TRIGGERnometry - David Starkey - I Won't Bow Down to the Mob

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Eminent historian and prolific author Dr David Starkey joins us in the studio once again. Get TICKETS to TRIGGERnometry Live with Ayishat Akanbi here: https://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873621622 Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What do we do with people like you in society? People who are talented and brilliant, but also take risks and make mistakes and sometimes say things that are insensitive and some people find... Always insensitive, yeah. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishon. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Returning to the show today, we have one of Britain's most brilliant historians and a very controversial one of that. Dr. David Starkey, welcome back. Hello.

I reference of... I'm going to absolutely put you on the spot. I should be so straightforward, calm, neutral, totally uncontroversial. Yeah, I doubt that very much, David. Back to you to tease it out of me. We'll do our best.

But welcome back. Thank you. Last time we had you on the show, as you alluded to in our conversation prior to us starting, we were in a very different place, but I put it to you, so were you. How have you been this past 18 months? much as I am now.

I take it you're referring to the unfortunate and dramatic events of last July, or were you just talking about COVID? No, no, I was talking about the fact that shortly after we had you on the show, you were speaking to Darren Grimes on his show, you made what I think you said in one of your recent interviews were stupid remarks for which you apologized, and there since then ensued a whole maelstrom of various things. So tell us about that.

Yes, well, I did make a stupid remark. I used the word damn in front of the word blacks, which was a very stupid thing to do. On the other hand, what I was saying, which is that slavery is not genocide, or at least the Atlantic trade slavery, is not genocide, is a straightforward statement of fact. About 300,000 black people were exported, or they were treated as chattels, were, exported enslaved ships to the south of what is now the United States, 300,000 within three generations, there are millions. Now, that's not a genocide. But of course, whatever forgets, one piece of slavery was a genocide.

And that's the slavery to the Islamic world. That is the slavery that actually goes overland in Africa to what was then called the Ottoman Empire. The best estimates are it was 20 million, 20 million, of whom the men were castrated and the women were kept as concubines. And most of the children, which are, of course, mixed race, Turkish, or whatever you want to call it, Ottoman and African, the children have their brains dashed out. That is a genocide. But we don't talk about that because there's no white guilt. There's no guilt of David Starkey in that.

So we don't talk about it. But of course, David, that isn't the remark that people took the issue with. The remark was down, there's so many down. It was simply, of course, it was stupid. What I was in, and also I even mentioned, right, come on, let's explore. I'm sure neither of you have ever said a word out of turn. Ever, ever, ever said a word out of turn. I committed a second stupidity.

I meant to illustrate it by saying there wouldn't be so many in America and my tongue slipped and I said Africa deranged very very bad and for somebody who prides himself on position of language disgraceful. On the other hand one word damn four letters if people had had their wishes an entire career would have been destroyed for four letters. Who is actually seriously hurt? Why is a word, one word, given this extraordinary weight? Isn't it a bit religious? Isn't it superstitious? Isn't it the kind of verbal fetishism?

Doesn't it smack of national hysteria? In other words, exactly, for example, what happened around the death of Diana or what the great, another great historian, even greater than me, what Lord McCauley described as the nothing more ridiculous than the British public in one of its fits of morality. It was a fit of morality. We should, come on, we should, you ask, right, why am I treating it relatively lightly? No, no, no, hold on, hold on.

I'm not saying, I disagree with you. You know my view on this work stuff and all of that. And you know how much we like and respect you on the show. You are one of our favorite guests of all time. No question about that. The point I would make to is, I would make to, is, I would, I don't think people were concerned about the one word. What a lot of people said at the time,

including people we respect also, people like Catherine Bourbel Singh, who we had on the show, that this wasn't the first time you'd had a slip of the tongue in relation to race. And so their perception was, let me just finish this, their perception was that it wasn't an individual instance of a mistake, which we all make, all of us. You alluded to, of course, all of us make slip ups,

but rather that it was a pattern of behavior that was reflective of an attitude. towards race. That was the point that people made. Personally, I didn't necessarily agree with that, but that was the point that people made. So what do you say to them? I would love to see what the evidence... You see, again, I'm sorry, I'm really boring.

I believe in evidence. I made a comment at the time of the race riots in 2011, which said some seem to me to be absolutely true, but was regarded as being outrageous, that these were black riots, which they were. The evidence is absolutely. overwhelming. If you actually look at the maps of the riots, it was nothing to do directly with impoverishment. There were areas that were very much more impoverished that didn't riot.

It was to do with a particular attitude. In other words, a form of imitation of urban behaviour that has been imported from America. The riots, you know, shopping with violence were very, very similar to the pattern that we saw after Floyd's death. And it's a particular imported pattern of behaviour, which is not, I think, one that we were used to in Britain. I think it's deeply unfortunate. This is nothing, this is not, so I am not criticizing race. I am criticising behavioural patterns. I'm not criticising skin colour.

I'm criticising things that people decide to do, right? In the same way, why was I agitated on the question of whether it's, it's genocide or not. Why does that question come up? It comes up because I'm afraid the whole question of slavery, monstrous though it is, is deliberately being weaponised in a specific cultural context, which is why what I was talking about at the beginning, why what is the most monstrous aspect of the slave trade is deliberately ignored because it does not attack the West. The reason again that there's a talk about slavery is genocide, you're a Jew. Unfortunately, there's a great problem with Jews.

You are absolutely... We're going to clip that day. I'm going to just to let you know. David Starkey, there is a big problem with Jews. There is a big problem with Jews, which is you are mope, the most depressed people ever. And that is a very jealously guarded status. and it's also one that people are very jealous about. Black activists are absolutely Palestinian activists are outraged at the fact that the genocide gives you this kind of moral...

It is a testament to a sick society that the genocide becomes a kind of badge of pride, weirdly and bizarrely. And this is why there is an attempt at portraying slavery in exactly this fashion, so that you can say the whole of the West is guilty of pseudo-Nazes. Haven't you observed how the left, I think we should start calling the far left. That is everybody, even faintly to the left of Keir Stama, is far left.

