little parish church and to Westminster Abbey. And in those buildings, if you can't sense something greater, a past that's not dead, that's there, that's underfoot, that's in the smell, that's in that ch curious, rich light. I call it historic, I call it historical transcendence. I'm an atheist, but at those moments I feel something. And you know what? Again, one of the disasters that we made is the abandonment of literature. It's in literature, which itself, of course, is a historical artifact, it's a record of the past, it's a written record of something that was done long ago, sometimes quite recently. If one looks, I've mentioned Chaucer, I've mentioned Thucydides, but if you look at somebody like T. S. Eliot, Eliot's marvelous poem, Little Gidding, is all about that experience in a parish church, a little parish church, um, in Little Gidding, as the the light falls on the winter's afternoon. History is now and England. And he talks about the sense that of footsteps, heard and not heard, that of the tread of centuries, that are people dancing, people loving, people fighting, those bodies in tombs, you know.

SPEAKER_03 14:59

I hate to bring us down from what was a very rousing a rousing opening.

SPEAKER_02 15:05

What I'm trying to do, I'm trying to give people the trouble is history is thought thought taught usually so terribly. Recitations of lists of dates. People associate it with something boring, deracinated, inhuman.

SPEAKER_03 15:21

It's not. Well, absolutely preaching to the contear, uh uh the the thing that I think will bring us crashing to earth is touching on the lack of historical understanding or curiosity amongst our political class almost of all stripes. And so I wanted to ask you a question about uh about that. Uh uh there was a a GB News interview with between Stephen Edgenton and Liz Truss last year. He asked her, outside of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, who her favourite Tory leader was, and she searched around, couldn't think of anything, said, But I like Javier Millet, and then we have a uh a Prime Minister, Pierce Darmer, who's asked what his favourite literature was, what his favourite poem is, says I don't have one, and he even said that he doesn't dream. Uh considering the that that they are the the progeny of this cultural heritage which you just so richly described, how worried should we be that our political class don't have any understanding of what came before or or even the the uh the the the richness of our past that they can't find anything in which to understand on it? We shouldn't be worried.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

