HIstorian David Starkey, left, and Rupert Lowe
David Starkey is at it again. Not satisfied with having previously insulted every black person on both sides of the Atlantic with astonishingly ignorant remarks about the slave trade, the once-celebrated royal historian and constitutional expert has now set his sights on becoming the most hated man in Ghana.
In an episode of his podcast David Starkey Talks this month, he asks: “What is an Englishman?” That, for the uninitiated, is common hard-right podosphere code for ‘“How do we talk about racial purity without sounding too Volkisch?” It features an interview with the far-right figure Carl Benjamin, of whom, Starkey says in the show notes, he was once told: “Never interview Carl Benjamin. He’s much too extreme.”
The podcast delivers exactly what you’d expect from professional contrarian Starkey and Benjamin, an “autodidact” philosopher whose online pseudonym is “Sargon of Akkad” (ruler of the Mesopotamian empire). It is, for want of a politer phrase, a pseudo-intellectual jerk circle.
Starkey and Sargon plunge headfirst into an incoherent word soup. The two men spend an hour dancing around the subject they are there to answer, implying they can’t speak candidly for fear of “persecution” by people they never name. It’s almost as if they’ve swallowed Tommy Robinson’s grift script.
Sargon has, as it turns out, coined a euphemism for the debunked “great replacement theory” beloved by ethno-nationalists. He tells Starkey that “demographic security” is the problem facing us. He laments the loss of an England that was once “99.9% English.” This elicits from Starkey the most Starkeyesque of responses – by which I mean racist. “I was talking about the importance of historical fact,” says the historian. “I did not see a black until I went to Cambridge. The first time I saw a black man was when I shared lodgings with one and he was Ghanaian and, if I dare say so, he was simply an English public schoolboy dipped in chocolate.”
At this point you may be tempted to dismiss Starkey’s witterings as nothing more than fodder for the nether regions of the internet. I certainly thought so until former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe sent a whimper through Westminster last week when he launched a new hard-right political party, Restore Britain.
The Restore Britain party – not yet registered with the Electoral Commission – grew out of the pressure group of the same name, which Lowe founded in June 2025. It followed his expulsion from Reform UK for having allegedly “made threats of physical violence” against the party’s then chair, Zia Yusuf, a claim the businessman and landowner denies.
It was a meeting of minds: two men obsessed with re-creating a mythical England in which people like them got to say whatever they liked to people like us
Banished from Reform-land and loudly muttering “there’s a messianic cult around Farage!”, Lowe, clad in fine tweed, went wandering high o‘er hills and dale in search of his very own immigrant-free Camelot. It was, I imagine, somewhere beside the lake and beneath the trees that he bumped into the disgraced David Starkey.
It was undoubtedly a meeting of minds: two men obsessed with re-creating a mythical England in which people like them got to say whatever they liked to people like us, however ill-conceived and misinformed, without challenge.
Lowe promptly installed Starkey on the advisory board of Restore Britain (the pressure group, not the political party). Exactly what, if any, role Starkey will have in Lowe’s political party is unclear. What we do know is that once parties are formed they come under considerable scrutiny – as do their officials, MPs and advisers.
Journalist and broadcaster Sangita Myska
This brings us back to Starkey and Benjamin's self-styled “dissident right” podslop. The two men spend a fair amount of time bemoaning the fact they have been “cancelled” by mainstream media for saying things that are commonly understood to be sexist, or racist, or both. It means the only thing these two heroic survivors of the free-speech police have been left with is a bunch of lucrative speaking gigs and a huge online following (Benjamin alone has nearly 1 million subscribers to his YouTube channel) from which to make a living.
In the podcast, having already belittled his former room-mate by turning his blackness into a visual joke, Starkey adds: “He was of a Ghanaian princely background with all the arrogance of that combined with all the arrogance of a minor English public school and I loathed him, but I loathed him on grounds of what was inside, not what was actually outside.”
At this point, it’s worth reminding ourselves exactly what got Benjamin and Starkey “cancelled” in the first place. Back in 2019, Sargon was standing as a Ukip MEP when it was discovered he’d made a series of comments about sexual violence against the MP Jess Phillips. It culminated in him saying (on his YouTube channel): “There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest, nobody’s got that much beer.”
Logo for Rupert Lowe’s new - as yet unregistered - political party, Restore Britain
It was a year after that Starkey went on Brexiteer Darren Grimes’s podcast to share his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement. The royal historian’s admission that US history was not his bag wasn’t enough to prevent him from offering up this immortal piece of analysis: “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there? You know, an awful lot of them survived.”
The remarks were widely condemned for what they were: racist. It was of no surprise to anyone – other than to Starkey himself – that he was pushed out of roles at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, Canterbury Christ Church University and the Mary Rose Museum. Even Grimes cut the remarks from the recording, saying: “I reject in the strongest possible terms what Dr Starkey said in that clip.”
The thing about Starkey’s acts of reputational self-immolation is that he still so desperately wants to be part of the national discourse – and yet he can’t help but make that impossible. Prior to being signed up by the Restore Britain movement, he was focused on aligning himself with Reform UK. He was snapped with Nigel Farage and others at a lunch hosted by an American lobbying firm. He pitched up at Reform’s 2025 party conference, speaking alongside Mark Littlewood, the director of PopCon (the “movement” launched by former PM Liz Truss to “restore trust in politics”), and has bragged about MP Danny Kruger plagiarising him as a “wholly good thing” as the Reform MP prepares the party for government.
There is no doubt that Starkey, now 81, is knowledgeable, articulate and has stage presence. That’s exactly what appeals to Reform UK and its rival Restore Britain, within whose movement the constitutional expert has an official role. Every political ideology that uses race-based dog-whistles to appeal to its adherents requires a veneer of intellectual credibility. The very fact Rupert Lowe and Nigel Farage are willing to welcome a man who has repeatedly used racist language, shows no contrition, and continues to be shunned by academia tells its own story: for a clever man, David Starkey has proved himself to be a useful – and potentially dangerous – idiot.
Sangita Myska is an award-winning journalist and presenter best known for her political and social commentary.
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