Time to play dirty? Lessons from the David Starkey affair

It only remains now to cancel the few remaining practitioners of real history. Many of us think this deplorable. For a range of reasons, not least of all because we think that studying the past in an objective way is an important activity in its own right and because we think it might help us to act well in our own age. Studying history is also a challenge to the life of the mind, that equally antiquated notion. Clinging to this quaint notion of scholarship and learning is something itself to be disdained. No, more than disdained. It has to be eliminated.

Because there is a war going on.

A war not fought with traditional weapons, but a war of the mind. A war for hearts and minds. With consequences few of us dare contemplate. It is a war fought by an enemy that means business, with a military strategy, battleline tactics and well equipped generals and frontline soldiers. It has all been written down, too, in a novel. That novel is called 1984.

Starkey has been preaching the right way to study history for a lifetime, in a shrinking academy in all senses of the word. Preaching the right way to study history while being on the wrong side of history.

History has been in the news of late, what with all the statues warfare.

It was only a matter of time before a traditionalist historian attempting in vain to hold the line on teaching history objectively came a cropper with the revolutionary mob, the direct descendants of the Jacobin thugs of 1789, of Bastille and of the reign of terror.

It occurred a week or so ago, in a now infamous interview David Starkey gave to a young conservative blogger called Darren Grimes in the UK. Grimes is already hated by the British left for his provocative, non-intimidated and effective counter-cultural (for the young) prosecution of the case for Brexit and for free thought. An enemy of the people, then. In their sights.

The interview was truly astonishing, in its historical breadth, scholarship, learning, coherence, common sense and heartfelt plea for rational debate on contentious issues like race and identity politics. It bears watching.

Starkey was particularly animated in relation to the farcical charges against people of whiteness that they should "check their privilege". Starkey outlined in graphic detail his own lack of privilege, and that of his late father, who suffered much in his own, humble life. Starkey's case against BLM reductionism was impeccable, compelling and powerful.

But he said that current renditions of the history of slavery are utterly without nuance and credibility. A major thought crime in itself. Then he said that slavery cannot reasonably compare with the Holocaust, since there are "so many damned blacks still around". In other words, blacks survived slavery, and, it might be argued, have prospered. This interpretation of history will be disputed – as it should be. The study of history will be, forever, controversial and contested. Again, as it should be.

Following this colourful outburst, Starkey has been duly cancelled, despite his (non-craven) apology for his, he admitted, inflammatory remarks. An appropriate apology, perhaps.

I have no idea whether his remarks inflamed anyone. Or whether he simply happened to walk into the minefield of what Douglas Murray has called the inevitable "tripwires" of the left-controlled culture wars.