Look how far to the left he is. Have you not noticed how they're all throwing around the term Nazi, the term fascist? Have you thought of the disgrace, for example, of talking about the person that I appeared with last night, Nigel Farage, as a Nazi or a fascist? What is the contempt that that shows for the victims of the real Nazis and the real fascists? That you, again, you elide the kind of language that somebody like Farage uses with the concentration camps and the gas chambers. This is what I find deeply, deeply shocking, scandalous and disgraceful,

that we are using these, that we're eliding these slips of tongue with monstrous behaviors and acts. We've got to separate words from action. This is the classic position in America with the First Amendment and all the rest of it, that there is absolute clear distinction between words as words and words that invoke action. The famous remark,

the one thing you can't say under freedom of speech is fire in a theatre, because it provokes behavior. But it's a really good point, David, that you've just made. And we were talking before how we've conflated words with violence and words with action. But words have power. And I would argue to you that what those words are being used, Nazi, racist, fascist, anti-vaxxer now, what they're doing is they're using words in order to shut down a discussion.

Of course. In order to bludgeon somebody into not speaking their opinion. as indeed a previous authority that was very keen on words and policing words, the whole business of the medieval church and the use of heresy and heresy trials to shut people up. I mean, it's fascinating, again, putting all these things together. You remember the great fuss that's being made about the statue of Cecil Rhodes on the front of Oriel College at Oxford.

One of the other statues there that nobody actually complains about is a man called Archbishop Arundel, who is an early fellow of the college, he is the man who very nearly destroys the University of Oxford in about 1400, when he uses his power over the Church of England to issue the Arnold's constitutions,

and they literally shut down intellectual debate in England for a century. As a Cambridge man, I used to be quite proud of being a Cambridge man, but a long time ago, well, 18 months ago, That's a vast, vast period that we were talking about before. What Arundel did to the University of Oxford gave Cambridge its chance. Does anybody notice this?

Does anybody care about it? Because the universities, public life in general, our companies, have lost any notion of the value of freedom of speech. It seems to me to be an absolute value. If you want to look at what distinguishes us, what distinguishes the West from the rest, it is simply freedom. As we're now discovering with China,

you can actually have prosperity without freedom. Our only hope is that freedom which will encourage the fermentation of ideas, the development of new technologies and so on. If I'm afraid you can have new ideas without freedom were lost. were lost. I mean, it's an excellent point. The problem is, as well,

it's not just that we're losing freedom of speech, we're also losing the ability to fight for it. People don't want to seem to fight for things anymore. There's cowardice. Cowardous. Again, in the moment, I really do think we are in a form of war, and some people can cope with war, and some people can't. Some people can put their heads above the parapet,

and some people can't. I refuse to bow the neck. I refuse to take the knee. I refused to submit my mind to anybody. I was very fortunate. I come from a long line of dissenters, I mean, literal, religious descent. I also had a mother,

despite all the problems that we later had over my sexuality, who gave me an iron self-confidence. And I've always taken a pride in that. again, I was brought up in a strange religious denomination, the Society of Friends, Quakers, where there was this, in theory, emphasis on plain speaking, plain on varnished speech. But why do you think we're at war?

Because that's a very bold statement. And also a lot of stupid people will, you know, people don't understand metaphors anymore, or they choose not to. So what do you mean when you say we're at war? I think it is the first time, right, let's look at this and try and, again, pull back, use karma language, non-metaphorical language. When I grew up, the West was in a thing that was, well, I was born at the end of a real war. I was born in 1945 at the very end of the First World War.

My mother said that I was the only person in Cancel who actually slept through VE Day. It's a contented baby. Then, of course, I grew up with the Cold War, which was also, of course, the great nuclear standoff. We knew there was a power, those of us were at all intelligent, that wished to destroy us, that had opposed values to us, the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is seen off.

It collapses under its own contradictions, the absurdities of communism, all of this stuff. Oh, we've never tried communism. Has any doctrine ever been more rigorously pursued at a greater cost of human life that dwarfs even the horrors of Nazism? Anyway, communism collapses. And then at which point there was this absurd man with the wondrous name Fukuyama came along and talked about the inevitable triumph of the West and liberal capitalism and whatever. But the seeds of something different had been so. This was an internal enemy, an attack on the attack on the West.

the absolute fundamentals of Western society. We've really got to understand this. This is what... Everybody jokes, or we sort of joke about woke, because it is so preposterous. And it's so stupid. I mean, the idea that merely by saying, I want to be a woman, I am a woman.

This is, again, it's religious, Francis. It literally is religious. I mean, it is the equivalent of the priest saying Hoces corpus. I mean, the word transubstantiation of the word trans, transsexual. It's the same word. You're trying to change one thing into another merely by words. It's incantatory. It's magic. Now, this reversion to religious primitivism, this giving language priority over fact, feeling priority over fact, is a deliberate reaction against modernity, against progress, against science, against everything that

has made our lives better, longer, healthier, more comfortable than the lives of any human freer than the lives of any human beings before. And so it is really an attempt at destroying everything, and it's purely destructive. At least communism thought it had an alternative. This has no alternative. I mean, nobody has ever, these extraordinary people, like Professor, whatever is called, Bhopal at the college opposite, my former college at Cambridge, at Churchill College, that she wants to see the disappearance of whiteness.

Now, if that's not an invocation to genocide, I really don't know what he is. I mean, destroy white values. Now, people on BBC television, mainstream television, the or Osogas of this world, want apparently to destroy whiteness. Now, what does that actually mean? It means, if you're being polite, they want to destroy a culture. Well, I think that's called cultural genocide. But how do you destroy a culture without destroying people

unless you put them in a concentration camp? Nobody bothers to interrogate this language. Nobody puts them on the spot. All these big companies politely nod their head. The BBC nods its head. The Metropolitan Police nod its head. Even for God's sake, Covent Garden is the... nodding his head. So that's why this is appeasement. This is the appeasement stage before war.

I suppose I'm now identifying myself as a new intellectual, with characteristic modesty as the new intellectual Churchill. I would push back on the saying that they don't want anything. To me, these people are utopians, just in a way as a more misguided people in who are. Yeah, but what you right, okay Francis, I'll challenge you. Describe the utopians. They want. Okay, they want a utopia where we, you know, trans women are women. Everybody lives free from the oppressive patriarchal structures. I'm not saying I believe in it. I'm just putting forward the argument where racism isn't a problem, where white supremacy isn't a problem, where people are elevated, etc. I think more succinctly it's they want the end of the discriminates.

Yeah. They want, they want for everyone to be equal and for there to be no discrepancy. Now, look, we're more intelligent than that, hey, we understand that those things aren't always possible. But that's what they want. No discrimination, everybody's equal. Well, I've got no problem with that. But they want discrimination. They want discrimination against whites. They want preferential treatment for people of different skin pigmentation.

