Dr David Starkey (pictured) has long been seen as Britain’s bitchiest historian. Cattiness is his calling card, writes CRAIG BROWN
What is the world’s bitchiest profession? Some would nominate hairdressers (‘Deary me! Who cut this last?’). Others would argue, just as vehemently, for actors or supermodels or — but surely not! — journalists.
However, recent events have convinced me that, when it comes to cattiness, one profession beats all others hands down. I am talking of historians. Oddly enough, it is popularly regarded as a profession full of trusty, tweedy characters, steeped in wisdom. But beware! If ever you see a distinguished historian coming toward you, my advice is to dive into the nearest alley.
Dr David Starkey has long been seen as Britain’s bitchiest historian. Cattiness is his calling card.
One day, he compares the SNP to the Nazi Party; the next, he describes the Catholic Church as ‘riddled with corruption’. A few years ago, he described his fellow historian Mary Beard as old and ugly. Paradoxically, he also complained that only pretty female historians were given their own TV shows. After each of these outbursts, other members of his profession turn on him, demanding his resignation. In 2011, after he attacked black culture on Newsnight, 102 of his fellow historians signed a letter condemning him.
And now it has happened again. Following offensive remarks about ‘damn blacks’ — for which he apologised yesterday — he has been ejected from virtually every position he has ever held. Last week, his fellow historians called on him to resign his fellowship with the Royal Historical Society ‘with immediate effect’.
Should Starkey have expected forgiveness? Of course not. To expect kindness from a historian is as daft as expecting a welcoming lick from a boa constrictor. It is not what they are bred to do.
If history teaches us one thing, it is that historians are a funny lot, their personal pettiness increasing in direct proportion to their professional omniscience.
It has always been so. David Starkey reminds me of his predecessor as the terror of Tudor history, the late A.L. Rowse. Rowse’s diaries are full of swipes against colleagues. He complains that neither Isaiah Berlin and John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, ‘has been able to produce a single book of any weight’. He declares himself more intelligent than Hugh Trevor-Roper, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He calls Sir Arthur Bryant ‘second-rate’ and even has it in for Bryant’s dog Jimmy (‘I have never liked that dog’), rejoicing when Jimmy bit Bryant’s nose, turning it into ‘a perfect pickle, all bloody … It was poetic justice’.
In 1994, the elderly Rowse was visited by yet another Tudor historian, Sir Roy Strong, who sniped in his diary that Rowse’s ‘suit was filthy and his chin covered with tufted stubble’.
Ten years earlier, Strong had invited the distinguished historian Sir J.H. Plumb to dinner, noting that he was ‘querulous and ill-tempered’ and that he referred to Trevor-Roper ‘with venomous dislike’. In 2001, Strong marked Plumb’s passing with something close to glee: ‘He became bad-tempered and jealous in his last years…Isaiah Berlin called him an ignoble character.’ Girls, girls!
David Starkey reminds me of his predecessor as the terror of Tudor history, the late A.L. Rowse, writes CRAIG BROWN (pictured)
Trevor-Roper himself was the Maestro of Malice, the Professor of Poison. He called A.L. Rowse ‘the Cornish egomaniac’, and C.S. Lewis ‘a purple-faced bachelor living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness’. He loved nothing more than plotting a colleague’s downfall. Pacing around his college, he was once overheard asking: ‘Whom can I ruin next?’
It is almost as if, overawed by the majesty and complexity of their chosen subject, historians slope into the broom-cupboard of university politics, ready to suck on the comfort-blanket of bitchery.
J.H.Plumb and Hugh Trevor-Roper both came back into the news at the weekend. Apparently they had taken opposite sides in the argument about ousting the art historian Sir Anthony Blunt from the British Academy after his exposure as a Soviet spy in 1979.
Trevor-Roper reg-arded Blunt ‘with contempt’, but was against expelling him, as it would make the academy look ridiculous. Plumb, on the other hand, believed that Blunt, ‘that awful man’, should resign.
In his brilliant book, Our Age, yet another historian, Lord Annan, remembers Blunt’s conversation as ‘baited…with gossip, inside gossip, gossip. When he had gone, it dawned on you with what skill he had faintly denigrated those about whom he talked … a flick of the whip here and a twist of the knife there’.
With salons back open, we can all rest easy. The most grievous snips come not from hairdressers, but from historians.