In Conversation With David Starkey

In the latest issue of Total Politics I have an IN CONVERSATION interview with David Starkey. He sure knows how to give good interview. You can read the full interview HERE, but here are a few extracts...

What do you think of politicians as public speakers?
Very few are any good at all. I can't really think of any current ones who are. I was never impressed with Blair. Cameron is all right.
Blair was quite a good platform speaker because he could act.
Yes, but if you are to be a really impressive public speaker, there's got to be content, and of course there never was. There was blather of common places. And also, I don't think with really good public speaking you should be too keen to please. Blair has a labrador quality.
Isn't that endemic in politics though?
It's endemic in current politics. I don't think Churchill fell over himself in his desire to please. I suppose what has really happened is that the idea of the major political speech as sustained exposition - explanation, policy - that has largely vanished, because most of them don't have any policies to explain. By no means are all the 'great' 19th century speeches really great, but some of them are.
Wasn't that because they had no other way of explaining things, whereas nowadays there are?
But how often are they used? How often is there any real exposition of policy at all? What's astonishing is that we have a Prime Minister who is supposed to be an intellectual - I've never seen any evidence of this, but we are told all the time that Brown was a brilliant student and briefly held a university position. I've never heard one word from him that suggests connected thought. If you look at the alleged 'great rescue' of the economy there are two ways you can explain it. One is that he was grounded in serious understanding of Keynesianism and all the rest of it, and the other is that Brown is doing what he's always done best which is throw money at things. And nothing he has said has persuaded me that it was anything other than the latter.
Is there a figure in Tudor history you would liken Gordon Brown to?
Gordon Brown actually reminds me more of a figure of modern literature. There is a real feeling of Kenneth Widermerpool about him from Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Widmerpool is the dreadful, plodding figure, who's only good sport at school is cross-country running. While all his brilliant, charming contemporaries bugger it up, Widmerpool rises! It seems to me that with Brown there is a complete sense of humour and charm bypass. There is that relentless bludgeoning quality with his alleged 'brilliant performances' as chancellor, the machine-gun fire of statistics that were always at least ten degrees from the point. But no charm, no wit.
Do you think we're now seeing the results of that type of education, where very few politicians seem to have any sort of historical knowledge or perspective at all?
That's absolutely right and it also goes along with a particular type of society - if you like the Californisation of the world. One of my American friends said many, many years ago - decades ago - that what you've got to understand in California is that with that blue sky and eternal sunshine and lonely beaches, the concept of the past can't exist. We're all Californians now! And I think a very interesting example was someone like Princess Diana - from the grandest, upper-crust English background - and yet her references, modes of behaviour, appearance and dress suggested she was born in Orange County. Didn't she think that Duran Duran were more or less the best thing since sliced bread?
And she was right! Couldn't you actually come up with a character from any age of whom you could say that about?
Well, the airhead isn't a new phenomenon. But what was still particularly interesting was what sort of fecundity she represented. And most of the young women on television it seems to me seem to belong in this kind of Orange County 'never never land'.
Talking of women in history, you've come in for some flak recently for your comments about the so-called feminisation of history.
I can't imagine why. It seemed to me such a sensible, gentle comment. If you have a large number of women historians, writing for a readership where a very large percentage are women, you will get a certain kind of editing and presentation of history. It was no more than that.
Couldn't you make the counter argument that men writing about history put a particular slant to it also?
Of course you can. That's precisely what I was saying: that certain sorts of things are put into the foreground like personal relationships, the role of the wives and so on - and I have after all written the defi nitive book on Henry and his wives - but certain other things are put into the background, like war and religion.
You also sparked controversy with your remarks on Question Time about Scotland being a "feeble little nation".