Stormsy has sponsored outrageously scholarships that came between the own given to people with black skins. Now, that's, I mean, sorry, that is what Martin Luther King fought against with his life. isn't it? Moving on slightly, one of the things you pioneered in many ways, we had Tim Stanley, the historian in here a few weeks ago, and he was talking about one of the transformations in our understanding of history that you were a huge leader in was to re-emphasize the role of the individual,

the huge character, the huge personality. And we are obviously operating right now in extraordinary times, by any historical period, I think, it's fair to say, with COVID, with lockdown, with all of the cultural stuff that's going on. Who are the personalities of today who are going to shape our historical perspective on this period of time, do you think? And what is the process that's happening now? Very difficult to say. I mean, there's been a kind of abdication, hasn't there?

I mean, there are clearly big personalities, something like Boris Johnson. But you remember that wonderful phrase of, he, Cummings that a politician is a cushion upon which everything is sat but a man. And Boris takes whatever shape. I mean, it's complete shape-shifting. It is a kind of inflatable, squidgy, funny cushion, a kind of perpetually shifting clown mask, plastic. There are individuals, does anybody?

I'm falling silent because a handful of us, I think, have some sort of grasp, but we're mere intellectuals, we're little people on the margin of things. Is there any big figure, any statesman, any church leader? I mean, all the things you used to look to. I mean, look at Archbishop Welby. well-being, that absolutely vacuous windbag, his mouth stuffed with dreary business speak. I mean, can there be a clearer illustration of the complete loss of what was one of the intellectual and, intellectual and, the word, let's utter it, spiritual centres than the performers that he put up

at the beginning of lockdown at the Easter when, as it were, he's celebrating. the closure of churches by celebrating Holy Communion in front of a kitchen cabinet. Can there be a more appropriate metaphor for using that word that I shouldn't? For that loss of meaning of seriousness. Because that's what's happened, isn't it? Maybe it's just that we're too comfortable that if you look at the seriousness of culture in the Soviet Union where the persistence of serious classical music, the seriousness with which even the communist state took scholarship and learning, those terrible pressures

were brought to bear by totalitarianism and our flaccid, formless, self-indulgent consumerism. I mean, I'm as guilty of it anybody, I'm a creature of the 60s. in many ways, although I had to fight intellectually I had to fight through scholarships and all the rest of it, one had extraordinarily easy life and it was a life of perpetual opening opportunity there was the whole hedonism

of the developing gay lifestyle, there was the pleasure of increasing prosperity, we've had very, very comfortable times. In other words, there is a terrible whiff, isn't there? of the end of Rome. And the thing that's most striking, going to your point, about the end of Rome,

is how invisible the emperors are. These, these times, you know, the last emperor, Augustulus Romulus, the littlest, Augustus, the littlest Romulus, and honorius who was without honor, the disappearance of serious thinkers, the lack of proper generals, It's awfully

reminiscent. Well, this is what worries me and I was going to ask you, David, because, you know, we've addressed your controversy. Do you think part of the reason that the caliber of thinkers, of politicians, of our leaders, our spiritual leaders, prevents people who are big characters

who speak honestly, sometimes wrongly, sometimes stupidly, as you've said. They take risks. They take risks. but they're prepared to make a stand on principle, which is always going to alienate some people. They're prepared to speak their mind, which will always alienate some people,

and they're prepared to take a risk, which doesn't always pay off, as we know, but sometimes pays off hugely. We don't want those people anymore as a society. We punish those people. Particularly, I was having a very interesting discussion at the Farage show last night with a couple of trainee teachers.

And, of course, that is what has exactly happened in teaching. in some ways for the best reasons. When I was a schoolboy, you had these monstrous characters of teaching, completely extraordinary people, clearly half of a significant number of them were perverts, and very often the best

teachers, again, things, truths that we cannot speak. Very often, the people, in my experience, of course, because I'm much older, so many of mine were returnees from the war. They'd been shot up, they'd had bad wars,

they'd had good wars, they could talk about nothing else, they couldn't mention it, but they were extraordinary people. And again, teaching needs extraordinary people. You look at the great writers of children's books. Every one of them is semi-mad, and some of them are wholly mad. From Louis Carroll

downwards and onwards. But they have this magical quality that attracts and holds attention. Now, of course, we've replaced charisma with celebrity, which is an utterly empty thing, the famous for being famous. The point that you made just there is so true when it comes to teaching, because when I was a teacher, over 12 years, I saw it changed. It become a tick-box exercise.

It became, did you meet this target, this target, this target, whilst actually the people who were brilliant teachers, the Mavericks, the free thinkers, the people who could truly engage children and make them wonder and make them want to break out. Or cross. Or cross. Or angry. Yes. But involve them. In cite some kind of emotion in them. Inspire them. They slowly drifted away or rapidly forced out. Yes. Because they didn't fit into a box. And that's what we want in our society. We want boxes. We want a box. You're a gay man. You're here. You're trans, you're here. You're straight, you're here. But life doesn't work like that.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But it is, we're in an age which is competent at everything and good at nothing. That apart from technological fiddles, you look at now in terms of, say, the performing arts, we are wonderful. There have never been more competent performances. Who is actually creating anything? look at the mountainous heap of rubbish of modern art. And it is absurd.

It is simply absurd, propelled, of course, by people with too much money who treat it simply as an investment opportunity or something to decorate their overpriced loft or bank atrium. So never as the word creativity been used more often with less actually being created. And again, there are all sorts of things which are really very uncomfortable to say. We generally speaking, I think, agree that our politicians are, to put it as mildly, I know we're now supposed to be nice about politicians following recent events,

but they are a pretty uninspiring lot. I mean, when your greatest achievement is to further the affairs of your constituency, Well, that's fine, but getting the streets cleaned really isn't the most noble of human acts. And there's been, why has that happened? Well, it is, of course, the equivalent of what's happened to teaching. It's the creation of the professional politician class in which these people are paid and salaried. And why is that happened? Because our old governing class has died and been deliberately wiped out.

Now, again, there was a huge amount wrong with the gentry and the nobility, but equally, there were these... You look at Churchill makes this point brilliantly because, of course, he was one of these people. He points out that we were better governed when our elite was drawn from 600 families than we are when it's drawn from 50 million. Well, talk about... But he's absent. If you look at the calibre of our 18th and 19th century politicians, If you look at the calibre of our 19th century prime ministers, you look at figures like Peel and Gladstone and Israeli.