We should be terrified. Because they are utterly at sea. Without a knowledge of the past, you're at sea without a compass. You're walking in a street without your Google map. You're lost, as they are lost. And it's the sense of, I mean, Starmer is the most interesting. Here is a man who has never read anything apart from a legal textbook and an Arsenal program, trying to deal with the horrors of Southport. I mean, let's just look at the horrors of Southport and see how we could with the frame of reference that I've been talking about now. Why have things gone so scandalously wrong? See, I don't subscribe to the argument there's been some vast cover-up. I don't believe that whatever this creature from Rwanda is called is some sort of serious Islamic terrorist. I don't believe that for one single second. I think he's something else. And I think also the focus of both sides on ideology has been completely misconceived. It is, of course, because when we want to look at terrorism, and you can see this, we'll just talk about it because it's a wonderful example that brings, you know, brings to the fore every single thing that we've been talking about. What is it that Keirstammer is saying terrorism is? Well, he's saying, of course, it is a matter of ideology, of isms, of abstracts. What does prevent say terrorism is? It's a matter of ideology and isms. What is left out? It's left out bloodless. It's left out. Why? Axel. Reflecting on it immediately afterwards says, I'm so glad. So glad that you're dead. Six years old. So is that the terror of the dislocated mind? You won't find that in United Nations definitions of terrorism. You won't find that in the remit of PREVENT. You won't find that in an act of parliament. You will find it if you read Dostoevsky. If you read It's called The Devils, The Possessed, the Demons. It's the first novel about terrorism. And it points to two things. It points first to that bloodlust that I just wanted to kill. Then it talks about the isms. What we've done is we've assumed it's the isms that produce the bloodlust. Dostoyevsky is wiser. It's the bloodlust that latches onto the isms. And this is where we've gone completely wrong. This this astonishing record that we have of Axel. How many times has he been referred to Prevent? How many times has he been referred to the police? The answer is very simple. Why doesn't Prevent recognize this man manifestly wandering around with knives? Ringing, ringing, ringing the police up and saying, what do I do if I want to kill somebody? It is going to school with a hockey stick to smash somebody over the head. Oh, but he doesn't have an ideology, so he's not a terrorist, so we needn't worry about him. And the police, it was fascinating. The Daily Mail did an astonishing, as it so often does, an astonishing piece of reporting. I don't know whether you read it this morning. The detective inspector, whatever he was called, in charge of the case, saying, we recognized it was terrorism. It was remember, if it hadn't been for modern medicine, twelve of those girls would have been dead. Twelve. It's a mere miracle. It's a genuine massacre. But oh, the rules say it can't be terrorism because he didn't have an identified ideology. So in other words, it's not that the state was consciously covering up. Yes, there was an element of covering up because we know in appearance it looked like any other Islamic terrorist incident. But the ideology, I think, in all of these fits on top of that basic bloodlust. You see the point that I'm trying to get at. And we've instead what we have, we have a routine of mere bureaucracy. We can't call him a terrorist because he doesn't put his hand up and say Alo Allah Akbar. There's no evidence that he did. Um he doesn't have the beard, he has, and forgive me, um, he has he has none of the none of the none of the usual sights for the good reason they're not there. And his his reading about about About horrors was entirely indiscriminate. It was anything that's really horrible, uh, any form of torture, massacre, um, um, ethnic cleansing, whatever. It's the it's it's it's the bloodlust. Yes, the only thing I would regard as being central is misogyny and a strange fascination with little girls. But then we've seen that's very characteristic in the grooming gang thing as well. But it's the it's the it is the failure of the what we see is not wickedness, and it's really important. Everybody's been saying, oh, the failure uh of um of uh that's gone wrong with the grooming gangs is it's wickedness, it's conspiracy. It's not. It's bureaucratic rigidity, it's legalistic rigidity, which of course leads to the other absurdity. Did you not read, my dear friend, uh Jacob Rees Morg, was actually subject to investigation by Prevent. Why? Because he read a dangerous, ideologically loaded text, Ruddyard Kipling, you know, Empire, White Man's Burton. You see, you see, with the total derail, I mean, somebody is infinitely buttoned up and respectable. There isn't room for a bladed knife inside poor Jacob's double-breasted suit, you know. He's got absolutely nowhere to put it. But these ninnies, because they operate in a mere world of defin of legalistic definition, again, Starmer, and his extraordinary behavior over suits. I followed the rules. This is a man whose framework of reference are the terms and conditions of a mobile phone contract. And he's trying to govern the country on the basis of that, which is why he's as sociopathic as Elon Musk. But without Elon Musk's wonderful creativity, enthusiasm, joy in life, sense of a civilization so great that he's got to rescue it now and take it to Mars. It's the opposite form of sociopathy, the the the awful, rigid, desiccated a world of dried peas.

SPEAKER_03 24:29

How do you think the we we got here? So we've got this rich history which um stretches back a couple of thousand years, and it was largely passed down through the generations. And I was speaking with Ed West, the historian and journalist recently with his colleague Paul Morland about the podcast The Canon Club, where they try to uh introduce people to some of the key figures and the unheralded figures of the Western canon because they believe it's important that we understand our cultural heritage.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

What I tried to do with David Starkey talks, exactly the same thing. What I've been trying to do for the whole of my life, what television used to do very well.

SPEAKER_03 25:12

Well, indeed. And we spoke we spoke about kind of Clark civilization in the 1970s, excellent introduction to it all, and and Ed always makes the point that the civilization that uh lasted from say medieval times up until the the outbreak of war in uh the 20th century is recognizably the same civilization, and then things change. Uh how is it that you that we ended up becoming so impoverished in our historical understanding? Because I feel like the generation or two above me have a pretty solid understanding of what this country is, its key figures, its key moments, its key events. And I felt like as a millennial, I had to relearn or learn all of that stuff in my late 20s, and it was only then that I understood what it meant to be an Englishman and a Swiss person.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

