Waiting for Dr Nasty

David Starkey is no longer quite as eager to show off his bitchy side, but he can be persuaded …

 ‘I don’t think I could have been Dr Fluffy,’ says David Starkey, poised behind a hake. ‘No. Absolutely not Dr Fluffy.’ He takes a sip of wine. He looks like an evil Professor Yaffle.

I am here because I have long wanted to interview him, principally because once, when I was working for a newspaper gossip column, he gave me a line about Tories and sado-masochism too revolting to print. And he is always in trouble. On Jamie’s Dream School, a reality TV show where poor teenagers got celebrity teachers, Starkey, who has never been a member of Historians For Censorship, called a fat child ‘fat’. After the riots he appeared on Newsnight and announced, ‘The whites have become black.’ And two weeks ago he told a conference debating the National Curriculum that English schools should have ‘a serious focus on your own culture’. This is not, in my view, an insane opinion, but the Daily Mail quoted someone calling him a racist.

But I can only muse on him initially, because he is 42 minutes late. I wonder if he is in WHSmith putting his books in front of Simon Schama’s, or if he has simply fallen under a bus. Eventually he waddles over, gives me a damp kiss and sits. No apology or explanation; as Max Bialystock said in The Producers, everyone is a big shot.

‘I don’t necessarily like talking about myself,’ he says, opening his napkin. ‘The interview is a strange art.’

Starkey is grammar school-educated. ‘Northern peasant stock,’ he tells me, preening. He may have the tastes of a toff — I bumped into him at the Royal Opera House once, sitting front centre in the royal circle — but his father was a factory foreman, and his mother a thwarted ‘tiger mother’.