They are tiger in their sheer intellectual power, let alone anything else. Not Israeli, but Gladstone and Peel. They are the absolute stars of Oxford. They're highly competent at maths. They're brilliant classicists. They're sheer, as well as rhetorical power, imagination, You look at what those two men do, and you compare it with any politician of the later 20th century.

And they shrivel to a pea. David, there's another thing that you bring up, since we're talking about controversial subjects, and this is something I think is very important to talk about. I told you I wouldn't. You did. I didn't expect you to be faithful to that, to be honest. But look, we talk about politicians, and you mentioned, you allude to, rather, the murder of Sir David Amos very recently. and one of the things I find absolutely mind-boggling,

and perhaps you can help me with this, is he was murdered to all intents and purposes, as far as we know, by an Islamist extremist who was radicalized online. Or by his father. Well, I was not... I mean, if you actually look at the evidence of the kind of things that his father was saying, this was clearly a family that was fully Islamic.

Well, you come to the very point that I was trying to make, And I'm not aware of the situation with the father. Perhaps you're better on. It's been widely reported. Okay. So, in response to that, our politicians' reaction was to talk about online anonymity. Deranged. And I think there's a very nuanced conversation to be had about Islam.

We've had former Al-Qaeda agents turned down my Sikhs and former's on the show. I understand the complexities of that issue. It's not as simple as some people like to make. out to be. But on the other hand, I mean, I just, I think it needs to be dealt with and addressed. And yet the response from our political class is to ignore it and to talk about something else. I don't understand what's happening there, do you? It is an elephant in an Arab headdress, isn't it? In the room. I do understand it's too dangerous. They will not grasp it. We talk about no serious. This is the problem. We don't talk about any serious issues.

in politics. We've been through lockdown without actually raising the fundamental question. What is the weight between saving so many lives of primarily people even older than I am? Again, shutting down an entire economy and incurring debts on the same scale as the Second World War. And killing people as well. And of course, by gross mismanagement, killing people in care homes. But none of these debates have been had at all. what is the cost of saving a life in terms of the life of other people who live?

How much do you spend? Apparently, the average spend on, as it were, saving a life in COVID is three times what the national health will normally spend. It's called a quality-assessed year of life. So everywhere there's a refusal to debate serious things. It's just too difficult.

It goes into that, too difficult box. Islamism is clearly a fundamental issue, but it is part of a much bigger box of issues, which is how do we live in a complex society? I don't want to use, well, I have to use the word multicultural, in which there are lots of different cultures residing together. It seems to me there are two ways you can try to do it. One is what you were talking about with this vision of the woke, in which all cultures, of equal values and we are fundamentally atomized into different groups in which mysteriously, although they all hate each other, they will survive perfectly happily alongside each other

with, of course, no police force because the police are wicked. So all of these rival, mutually hating groups will somehow in this wonderful Nirvana learn to live happily with each other right. That's the woke vision, which is why I'm sorry I said. I didn't think it was very serious. Now, I have got a different vision, which is, and oddly enough, this is what I was talking about in the Darren Grime. I don't know whether you watched the home of the Darren Grimes video. This is what I was primarily talking about. I was talking about this thing called biculturalism. And this is what I think the solution to our society is. And I learned about it, because I do occasionally listen to people, as well as talking at them. And I learned about it through my

friendship with somebody who was very, very different from me, Hugo Grin on the Moral Mays back in the late 1990s. And Hugo and I were complete polar opposites. You know, he was a liberal Jew. I was there in a sort of radical gay libertarian, though I've softened, I've changed, I've become a radical gay Tory.

But Hugo and I had this very spari relationship in which there was a wonderful exchange between us when Hugo, you're going to listen here, and David, you're not half as nasty, as you seem, to which my response was, Hugo, darling, you're not half as nice either. But Hugo had the courage to take myself and my late

partner James into his home for a Passover. And it was one of the most memorable experiences I've ever had. I had not understood Judaism at all in terms of the, in a sense, the synagogue is dispensable that central rituals are within the family

and within the home, which of course is why it survived 2,000 years of diaspora and persecution. But what was also striking to me was this man who, to all intents and purposes, was a very important figure, as British as they come in British public life, becoming somebody completely different. A Jew invoking the rituals of two and a half thousand years. But he was perfectly at home in both of those worlds. And if we look at all our successful immigrant groups, that's what they do.

The Hindus, the Sikhs, whatever, the Chinese do this with astonishing facility. You look at the members of the cabinet, this astonishingly multicultural cabinet. Again, I had a fascinating insight a couple of years ago when I was going around taking various tours and we were to a particular stately home and I'd arrived early

and it turned out to be a very good thing because there'd been a wedding party. So there's still lots of champagne lying around and quaffed it down and got talking with the staff, which is always an interesting experience. And it had been a marriage between an English guy and a Hindu girl. They had gone through, because they were clearly very comfortably off in this grand stadium, they'd gone through no fewer than three ceremonies. You'd had a registry office wedding. You'd had a sort of Christian wedding. And you'd had a Hindu wedding.

And this was a wonderful opportunity because you had complete changes of clothes for all of them. And, you know, the bride wore white and the groom war tales. And then for the Hindu wedding, they were swathed in silks and saris and whatever. And this complete cultural shift. But, but, but, one of those cultures has to have primacy. It's the native one. It is the values of Britain. You have to be, and it's the only way we can operate, is if, and this is where, again, my profound

disagreement with BLM, with Bhopal and whatever, there has to be that overarching culture of the Liberal West. And you can engage, you can fit, you can swap, you look again, historically, you know, I happen to be a rather passionate philosemitic to a word. You look at the achievement of families like the Rothschilds, completely British and yet completely Jewish, this double face. And this seems to me to be exactly what we should be aiming for. And why is it that that is such a controversial point?