Because it's historically conditioned. Right. I think there are two explanations. There's a very big one, and there's one that's entirely local to the teaching of history. I went through exactly because I'm so eight, I'm I'm I've just celebrated my 80th birthday. I am history a living fossil. Isn't it amazing? I take you back to 1945. Um, what went wrong was uh my generation again. It's my generation, and I'm going to use the brutal word that fucked up. It's really important we understand this hand in hair of guilt. We fucked up partly because we became experts. If I think of how I was taught history, most of the people who taught me weren't experts. They hadn't done their PhD. They had a broad civilizing view. They thought they should teach me big sweeps of European history, big sweeps of British history. And the central subject I was taught was the British Constitution, was the actual entrenched development of our politics. Um, and what my teachers again thought they had to do was to give me a great map of time, that that that sense of those 2,000 years that you talked about. Um I realized partly from my own, partly from my own experience. Let me tell you what happened. We all started doing PhDs. A PhD, that tiny, tiny little bit. Do you know what happened? When I went to London in 1972 from Cambridge, um there was, I when I went there, there was a marvelous history degree. You'd to do the big sweep of English history, British history, which meant English history, of course, you to do big sweep of European history. You could do some world history, you could do history of America, and so on. Um, you began clearly with big narrative courses, and then you got a little bit more specialized in one subject in your second year. And in your third year, you did a special subject with proper documents and all the rest of it. Great. And of course, we all sat down. I, David Starkey, have researched the privy chamber of Henry VIII. I am privately going to teach the privy chamber of Henry VIII because I'm bone idol and I can't be bothered to do anything else. And the result, and we all reconstructed the curriculum around our specialist interests. There was this university, it began at university level, as these things usually do. It was self-interested, it was um it was, of course, justified in grandiose terms, as you can imagine. We're introducing people to new ways of approaching history, we're taking them nearer to the documents, all of that stuff. But basically it was because we were lazy. And then it developed in an even more dangerous way, an ideological way. The decision that history should be taught through documents even at school level. But what we should be doing when we're teaching history at school level was teaching people to be historians. Deranged. What you should be doing, of course, is giving them that broad understanding. Instead, you I mean, I cannot believe it. You give 12-year-olds bits of historical documents. Of course they can't understand them. You can only understand a historical document if you have some inkling of the world that produced it. It's completely the wrong way of going about it. But, and again, the leaders of the profession, I shall name names. People like Richard Evans, the Regis at Oxford, led the way on this. I remember a news night debate with him in which, when he just said, Oh, there's no reason why people should understand the history of Britain. What we should be doing is teaching them to be historians. I was so shocked that I didn't debate with him properly. So that's been the thing. And of course, it was then stirred into all sorts of things. Oh, the history of Britain is a history of oppression and all the rest of the stuff. But it began with those two things. It began at university level with the over-specialisation and teachers reluctant, really, to learn much beyond what they'd learned already in their PhDs, and teachers themselves, increasingly without breadth of knowledge. Then there is the focus on the teaching you to be a historian, and the also the disbelief of narrative history, that what we want is analysis. And then there's something much bigger. The 20th century modernism is about the deliberate destruction of the past in every area. Again, I've written on this in the form of a little pamphlet, but colouring the whole of my thoughts. Again, art, this is when we go back to Kenneth Clark and civilization, which he did not fully get himself. Modernism is destruction. Marcel Duchamp, the famous urinal, which is exhibited in New York at the end of the second at the end of the First World War, is intended to be the destruction of art. In his early in the Dada East or whatever, round about 1918, 1920, in response to the horror of the First World War, said all art is meaningless. Duchamp is perfectly clear. All art is meaningless. You should use Rembrandt's ironing boards. I am not an artist, I am an artist, like an archist. I am opposed to the very idea of art. Modern art, as we understand it, is only invented in the cupidity and folly of 1960s New York. Similarly, modern architecture, modernism in architecture, is intended to destroy everything that had gone before and did. Modern classical music is intended to destroy everything that had gone before and did. In other words, modernism isn't this new movement of creativity. You look at it, you look at Tracy Eamon, you look at Damian Hearst. This is shit in the face of the public. You look at the mess we've made of our cities, the horrors, the cult of ugliness. Everything is ugly, is deliberately ugly. Again, one of the essential problems with Britain is our terrible decision at the end of the Second World War to rebuild in modern style. Why does nobody want to live in Manchester or Birmingham? Because they're ugly. They're vile places to live. I was at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham earlier last year. It is the most hideous place on God's earth. Apart from a few fragments of what Joe Chamberlain tried to create, magnificent classical buildings. It is just ugly and it doesn't even work. The stupid conference center that we were in, the only way they could fit security was when you went through a security gate and then walked another hundred yards in the pouring rain. Modern architecture is supposed to be efficient, it's not. So we've modernism was about the deliberate repudiation and destruction of the past. Now look at where there's economic growth. Everybody says, why are continental cities lived in in a way that ours aren't? Because they either weren't destroyed, as in France, because France ran away from the Germans, or, as in Poland, country now absolutely booming, Hungary about to be so, the rebit they rebuilt their cities beautifully. Do you know what is the place in Britain which has the fewest people out of work?