It was a joke! The question was did I think the English should treat St George's Day the same way the Scots and all the rest of them treat their saints' days - St Andrew, St Patrick and my answer was no. That would mean we would become a feeble little nation like them and we're showing every sign of doing just that. H.G. Wells has this wonderful phrase - "the English are the only nation without national dress". It is a glory that we don't have such a thing. If you want to be academic about it, there are two completely different patterns of nationalism in the British Isles - the Celtic nationalism of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, which is entirely typical nineteenth century European nationalism, an invention based on folklore, supposed authentic peasant cultures which are entirely fictional, national dress, national music and some goddamn awful national poet like Burns. English nationalism went through that phase under Henry VIII. But if you do really want me to go back to being abusive - I would say that Scotland's decisions with the Libyan bomber confi rms everything I said about them. If you want to see what happens when a country becomes 'little' - when you have a government that wouldn't make county councillors in England, and a Minister of Justice that is an underemployed solicitor - that's what you get. And I am not anti-Scottish, I love Scotland - my childhood holidays were there - apart from that fact it pissed with rain all the time. But Scotland's greatness took place not in medieval history when it was a catastrophe of a place, but in its long, long association with England and Britain. The transformation of Scotland from this deeply backward Presbyterian horror of the early 17th century - where you still hang a lad in the 1690s for denying the existence of the Devil - to this extraordinary 'Athens of the North' of the Scottish enlightenment, the amazing products of Glasgow University in the 18th century, is when Scotland looks out as part of a greater whole. What's happened of course is that Scotland is now looking in. It has become exactly like medieval Scotland - the clannishness, the introversion, chucking money at the Edinburgh Festival to make it 'more Scottish', that awful Parliament, the dreadful Parliament building. The self-indulgence of the whole thing, the complete sense of in-growing toenail; I mean Edinburgh has turned into a city where you can see its toes growing in.
What do you make of what this government has done to the constitution?
Catastrophic. One of the great problems is that when you have no written constitution, there is nothing that is actually entrenched. It's only respect for convention that holds you back, and Labour has a very bad record in this regard - going back to the Parliament Act - of forcing major constitutional change unilaterally. Always, of course, in the name of social justice and nice things like that. The situation that we find ourselves in now is that our structure of government is broken.
So what's the Starkey recipe for fixing it?
We need a version of the American constitution. When you think of all the silly fuss over the office of Lord Chancellor - when did a Lord Chancellor last do any serious harm? The alleged confusion of political and judicial functions. What's been so striking about a lot of Labour constitutional reform is that on the one hand it's done big things that it shouldn't have done, and it's also done little things that there was no need to do like fiddle around with the position of Lord Chancellor. The catastrophe is one body being both the executive and the legislative. It means that it does neither job very well. In particular our Parliament is useless as a legislature. It's why our legislation is so awful. It's why, of course, MPs have actually got no function. MPs now are, at best, overpaid social workers. What we need, I think, is something very much like the American model, and I would go the whole hog. I would have a directly elected Prime Minister. The emergence of somebody like Gordon Brown, who is so totally unsuited to the office and never actually been subject to the test of election, would be unthinkable in America, because from primaries onwards you are subject to this test. We should have something very much like the American cabinet, which is outside the legislature. We should have an elected Lords. The obvious basis for the Lords are the old counties. The catastrophe of the semi-abolition of the old counties under Heath was a catastrophe. Incidentally, there's only been one government that's as bad as this and that's Heath's. Heath and Joseph together were a catastrophe. Every single thing they touched turned to something brown. I would create a second chamber that has two members elected from each county.
You were quite rude about the Queen. What about Prince Charles, what's your view on him?
I wasn't rude about the Queen...
You called her a "provincial house wife".
Well that's right. It's what she is. And provincial house wives are not without virtue, my mother was one. They are not without virtue at all, and ...
Why were you happy to receive your CBE from a "provincial housewife"?
I didn't, I received it from the crown. [Laughs]. She's had the virtues of solidity, of good sense, of rugged determination to stick at the job, and she's had the vices of a complete lack of imagination, of style, of no interest in anything but horses and farming.
I learnt the other day that she's a supporter of my team, West Ham United.