Because you wouldn't be allowed. If you talked about that on Newsnight, I'd give it about 23 seconds. before someone tried to shout you down. It's quite extraordinary because again there is the notion that the West is somehow fundamentally wicked. And of course it is really that there are only two groups that don't want to fit in that pattern. And we both know what they are. And overwhelmingly, it seems to me, our society without actually articulating that

or without having that as a principle has actually happened. actually happen, except, of course, that the official line is a very different one. But if you look at what the behavioral patterns have become, they have become, in all successful immigrant groups, they've become this biculturalism. Well, look, I've been talking about this for a long time as a first generation immigrant. I talk about it in my book. As, by the way, I talk about the slavery points that you made earlier, that I think the only way a multi-ethnic society can work is if it rejects the idea of multiculturalism and encourages

people to adopt the primary culture of that society first, while also retaining the valuable things about the culture from which they come. And there's no, the point is there is no contradiction. No. Unless, of course, you have, again, now let's be frank, and return to the problem with Islam. The great problem with Islam, of course, is that Jews, Islam, I have a problem with everybody, don't know, that makes life much simpler. So everybody can cancel me.

that's really much better. The problem with Islam is, of course, that unlike Christianity, it does not make a distinction between church and state. There is no equivalent to that extraordinary moment in the Bible,

where it's very, very striking and again, looking at many modern Christian attitudes, one of Jesus' disciples says to him, come on, we shouldn't be paying taxes to the Romans, should we? And Jesus says, right, hand me a coin, they hand him a coin, he asked whose head is on this coin. Of course, it's Caesar. And the

wonderful remark, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God. Unfortunately, Islam is a complete doctrine of life in which politics and religion ideally, that's what the caliphate is about, are one and the same thing. Now, that raises absolutely fundamental problems. And it raises, again, the campaign for Sharia law is unthinkable in a liberal democracy. One simply cannot have it. You could allow it, as, for example, with Jewish law. You can allow it in certain forms of private relations. But even then, because of the very different attitudes to say a divorce, you come up against a huge problem. In every state, there has to be a final, I think, set of values and a final legal principle.

One cannot have rival ones. Otherwise, this is why there was a reformation. This is why there was the first Brexit against Rome. Fundamentally, there has to be that bedrock that generally accepted. But you see, we stop teaching this. it is no longer fashionable or respectable to do so. Our national broadcaster actively campaigns against it. Isn't also the problem, David, of taboo subjects?

We had Ed West on the show a few weeks ago, and he made one of the most pertinent points I've ever heard where he said, the problem with having taboo subjects is it means you never solve problems. Of course. They fester. They fester.

Because you don't talk honestly about it. What I was talking at my moment, I've been making exactly the same point. We were talking again about how much money do you spend on saving a life. The whole absurd distortion of the national health in which you spend, I think if you look at how much money we spend over a person's lifetime, you spend something like 70% of it in the last year and a half of their lives. To what purpose?

To what purpose? The absurdity of somebody is suing the NHS now, okay, we both agree, that the way in which care homes were handled and in a sense the almost, to use the word deliberate is wrong, but the reckless permitting the spread of COVID within them. But to pretend, as this person is doing, that the death of a 90-year-old man with Alzheimer's from COVID is a major tragedy. Please. Please. What this is really about. This means that we've lost any sense that, Sorry, lives do have different value. Well, this is what I was going to say.

Do you think we've lost any ability to have... Our feelings have become so important. And, of course, if it's your parent, it doesn't matter if they're 190 and they've got Alzheimer's... Except that you would do slightly raise the question why you've put them in a care home. I'm sorry, isn't a care home one of these wonderful words that... It's Orwellian.

It means the opposite. It's a careless home. It's an uncareful. It's I can't be bothered to care home, or I'm finding it too difficult to care home. Just look at what you can do with the playing of that word. That is what it's really, but we dare we, well, we dare say it. And it's high time we did. Because this is the reason the NHS is costing more and more and more.

Again, the saving of lives of brain dead children. No, it's preposterous. because it's okay the parents want it but if that child survives in that condition it then becomes a vast cost upon the state upon the rest of us it's the problem that has a reaction to the horrors of eugenics

and Nazism and whatever we have its feeling but it's false feeling its sentiment it's sentimentality we are driven by sentimentality which is false dramatic shallow displayed feelings feelings not in the heart, but feelings worn on the sleeve.

But we live in a society that incentivises people to behave like that. Of course. Of course it does. Of course it does. And it is disastrous. And we have politicians who are too frit to cite one who wasn't. Politicians who are too frit to tackle it. And it's not only that, but to me as well, it's the fact that we don't have religion anymore in this country. Oh yes, we do. Oh, yes, we do. God may have died, but you'll remember the wonderful remark of G.K. Chesterton

that when people no longer worship God, they don't worship nothing, they worship anything. And everything that's going on now with woke is a form of perverted religion. I mean, the very notion of this radical equality is the Magnificat, you know, and he has exalted them of low degree. He's taken down the mighty from the seats, people big fat prosperous, you know, overpaid white men like me and exalted them of low degree. You know, Professor Bhopal, who happens to come from the Brahmin family, and suddenly, you know, in her anxiety to point out the moat in the eye of the West,

ignores the beam of caste in India from which she benefited from being high caste. I mean, it just, there's an extraordinary religiousness of all of this. What I experienced was the equivalent, at least in the days of the church, you had a trial before you were condemned as a heretic. I mean, this is just a witch lynching. You're herod to the stake and burned as quickly as possible. But it's religious. And this is why, again, why we've ceased to be able to argue with people.

The whole problem with woke is because its statements are so absurd, like, I can become a woman merely because I say so. They cannot argue about them. They become articles of faith. when there's an extraordinary case at the University of Sussex at Brighton of Professor Kathleen Stock. When she says, you know, I don't actually believe that you do become a woman, what do the trans say?

Well, they actually, or the radical trans, what they say is, we cannot be reasoned out of existence. Nobody is challenging their existence. What we're challenging is their right to force us to tell a lie, which is to say that a biological man can become a biological woman. You can't. Or to even eliminate the notion of biology. But this is an act of religious faith.

This is like saying you believe the bread and the wine is the flesh and blood of Christ. You're asking us to believe in miracles. If you think about it, woke is the miracle. Again, the society, right, come on, I'm really running with that idea. It's the society that we have in which, wondrously, Palestinians and Jews are going to be completely happy in this marvelous utopia. It's the lion lying down with the lamb.