SPEAKER_03 34:39

Oh, I think I read this the other day. You'll have to you'll have to remind me. York. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

Utterly untouched. I couldn't believe it. I was there just before Christmas. It made Oxford Street look like, you know, what a bit what it does, the third world. Um absolutely booming, bustling, because it's a lovely place to live. Bath, Brighton, Edinburgh, much of London where I live. They're attractive places. That's the this is why the attack the notion of Hull, Bradford as the city of culture. I mean, the sheer lunacy of the idea. But if you compare and contrast with what the nineteenth century tried to do with those cities, with the heroic quality of the buildings, even the cotton mills of Manchester, as Lowry shows, are magnificent. And look at us. Again, this deliberate deracination of a culture in the name of progress. And again, this notion that we become this bizarre utopian. We assume we can simply invent everything from new. I mean, again, the horrors that's gone wrong with our politics is Blair. We're a new country. What? We have the oldest continuous political system, or had before he got his horrible hands on it, but the oldest continuous political system in the world. Nowhere else. I mean, our political history until 1997 is genuinely continuous from Magna Carta, and you could argue, even from the reign of Alfred. And then there is the equivalent. I mean, Blair is the equivalent of Marcel Duchamp, though without the talent. This deliberate rupture. This notion that started again.

SPEAKER_03 36:38

Dear classmate John here, this isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button. If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on. You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class. You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at Thinking Class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser. And you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox. You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for showing your support. Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate. Do you think people understand just how big a break that was that you've just described? Do you think that's within the public consciousness?

