David Starkey is, according to his Wiki, a famous British historian and a famous conservative/right-wing political commentator. In 2020, he got in trouble for saying something racist, and since then, he no longer appears on various British political programs. Instead, he’s built up a YouTube channel and following, and he’s still considered by some as some kind of authoritative right-wing figure/historian. He’s currently 80 years old. He’s about to give some kind of major lecture at the Oxford Literary Festival, in partnership with the Telegraph, which is why the newspaper profiled him. He ended up saying some genuinely hilarious and interesting things about the British monarchy, which is why I’m covering it.

His general thoughts on the monarchy: The monarchy is “fading into irrelevance”, he discloses. The King is woke. William is “hopeless… Nature intended him to be the manager of a second-division football team.” (And he’d be “rather stretched at that”.) Much blame lies with the late Queen, who was “obsessed about the Commonwealth” and spent too much time “sucking up to African dictators”.

Britain was ruined by its elite: In the 1960s, he tells me, Britain became freer, but the prudes and the Lefties used the law – notably the Race Relations Act – and social media to restore censorship. The fight-back has started; he sees the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Elon Musk as a turning point. “I follow practically every tweet of Elon Musk. He is a genuine liberator.”

His thoughts on QEII: New Labour embedded the revolution further with equality and green laws, plus devolution – “a disaster” – and the old guard, terrified of sounding “nasty”, offered no protest. This is his serious point about the late Queen: she “effectively abandoned” her “essential function as government under the King”, preferring to tour the world talking to tin-pots rather than define and promote the British character.

The British monarchy has no function: Today, the monarchy “has no visible function at all… Look at the continental monarchies, particularly the Dutch – what colour does the Dutch soccer team wear? Orange. The House of Orange. Because the various monarchies can act as an exceedingly effective focus of an historic nationalism.” By contrast, the members of our Royal family, embarrassed by the Empire, project a drippy cosmopolitanism, their castles packed with “jaw-dropping wealth” that “makes the Elysée Palace look like a corner shop”.

[From The Telegraph]

He speaks at length about Elon Musk and how brilliant Musk is, which really ruins what I see as his incisive critique of the Windsors. The Musk BS makes me wonder if he’s genuinely skeptical of the Windsors, or if he’s just being a contrarian for contrarian’s sake. Still, I’ll be laughing about “William is hopeless… Nature intended him to be the manager of a second-division football team…[And he’d be] rather stretched at that” for a long time. I wonder how history will judge QEII’s Commonwealth obsession too, especially since it feels like those Commonwealth connections died with her. Charles’s reception in Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting was poorly attended and it seemed like the whole thing could have been an email. The point about the “jaw-dropping wealth” is very true as well, but no, the Windsors do not project a drippy cosmopolitanism. They WISH they came across as cosmopolitan.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.