Just think about it. All of those religious ideas are now translated and vulgarized into the real world. But of course, it's an absurdity because the lion could lie down with the lamb only at the second coming of Christ. What these people are trying to do

is to bring about the second coming here and now. America, of course, you see, has had this right through the 19th century. There were the great awakenings, the great surges, because it's all very Puritanical as well. Clearly, the woke believe there are a new elect, and it's certain to go to paradise, and the rest of us are wicked and corrupt and fundamentally, you know, we should go to hell and before we do, our life should be made hell here on earth for us. But the phrase that is marvelous is, I think I've coined it, but a friend of mine actually said somebody got there before it, we should be talking about the great awokening.

It's a manifestly religious movement. I'm afraid secularized religion like that is the most dangerous form of human behavior. It has got none of the restraints of real religion. It's got none of the restraints of the seriousness of theology. It is literally the blood and guts of the thing driven by the meanest, the most dangerous, and the most unsuppressed of emotions. You see, it's a new romantic movement.

In one sense, what are we really saying? This is a vast reaction to the technological world we live in. The world of... Because remember, in many ways, technology to an ordinary person seems like a man. miracle. I know about you. I really do think when I look at a mobile phone, there's something almost miraculous about it. I have absolutely no comprehension of what is going on inside this thing. And it seems to be able to do what once upon a time took an entire rumful of

secretaries' assistance and everything else. But equally, of course, it's an object. It's a thing. It's polished, smooth, profoundly unhuman. A social. A social. It's so. much of our society is. And I think what we're doing is, as with the 18th century, as with that period of elegance, formality, brilliance and whatever, there's this violent reaction. The age of reason is followed by the age of unreason, of romanticism, of passion, of Byron, of Beethoven, of Wagner, you know, great lushing waves of passion, sex, emotion, violence, war. And we're seeing this in almost I think a parody

form it of course the woke don't know anything or understand anything but they're like an extreme form of Rousseau who on the one hand proclaims that he loves all mankind

and on the other hand puts his own children in an orphanage but with the point of religion the point that I was trying to make and that point is incredibly valued that you just made but one of things religion does that the woke religion does not do is it gives us comfort with the knowledge of our own mortality. And to me, and our own flaws, and our own floors, all of those things.

But particularly mortality, because we have, we seem on the surface to have solved everything in our society apart from death. We haven't seemed to solve that. And you look at everything that is happening now, it's because we can't accept we're going to die. We know that we're going to die, there's an end. Therefore, I don't want to feel discomfort. Therefore, I don't want to be upset. Therefore, I don't want to have confrontations. Because I've got a limited amount of time here, and I'm going to be pleasure-seeking to the max,

which is why I don't want to get married. It's why I don't want to have kids. It's all about me, mean, me, me. But the problem is with our society, if you just have purely selfish individuals operating in that manner, you're never going to have social cohesion. Of course not. I mean, I think you've confused two things. I think that the question of refusing to accept death, is utterly fundamental.

It means that there's a wonderful joke. I mean, you've been the serious one, I'll tell the jokes, we'll reverse, road. There's a marvellous remark. Destroyed but very softly there's. There's a marvellous remark about Americans who are determined to die in a state of perfect health. And there is that refusal to accept

that we are mortal and we are frail and we will die, which is why this absurd attempts that prolonging lives that frankly are not worth prolonging. This refusal to accept that with the state of modern medicine, some form of euthanasia, if people want it, is the sensible way to handle all of this. Again, the absolute refusal to have a serious and proper debate on this subject.

The other one, though, I think is different. I mean, it is the, I'm not quite sure why you think that an acceptance of death and values other than pure solipsistic selfishness and pure narcissism are directly connected. I don't think they are. I mean, I think that it's possible to have perfectly sensible attitudes in these areas.

And I think it's fundamentally the narcissism and the solipsism of our society. But you see, I think there's a reason for this. None of this is accidental. I'm not a determinist historian, but none of this is accidental. Liberalism, from which I've benefited, we all have one way or another.

Obviously, I, as a gay man, benefited enormously from the transformation of attitudes. So in one sense, I'm biting a hand that fed me and indulged me. But liberalism has no end. There is no reason for it to stop. So the liberalism of the 18th century ended in the horrors of the terror of the French Revolution.

The reason of the 18th century turned into a parody of itself with the goddess of reason as a half-draped actress of the Comedie dexterous on the desecrated high altar of Notre Dame, this awful parody. In the same way, the liberalism of the 60s ends in woke. if you look at what's happened within gay lip I was right at the beginning of it I was I was

dare I say even occasionally going on a demonstration of me at a time when you know the Ian McKellons of this world were carefully parading their heterosexuality because it might have damaged their stage careers but if you look at that progression if you look at you know gay freedom lesbian freedom well then in one sense you can see then okay bisexual freedom, well then the next stage is trans freedom.

But trans freedom, if it then becomes we've got to believe you. When we were talking about liberalisation for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, we're saying, please can we be recognised for what we are

and not penalised for it. Trans is something completely different. It's saying, please can we be recognised for what we want to be for what we imagine we are. And by the way, if you don't believe in me, I'm going to destroy your career. Now, that seems to me that's the equivalent of the terror of the French Revolution. It's when freedom turns against itself and consumes itself.

You know, it's the phrase, revolutions always end by consuming themselves. They're self-consuming processes. Well, I'm afraid the same is true of liberalism. And it's strikingly, it's Israeli. I think the greatest practical political thinker of the 19th century in the same way that Churchill was the greatest practical political thinker of the 20th century. Disraeli recognizes that liberalism is the enemy and that this deracinated liberalism, this thing that dissolves everything.

The prime example in our recent history is the utter catastrophe of the Blair government. everything that it touched turned to pitch, be it Scotland, be it the Supreme Court, be it whatever. Northern Ireland, don't they? Well, Northern Ireland... Cosovo? No, pardon? Kosovo?

Kosovo, of course, is simply an EU colony. An EU, I mean, what's happened in the Balkans is an absurdity. I do think, in one sense, I know this sounds appalling, historically the way disputes like the Balkans are settled, I'm afraid is by war. That is how the frontiers of, you know this, that's how the frontiers of Eastern Europe were settled at the end of the First World War, with huge movements of population, painful and horrible, but that's how the problem is really solved, not creating this enforced patchwork of unsustainable stateless. Northern Ireland, for heaven's sake.

better, I suppose, than the terror, but pretending that the terrorists won, which is what I'm afraid the settlement is based upon. And with the imminent prospect of a Sinn Féin government in Ireland, I suspect it will turn out to have been just a bad idea there. Right. We've opened enough cans of words for one day, David, before we wrap up, let me ask you about one other subject,

which you've referred to. I've got one last question as well, but you go. I'll ask my final question. I wanted to talk a little bit about COVID. Not the modern situation and what happened here and who said this and whatever, but a historical perspective. I, based on what I know, and my historical knowledge is obviously limited, human beings have not dealt with pandemics in this way before.