SPEAKER_02 37:28

I think, but I think this is what I think is happening now. I think there is a sense. There's a moment at which you realize that marvelous phrase, there's something rotten in the state of Denmark, there's a great deal rotten in the state of Britain. And there's a dawning sense. Nothing works. Nobody tells the truth. You're in a world of words absolutely detached from things. You see, again, history properly done is the most thingy of subjects. I mean, I had, you know, I am an administrative financial historian on the one hand. I'm also a historian of the royal court on the other. And my great teacher was Geoffrey Elton, a German, one extraordinary man, part of that diaspora from Nazi Germany, Jewish, of course, though very secular, but a man who had no sense of history apart from words. And his great thesis was: in the reign of Henry VIII, for heaven's sake, Thomas Cromwell made government less personal in the reign of Henry VIII. And I would say to Geoffrey, come on, Geoffrey, and what was the day that Thomas Cromwell explained to Henry VIII that he was surplus to requirements? I think it's two days before he was executed by a deliberately inexperienced executioner, to make sure, in that wonderful phrase, he knew that he was dying. Or again, even administrative history. I mean, I'm, I know it's hard to believe. I'm rather a good financial historian. And the revolution that I brought about in the understanding of financial history, or indeed administrative history generally, was to say these are not just figures, or these are not just words or seals. The result, they are the result of real people doing real things in real places with real objects. And until you've worked out that, you will not understand it. But the problem is, and this is we're going back to Starmer and whatever, the left in particular just believe in a culture of words. The absurd dispute about Elon Musk and doing that, or rather that. Oh, it shows he's a fascist. Here is a man who has just spent 44 billion pounds making sure that X has freedom of speech. I don't think freedom of speech was very high on Adolf Hister's list. But it's this complete it's looking, the entire left is about words and gesture. Similarly with me, you know, when I was, when I was when I was done for being a wicked racist. Because at the height of Black Lives Matter, when everybody was claiming slavery was a genocide and the entire history of Britain had to be written around slavery, I'm afraid my tongue tripped and I said, you know, so many damn blacks. And wouldn't one do so? Rather than looking at what I was actually saying, the fact that one had used a no-no word. So we've become religious. We've we we've we we we now have a rather than a politics which is based in reality, we have instead a political theology in which get the tiniest word wrong, tiniest gesture wrong, and heresy to the stake. Cancellation. And again, look at extraordinary things like transgenderism, gender self-identification, as I constantly point out, this is purely medieval, isn't it? It's transubstantiation. If I say hockey corpus, miraculously, the chunk of bread has turned into flesh. If I say, oh, but darling, I'm really a girl, uh, you know, despite my Y chromosomes. You see what I mean? It's again, it's this is something's gone radically, radically wrong. And I think it's this deracination. Again, modern architecture is purely theoretical. Buildings are constructed by algorithms, they're they're constructed by equations. Something terrible has happened. But what I'm hoping is that the sense of disintegration, of decay, of malfunctioning of a state that is both ever more costly and ever less effective, that the more it tries to do, the worse it does everything, might force us, A, to think, B to look into the past, and above all, to examine yourself. Because again, one of the key things about history, and is is striking, isn't it? So many people say, and they come come to me or uh come up to me all the time. You know, I used to be completely bored with history when I was young. Now I've got old, I've got quite interested. You can see they're not quite sure why. And of course, the reason is you become aware of yourself as having a history, as being part of it. You become, of course, profoundly aware of mortality when you don't, again, lie to yourself about it. And these the these again, the whole way academic history is developed, um, it's refusal to look at art and or the art of language, it's refusal to embrace emotion. Good history is, of course, it's scholarly. It's based, again, I've always taken a pride, even when I was doing vulgar television, that you work really hard to get it right. Um, you work really hard to get the facts right. I believe there are things. Called Fox. Again, one of the things that's most terrible about the 20th century, the fashionable, all coming from France, of course, all bad ideas of French postmodernism, and then then enormously amplified through the power of American academic life. That's where everything has gone wrong. But the attack on the idea that there is truth. The great re the the there are, again, we need to understand the extraordinary achievement of late 17th century England. Empiricism. The fact that essentially there is a fact that things exist, you know, Dr. Johnson, in the face of Bishop Berkeley's denial of reality, kicked to stone. There are hard things. And we've got to rediscover that. The extraordinary achievements of the late 17th century are not due to deductive thought. They're not due to Cartesianism, beginning with big ideas and coming down. They're due to minute observation. The apple. The little prism by which you split the beam of light. That's it builds up. It is inductive, not deductive. History is the most profoundly inductive of subjects. The thingiest. And again, it's why I am passionate about people being interested not simply in history. You need the words, you need the chronology, you need the documents. But they acquire a quite different meaning if you look at the history of furniture, the history of buildings, the history of textile. One of the great revelations for me was having been trained by Geoffrey Elton at Cambridge, this intense focus on the document, on getting that right, was coming up to London and meeting a marvellous old queen, Hugh Murray Bailey, who was again this kind of rather old-fashioned, well, certainly an old-fashioned sort of homosexual. He'd been in the Marines, for God's sake, in the Second World War, helped put together the entire cultural inheritance of Nazi Germany, which had all been sort of salted away in salt mines. And he regaled me on magnificent stories like what did you do with the 14th-century Madonna when you only had six strapping chaps and a 10-ton truck? How did you put a fragile wooden Madonna in a truck and not have it wrecked as you were trying to take it back? Okay, lads, take your belts off. Suspended, as all his lads are rather nervously shifting as he looks at them lustfully. Anyway, um, but what he taught me was you can actually understand a royal court through understanding the layout of a palace. All the work that we've now done on Downing Street and the White House, why is it called the West Wing? It's a place, it's the proximity to power. At last, people have started arguing where was Sue Gray's office? How near are you? It's physical. And it's this sort of thing. We've got to understand. Again, the physicality of place, as I was talking about.

