David Robert Starkey CBE (born 3 January 1945) is an English[1] historian, radio and television presenter, with views that he describes as conservative.

While a regular contributor to the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, his acerbic tongue earned him the sobriquet of "rudest man in Britain";[2] his frequent appearances on Question Time have been received with criticism and applause.

[4][5] He is the only child of Robert Starkey and Elsie Lyon, Quakers who had married 10 years previously in Bolton, at a Friends meeting house.

[9] Starkey is equivocal about his mother, describing her as both "wonderful", in that she helped develop his ambition, and "monstrous", intellectually frustrated and living through her son.

"[13] The Daily Mail gave him the sobriquet of "the rudest man in Britain", to which Starkey was said to have told friends, "Don't worry darlings, it's worth at least £100,000 a year",[17] claiming that his character was part of a "convenient image".

[2] He once attacked George Austin, the Archdeacon of York, over "his fatness, his smugness, and his pomposity",[10] but after a nine-year stint on the programme he left, citing his boredom with being "Dr. Rude" and its move to an evening slot.

[10] He was a prosecution witness in the 1984 ITV programme The Trial of Richard III,[19][not specific enough to verify] whose jury acquitted the king of the murder of the Princes in the Tower on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

[21] In 2002, he signed a £2 million contract with Channel 4 to produce 25 hours of television, including Monarchy, a chronicle of the history of English kings and queens from Anglo-Saxon times onward.

Starkey's political views have changed over the years from what he called "middle-of-the-road Labour left until the end of the 1970s" to a conservative outlook, that he attributed to economic failures of the Callaghan government.

He has written that Disraeli was "exotic, slippery and had a gift for language and phrase-making", drawing similarities with the rhetorical style of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

[38] He bemoaned the Conservatives when they were in opposition, criticising Michael Howard in particular: "I knew Michael Howard was going to be a disaster as soon as he opposed top-up fees, either out of sentimentality or calculated expediency so that it might get him a bit of the student vote...Instead of backing Tony Blair, causing revolution in the Labour Party, the Conservatives have been whoring after strange gods, coming up with increasingly strange policies.

"[40] During the 2011 Conservative Party Conference he spoke at a fringe meeting, declaring Mayor Boris Johnson to be a "jester-despot" and the Prime Minister, David Cameron, as having "absolutely no strategy" for running the country.

[41] In 2015 he claimed that while Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, had introduced some meaningful reforms to education and welfare policies, they had not made large enough cuts to the UK's budget deficit.

[40] Starkey prefers radical changes to the UK's constitution in line with the federal system used by the United States, although in an interview with Iain Dale he expressed his support for the monarchy, the Queen and Prince Charles.

[42] Starkey thinks the modern UK House of Commons has become a weak political institution and that it should return to its core value of being in defiance of state authority, as it was in its origin.

"[49] In 2009, Mike Russell, then the Scottish Government Minister for Culture and External Affairs, called on him to apologise for his declaration on the programme that Scotland, Ireland and Wales are "feeble little countries".

[52] In August 2014, Starkey was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.

[57][better source needed] As a historian, Starkey presents Brexit in a wider historical context to try to show its importance in British history.

He believes that Magna Carta is essential in keeping peace and constraints on the state and the public and says that it is this rather shaky but very important 800 year old document that has led to a "constitutional edifice" developing in the UK.

[70] In August 2011, Starkey attracted criticism for some comments made on the BBC's Newsnight programme where he was a panel member together with Owen Jones and Dreda Say Mitchell.

The letter also criticised his supposed "lack of professionalism" and "some of the worst practices of an academic" in shouting down, belittling, and mocking, opposing views, rather than meeting them with evidence.

[84] In a June 2012 debate Starkey was criticised for stating that the perpetrators of the Rochdale child sex abuse ring had values "entrenched in the foothills of the Punjab or wherever it is" and were "acting within their cultural norm".

[85] In 2013, he criticised the inclusion of the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole in British school history curriculums, which he argued unduly promoted her and her work.

[86][87] In January 2015, Starkey, on a television programme, called political journalist Mehdi Hasan "Ahmed" and said that "nothing important" had been written in Arabic for 500 years.

[89] A letter signed by hundreds of students and staff criticised Starkey's involvement in the video due to him "repeatedly making racist statements".

[90] In May 2023, speaking to GB News, Starkey expressed his belief that prime minister Rishi Sunak was "not fully grounded in" British culture.

[95] As a result, the Mary Rose Trust accepted his resignation from the board of trustees[81][98] and the Historical Association announced on Twitter that it would withdraw the Medlicott Medal it had awarded him 20 years previously.

[100][101] Canterbury Christ Church University, where Starkey had been a visiting professor, removed him from that role in response to his "completely unacceptable" remarks.

In regard to the allegations, Starkey said that he did not "intend to stir up racial hatred and there was nothing about the circumstances of the broadcast which made it likely to do so" and also that the investigation by the police was "neither proportionate nor in the best interests of preserving proper freedom of expression".

"[116] Grimes and Starkey subsequently launched a formal complaint against the Metropolitan Police accusing them of being biased against them and acting in "deference" to the Black Lives Matter movement.