Never. But human beings have dealt with many pandemics before. So what do we need to know about, periods of this kind in human history and what are we likely to have to watch out for and expect with this? I think in a sense the way we dealt with COVID was a direct reflection of everything we've been talking about now that we thought in a sense that it was the notion that quite a lot of people would die was something so monstrous that we decided to shut down society. Now no, this is it's the first time that a plague, it's a very, very minor plague, by the way, in comparison with

the great plagues of the, say, the 14th and 15th century, the black death eliminates probably two-thirds of this cumulative effect between half and two-thirds of the population. That's real. This was a relatively minor blip. But for the first time, we decided to inflict more damage on ourselves in trying to control the plague, that the plague would have done if it had been given, as it were, the vexed question of herd immunity. Now, you could argue this is because we've developed proper attitudes to the sacredness of life and the sanctity of life, but we no longer take the indifference, the relatively indifferent view.

I mean, our ancestors had to take a relatively indifferent view, which is not to say that things like quarantine and all the rest of it were not very frequently applied. I think the problem is we also had a false model. We got a Chinese virus and we decided to have a Chinese solution. The lockdown is totally antithetical. This is the point Jonathan Sumpion has been making repeated. It is absolutely antithetical to British values, to Western liberal values. And it is a testimony to the fundamental collapse.

of those values that it's been allowed to happen. David, let me interrupt you there because you're making such a good point, and I want to just interject this, because I think this is so important, and you've allowed me to see something I've been rummaging around in my head for a while. I think what you're really saying, correct me if I'm wrong, is that we've forgotten that freedom comes with cost. Absolutely. Freedom has a price.

Freedom has a price in exactly the same way that trying to prevent death has a price. And because we've got into a habit of not having serious conversations, we've not debated the balance between those two. We've also been sold completely bad science. The whole science of lockdown, Professor Lockdown, Neil Ferguson, is a fraud. Let's just use this absolute word. He used the same mathematical models for BSE. He used the same mathematical models for foot and mouth disease,

and he was out by factors of score. huge, huge. Why this man is allowed to hold forth is beyond me. It's bad applied maths. It's not medical science. But there is a science, and the science is that of vaccination. Now, this will surprise you. I am absolutely in favour of compulsory vaccination. If you actually look at one of the great reasons that we've eliminated infectious illness, it is vaccination. Again, the great British discovery, Janice discovery of vaccination, of cowpox, which eliminated smallpox. And effectively, it is compulsory. In the same way, as a child, I desperately lacked the fact that there wasn't a sulk vaccine for polio.

I, because I never do things by halves, I not only have club feet, I caught polio. And from that point onwards, every child was vaccinated against polio. You weren't asked, you were in a queue, and you had little needles pushed in your arm, and we've eliminated illness after illness. We also used to have, because of the omnipresence of infectious illness, we actually had isolation hospitals, we had fundamental powers of medical offices of health, all of which we threw away in the 1960s. So there is a way of dealing with this, and it is vaccination,

and there's no libertarian argument against it. What about bodily autonomy? Pardon? Bodily autonomy. You, the state, has no right to inject something into my body without my concern. I'm sorry. You're a member of a society in which if you go around unvaccinated, you're likely to infect others.

Well, the evidence isn't very strong on that day. The idea that vaccination prevents infection is very, very, very limited. What? It's very limited. Well, it certainly limits the consequences of it. No, no. Yeah, right. So the vaccine protects you against Syria.

illness and it protects you against going to hospital and it protects you against dying. It does not have any strong evidence to suggest that it prevents me from catching it from you because you're vaccinated or vice versa. No, no, but that's not the issue. It limits the consequences of infectious disease. This is why small, sorry, sorry, if you were right and I was wrong, we'd still have smallpox, that it is precisely the universality of vaccination against smallpox that it is precisely the universality of vaccination against smallpox that effectively eradicated it.

Because there was nobody left getting smallpox and therefore nobody caught it, even though not everybody is vaccinated against it now. And sorry, this really does seem to me to be an... There is a science. There's a real medical science. But one of the problems is, again, we've had...

Public debate is so slovenly. And the government used the science as a get-out card, as an arse-covering card. And of course, the science the scientist, some of whom were. I had no idea we had so many serious experts in epidemiologists. I had no idea the country was crawling with people who understood everything about virology. Amazing. Every 10th rate academic and every 8th rate university popped up on SAGE. And the behavior of SAGE, everybody going shocking.

You're there to give advice to a government. moment you've given the advice, what do you do, you then all jostle and struggle to get on question time or to appear on the news and to become little stars. Now that's not, that really isn't what you should be doing. So I'm afraid the whole thing has shown, our reaction to COVID has shown, I think, the extent to which we are in a fully decadent society. It's shown an absolute refusal to ask big questions. It has shown vanity, the vanity of the scientist,

me, me, me. It has shown the absolute incomprehension of how medicine actually works. Thank you, you're pointing me, this. No, no, no, no, I don't, no, I don't accept this. Okay, that's fine, we'll then, right, let us give an example to everybody

and we'll agree to disagree. But, but, and the complete ignoring of history as to how these things have been dealt with before. On the other hand, it's shown something else, which is the wonders of private enterprise. That is to say, the discovery of the vaccine, the extraordinary rapid development of its manufacture. Isn't it very striking? Everywhere you look, the state has performed badly.

Do you remember testing? Compare the testing regime. done through the NHS and through Public Health England, and compare, on the other hand, the private enterprise development of the vaccine. Look again, do you remember right at the beginning, people were going on about, oh, we need rationing, we need a national food service, and how quickly the supermarket sorted it out.

Have you noticed how quickly even the petrol shortage has gone away? Imagine if we'd had a state supply of petroleum and state-run, petrol stations and state-run... We'd solve the climate crisis. There wouldn't be a single moving car on Lurray in Britain. But isn't it, I'm being really serious. And at the same time, we are constantly piling more and more onto the state as the state becomes more and more incompetent as its reach extends.