SPEAKER_03 47:43

We've talked about the deracination of culture, the loss of understanding of our literary history and even the cultural practices, how they're created by real people. And you when you talked about how modernism was this not just a break from the past, but an an intention to sweep it away and move on to something new.

SPEAKER_02 48:03

Uh like revolution. It's our fascination with revolution. Revolutions are catastrophic. It's the pro again, this this this this this middle class kid and and oh, isn't it sexy with Che Guevara? Um isn't it lovely? Wasn't Cuba marvelous? It wasn't. It's a horror. Every revolution makes things worse. That's true of the French Revolution as well. France has never re-established political stability. Look at the mess they're in now. Five republics, two empires, and two monarchies in just over 200 years. The catastrophe of the Russian Revolution, the catastrophe of the Chinese. We can now see it. Putin is just another awful expansionist. Z or Qi or whatever he's called, is another mad emperor. Nothing has changed. The techniques and technology has changed, but the mental attitude hasn't. But again, the whole of the cultivation of human rights is another disaster. It assumes as a universal human being, rather than the fact that we're all root all rooted in our cultures. Again, leftism is all based on an idea there is a universal human being. Ergo, as we see with Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, there shouldn't really be a state. We shouldn't really have frontiers. Exactly what's being reacted against so effectively by Trump in America. It's the same thing. It's the denial of the thing that shapes us and makes us. Even when you don't want it, it's still there. But the the point is these things are not, they're seen as straitjack. It's it's this recognized completely by Edmund Burke with the French Revolution. The desire to make everything new is the most destructive thing you can do. And tragically, we embarked on that course in 1997. In terms of our cities, we embarked on it in 1945. I mean, I think we've got to recognize that the entire history of Britain broadly since 1945 has been a disaster. There needs to be a recognition that there was an inflection point, and it was terribly, terribly wrong. A few people, gifted with astonishing foresight. Corelli Barnett and the Audit of War and whatever recognized that at the time. All the rest of us deceived ourselves. I lived through all of this. I hadn't I'm a sensitive historian. I knew Blair was going to be terrible. I've never got as drunk at any party as I did on the election night party in 1997. I knew it was going to be dreadful. But it's only really in about the last four or five years, very much aided by my own cancellation in 2020, that I become aware of this. This again is something else, you know, John. The historian, why do we get so much better as we get older? He said boastfully. Because we've had the experience. Unless, you know, you've buggered up something in your own life. Unless you've been in love and been rejected. Unless people close to you have died. You don't really understand those things. And it's again, it's the most influential history, because it's a product of a PhD, is now written by very young people. And they're writing, if they're any good, out of deep reading and deep knowledge, but shallow experience. What we call experience is just our own history.

SPEAKER_03 52:28

Thinking about the what comes next in our modernizing drive to make everything new, I I can't help but look at uh the monarchy being being an Englishman and a and a Britishman. And I I I want to ask you a question once I've quoted a passage from C. S. Lewis from you, to get your reaction to this and what it might mean should we lose the monarchy.

unknown 52:54

C.

SPEAKER_03 52:54

S. Lewis wrote, Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces. Mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are men whose taproot in Eden has been cut, whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance can reach. Men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. On the modernizing front, David, what would it mean for the country of Great Britain to lose the crown?

SPEAKER_02 53:27

Well, the crown, I'm afraid, is busy losing itself. That's the most terrifying thing. The coronation of King Charles was a self-conscious rupture. It is the first coronation since six I commented on it at the time and got much abuse. It's the first coronation since 1689 when Parliament wasn't present. In other words, the coronation, as King Charles reinvented it, with the aid of the now man known to be dreadful, Archbishop Welby, that coronation seemed like a merely private religious act. It had no connection whatever with the way that we are governed. This is a catastrophe. We're a parliamentary monarchy. The king seems completely unaware of the fact. I would argue it goes back, I'm afraid, to the reign of the blessed Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Elizabeth II, in my view, although she was very dutiful about her red boxes, fundamentally abandons her role as the centre of politics after the whole business of the succession and the fraught succession to Harold Macmillan when there was a whole debate about would it be Butler or would it be Douglas Hume. And she takes such fright after that that she effectively abandons her proper role as constitutional monarch. And it's compounded by the fact that she fetishizes the Commonwealth. This is utterly, utterly disastrous. It prolongs our imperial hangover. And of course, the Commonwealth increasingly becomes what, in my view, least matters historically, Africa. Whereas what mattered, of course, were the great realms, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and behind them, America. So we've the monarchy itself has handled, in my view, handled itself disastrously. And William is a perfectly decent chap, but nature intended him to be the manager of a second division football club.