Well there you are that's even more of a problem then isn't it [laughter]? Charles, you know, is almost the mirror image. I like the idea that somebody gets excited about things like architecture and the environment. Far too few people in Britain do. He's also got an extraordinarily impressive track record, which really is worth thinking about, in organisational terms. Think of things like The Prince's Trust. It's one of the few bodies in Britain that's got any kind of serious record in genuine rehabilitation, of genuinely getting the young out of this dreadful rut of three-generational unemployment - and as you know we now have some 20 per cent plus of the nation stuck in that rut. Anybody that can help [them] get out is a good thing. I mean, poor Prince Charles, he is in one sense profoundly conservative, but like me he's a child of the 60s. And you know he found himself, like Henry VIII, shipwrecked against concepts of marriage as a kind of public act, and the desire for private happiness - and he didn't have Henry VIII's available methods of solving the problem [laughs].
What do you think of Nick Clegg?
[Sighs] Do I think anything at all of Nick Clegg? Quite a good looking young man but I mean... There's a sort of 'who he' quality about him isn't there?
Going back to the Scotland, Wales issue, are you in favour of an English Parliament?
In the current arrangement you certainly need something like that. We probably need a genuinely federal system. I can see lots of reasons why, for historic nations that have come together as Britain did, this would actually be a rather good way of managing things. What I think is much more important, and I care about much more, would be a revival of local government. We've recently acquired a house in America in a little town on the Chesapeake called Chestertown. It's 4,500 people, it's a retirement community. I was entranced by the town. The core of it's 18th and 19th century - lovely and safe and handsome and a civilised community - but what strikes you about it is that it's like going back to my childhood in a rather bigger town, Kendal in Westmorland [now Cumbria] which was then 20,000 but is probably a bit bigger now.When I was a boy, Kendal had its own fire service, it had its own police force, it had its own mayor and council that were responsible for virtually everything that mattered. Chestertown still has. Now we have this ludicrous argument for the professionalisation of services but if you're in Kent, where I am, they're all 30 miles away. Ditto police. Four thousand five hundred people is twice the size of medieval York. London under Henry VIII was 50,000. Medieval York was capable of sustaining its guilds, contributing to the building of its cathedral, that vibrant civic life. Again one of the reasons for the kind of disease and sense of atrophy in national politics is that politics should build itself from the grass-roots up. The roots have withered because people genuinely don't control their own lives. It's absurd that the basic unit of government in London now is well over quarter of a million. Antony Jay published a book arguing that the natural human unit is about a legion or a regiment - it's about 1000 people. [He argues that] a group like that, where a high degree of common knowledge is possible, is the obvious unit. I think it's too small. Again you see what's so different about America is that the federal government can't change local government. Local government - the county, city structure - is an absolute given. It's embedded within the law. Look at the number of different arrangements that have been made for the performance of justice in the last 15 or 20 years. There's a complete disconnection between units of local government and how the judiciary works, whereas in America there are the courts at county level, the courts at state level, the courts at federal level, and there is a very close relationship between those areas and political boundaries. Again, look at the courthouse. We've spent all our time knocking wonderful Victorian courts down. In America the courthouse is nearly always one of the great centres of a town or township with an immense pride and history to it. Whereas we've gone in for perpetual deracinating change. I mean look at the National Health Service, the millions, billions, trillions that have been squandered on perpetual rejigging, rejigging, rejigging.
Oh come on, you know you're not allowed to criticise the NHS. You've almost committed anact of treason if you do that.
Bevan I think was basically deranged. Why should that particular set of arrangements become the definition of patriotism?
Particularly after 60 years.
It bears about as much relationship to modern Britain as, you know, the Christianity of the Bible does [laughter]. It's a joke, but we've touched on a very interesting point. With the loss of belief in real political institutions what you do is retain belief but it becomes a kind of mere sentimentalism. The most powerful force in English public life currently is an absolute sentimentalism. And the worst sort of sentimentalism is that which surrounds the National Health Service. It leads to a refusal to think seriously about things. Again the embrace of certain types of multiculturalism and whatever, they're forms of gross sentimentality. Refusal to analyse, refusal to look fairly and squarely at consequences.

Read the full interview HERE. You can subscribe to the print edition of Total Politics HERE.