SPEAKER_03 55:55

Can you imagine?

SPEAKER_02 55:57

So I think it's it's become absolutely marginalized. And again, you see, and it's really important we recognize how fundamental the marginalization is. We are not a nation. Britain is not a nation. We are a pre-modern state. We were the union of two monarchies, Scotland and England, with radically different histories. The only bonds of union between them were Parliament and the monarchy. And the parliament the bond of parliaments was broken by Blair and Evolution quite deliberately, in my view. And the the the the only thing that used to make you British at home, you weren't, at home, you weren't British. This Brit when you constantly see this terrible word Brits and Britons, Britons are naked and daub themselves in woad and fight the Romans. But what happened was that the only definition of being British was that you were a subject of the crown. This sense of direct loyalty to the monarchy has been completely lost. Again, it's hugely accelerated under Blair, deliberately by Gordon Brown, in which what you do instead, you try and invent being British. But you can't invent being British for the simple reason if you go back. Which are the first soccer internationals? Who are they between? England and Scotland. England and Scotland. How on earth do you see what I mean? You were British abroad. It was the British Empire. You were English or Scots or Welsh or whatever it was at home. And the the what happens in the 1990s is instead of loyalty to the crown, you try and define British values. And what on earth are these British values? They're totally vacuous. They are tolerance and diversity. In other words, anything goes. So because we've ignored this extraordinarily delicate tapestry of historic rival allegiances and hugely more in common, because really the differences between England and Scotland are paper thin, as James VI and first points out, when he the first agitation for union comes from Scotland. Him back at the beginning of in 1604-5-6, arguing passionately in Parliament for union. But what what what you do instead, you you replace this wonderful delicate fabric of identity with something Britishness, which is no more than a flag of convenience.

SPEAKER_03 59:00

David, I think we have scratched the surface here, and there's so much more to go. However, there is one more question I want to ask you before we ask one question from uh from the subscribers, and um uh and it would be great to also hear about what you're working on, but we'll get there in the f fullness of time. So, my my my final question to you in front of the paywall, as it were, is what have you changed your mind about in the course of your life and and what was it that made you think differently?

SPEAKER_02 59:32

Oh, what I've changed about is my politics. I was a libertarian. Um when I first came to pub real public attention, um uh uh things like the moral maze on the BBC. I was a radical libertarian. I become a conservative. In other words, I suppose I've rediscovered that history actually matters rather than is a jolly good way of leaving a nice life. I was immense, I've been immensely fortunate, John. I've been able to make a very good living out of something that I love. But as I've got older, I've realized it's more than that. I've realized that there are things which are on the point of vanishing irretrievably. And as I said, I think my own generation has made terrible, terrible errors. But we are, well we are the about to be missing link. Every week is a funeral. So I've changed my mind politically very sharply. And when I say conservative, I mean a Burkean conservative. I do not think the solution to our present discontents, as terrible as they are, is a kind of get up in the morning and think of something new. Um, I I I'm fond of Nigel Farage, I know him quite well and all the rest of it. But there's a I fear the moment, it may change, there's a shallowness. There's just let's reach something off the shelf. What we need is a recognition that what has gone wrong was a repudiation of this astonishing continuous history, which you remember, we were unique in Europe, in that we were able to preserve what you talked about, the monarchy, parliament, the House of Lords, that historic constitution stretching, which Pericles again is the basis of a country, stretching right back. We were the only country that in the 19th century, because we had already had the idea that to be governed by law in Britain, in England really, is to take part in the making of it. That's what the idea of parliament is about. You're bound by a law made in parliament because you have been in Parliament either in person or via your representative. Now that was mythical in the Middle Ages. In the 19th century, it becomes real. So whereas in France or Germany or Italy or wherever it else you look at, people were clamoring to tear down the ancien regime. In Britain, they were clamoring to become part of it. There's a fundamental conservatism. The Chartists weren't saying tear down Parliament, they're saying we want the vote. Even the women, even the monstrous regiment of the suffragettes. They weren't saying we hate Parliament, saying we want to be there. There's no accident, is it, that the first female MP is one of the excuse me, is one of the richest women in the country, Nancy Astor, with her magnificent town palace at the corner of St. James' Square. And it's this we the Blair and the horror of Alistair Campbell, that master of propaganda, which is wonderfully described by F. M. Cornford as that branch of the art of lying. No accident. These people foolishly, shallowly tear it down. And what they do, they construct something. But it's not simply unhistoric, it is unfunctioning. As we know, every bit of the state is at war with every other bit of the state. Why we can do nothing? Why there's the absurdity of HS2? Why there's the absurdity of the bat on it? And that's because we ruptured our history. That's but conservatism is, and again, the Conservative Party absolutely forgot this. Um, you know, Theresa May, the nasty party or whatever. You are a conservative because you believe that the past is not a is not a straitjacket, it's not um it's not a textbook, it's not how you do it. But it's this astonishingly fertile soil. And you don't grow a plant by uprooting it. And this is what we've tried to do in the 20th century. We've torn things up by their roots, and we've been surprised that they've withered.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:28

What is it that they say? And I can't remember who who who said it or wrote it, but you certainly will. That's uh uh tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. Uh I can't remember either.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:43

But I've been giving you all sorts of equivalent ideas. And I think, dare I say, the ones I've been giving you were better because they arise from the English tradition.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:56

Very good point. Very good point. And we'll cover off some of that in the subscribers section, actually. Um, David, you've got an excellent YouTube channel, David Starkey Talks, which everyone should go and check out. And I think that's one of the main repositories of your work these days. Is there anywhere else people can find you? And can we expect you to be producing or publishing anything in the news?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:18

Yes, I'm the next the next thing I'm doing, uh, all the political stuff that I've been talking about. I wrote a uh uh uh it was published just at the time of the Tory leader, the result of the Tory leadership elections. I did an article for the spectator, readily available online. I think it's called What Kemi Should Do. But actually, what it is, it's an explanation of why things have gone so shatteringly wrong since 1997, and a recommendation as what we should do about it. And what I'm proposing is a great repeal act and a restoration, because the argument there is that our history is fundamentally conservative. The great problem has been. With again the way we've taught British history, the idea that Parliament is something new, is something progressive. It's not, it's medieval. It's why when we rebuilt the Palace of Westminster, we consciously rebuilt it in the Gothic style. And every revolution in Britain, until the horror of 1997, was consciously conservative. You were about change, but change within the rules. Magna Carta. We always look at the wrong Magna Carta. The Magna Carta of 1215 was indeed a dangerously revolutionary document. And fortunately it failed. It's then rescued the following year in 1216 by our first great conservative politician, William the Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, who does something completely characteristically English. He reissues the charter, he strikes out all the revolutionary clauses, but says, of course, these are terribly important. We need to set up a committee to think about them. Which, of course, never, ever reports, and they are carefully forgotten and kicked into the long grass. The Puritan revolution is completely conservative. The radicals in the 17th century are monarchical absolutists. New style government in the 17th century is Louis XIV, getting things done, having serious experts, you know, the rule of experts. That's why the French should father all this nonsense. The Colbert and the Vaubon, whatever, these these rootless technocrats. What we were doing in England was doing something completely different. We were trying to establish not efficiency, but the grounds of legitimacy.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:14

Well, David, uh that that concludes the main part of the show. And for those who are subscribers to Thinking Class, we're going to jump on and ask two more questions of David. So we'll see you in the next part. But David, needless to say, it's been an absolute pleasure. To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes. Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters. Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond. Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you. I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.