Well, I grew up in the Soviet Union, you don't need to get an answer to this. But unfortunately, the people in Britain didn't, Boris Johnson did not. not grow up in the Soviet Union. And we're now seeing this extraordinary paradox of a so-called conservative government that seems to think that the state is the solution. When it's faced with the manifesting competence of everything, from DVLC to the inland revenue, to... The one thing that still preserves some sort of sense is the Treasury,

but that's about all. There was a moment earlier on in the interview, which I think when we touched on art, because to me art is very, very important. Art reflects the culture, the reflects the society. As it does so brilliantly. Look at the Turner Prize. Look at Jeff Coons.

This is the art of decadence and absurdity. Look at whatever it is. It's an ice cream cone with a cherry on it shoved on a pedestal into the Farkas Square. Yes, absolutely. But what it shows is that we have a dearth of, ideas. There's no fresh ideas. There's no new way of looking at... It's Douchon. The whole thing is that funny notion of Marcel Duchamp back in the end of the First World War, that anything is an ob... You know what? It's exactly the same as trans.

What Duchin said was, a urinal is a work of art because I say it is. It's exactly... You see what I mean? It's exactly the same phenomenon. It's the phenomenon of words, the whole business of conceptual art. It's the phenomenon of the word actually given priority over the craft, the act of painting, carving, or whatever it is. And of course the solipsism, and just the focus in on the self

of, because I say it is, it is. Or the fundamental, it's a miracle because I say it's a work of art. The one Turner exhibit was turning on and off a light switch. Ha! No, quite seriously. And this thing

receives enormous amounts of public money. The Arts Council is fixated on this rubbish. And it's rubbish. It's his complete emperor's new clothes. But what is most astonishing about it, Francis, you put your finger on it. It's old emperor, if you can have an old

presumably it means he's got a withered willy, you know, it's kind of old emperor's new clothes. Because these are ideas that have been knocking around since the beginning of the 20th century. Are there a hundred years? Oh, it's a hundred years of waving two fingers and calling it art. David, I said I had the last question, but I've got one more.

And it's personal to you because I want to finish where we started the interview, which is, what do we do with people like you in society? People who are talented and brilliant, but also take risks and make mistakes and sometimes say things that are insensitive and some people find... Always insensitive. I mean, we talked about the reaction to your social. situation, which I agree with you, was excessive. But what should we do when someone says the wrong thing?

I think we've forgotten the answer to that question. I don't know what the answer is. What should we do when people say something offensive? Well, the sensible thing is usually to say, a silly old fool ignore him, which is what one tended to do. The other is perhaps to listen. Because, of course, you see, again, I've been comparing myself to Churchill. With typical modesty, I will now compare myself to the prophet.

People like me are the equivalent of the prophets of the Old Testament. We are the Nace or the Cassandra's. And again, you remember what happened to Cassandra? She was ignored. She told the truth that she was ignored, which seems to me to be a pretty accurate description. What should we do? Well, I suppose you should really listen to things that challenge you.

But it's very difficult to persuade people to do that. You have to sugar pills. So it needs people who are more tactful than I am, and probably subtler and more insinuating, more snake-like, to carry these things through. But now to be completely serious, societies depend on dissent. You know this from the Soviet Union. societies that try to suppress dissent die.

It is very simple. I'm talking about it, I come from long generations of religious dissenters of people who said, no. I do not accept what is publicly enforced belief. I think it is wrong. And if you actually look at in every society, it is these marginal groups that are high creatives. As I said, never as the word creativity been so misuse.

If you look at the record of Quakers in England, if you look at the record of Jews, in Russia, if you look at the record of old believers, wherever the immigrants in Britain, like the religious refugees from France, the Huguenot or whatever, Louis XIV, D'14th destroyed France when he drove out the Huguenot.

They were the most intelligent, the most creative, the most brilliant craftsmen. The reason that in England, you suddenly get this extraordinary development, of everything from furniture to silver-smith work in the early 18th century is because Louis the 14th, whom Churchill uses as the model for Hitler, drove out the Huguenot, the Protestants from France. They were the greatest, you look at their names, echoing through the manufacturer of silver in 18th century, England. They're French, French, French, they're Huguenot, but they're marginal, their dissenters.

And a society that loses sight of this is finished. We used to have the reputation of English eccentricity. It's going. Again, it's one of the things, I know this sounds a real paradox. It's one of the things I worry about as far as I don't really worry about it, but if I'm put on a program like this and asked to find something to worry about, it is about gay life. We used to be dissenters.

Now, of course, you know, it's practically compulsory as one of the more disconted members of my department at LSC was remote. And as it mainstreams, and, you know, what happens now generally, I think when you come out, one of my younger gay friends said, you know, it was absolutely terrible what happened, just awful, I said, oh, poor lad, what was it? He said, well, my mother said, you know,

what's your boyfriend called? Am I going to like him? When's the wedding? But am I, for heaven's sake, here you are making this heart-rending confession, and it's just treated as an excuse for a new pair of shoes. And again, if you look at the gay world that produced people like Oscar Wild, that's not going to happen again. Stephen Fry is a very bargain basement version of Oscar Wilde.

I suppose I'm now arguing for persecution. But the point again about the Soviet Union. dissent is very important, David. Yeah. And it's an unhealthy society that cannot process dissent. It's like a human being. A human being that can't handle disagreement is an unhealthy human being. And society is the same, which is why it has been a pleasure to have you back.

Thank you. We're going to have some questions for our local supporters. But the last question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be? Having fun. And we've made it all so serious. I mean, one of the things that sustained me in all of this is I've been attacking simple pleasure seeking, but one needs to enjoy life. I love doing this.

I love debate. I love the pleasures of food and drink. In the days when they're more readily available, I love the pleasures of sex. But it's not that destructive hedonism, that just complete repetition. It is the enjoyment, the savouring. It is good food, drink, decent furniture, things that are beautiful. You were talking about art. All of that, these are the things that, again, using very unfashionable language, elevators, take us beyond ourselves,

but can also unite us with other people. What a wonderful note to end on. And David, you've also got a YouTube channel that you're starting. Why don't you tell the viewers about that and the listeners? Well, it's going to be called, very surprisingly, David Starkey talks. When is he ever since? My mother had a wonderful line on that. Your tongue will be the ruin of you, she said. And she was, of course, absolutely right and absolutely wrong.

It's been the making and the unmaking. I'm going to be talking primarily about history. I'm going to try and do it very free form. It's not going to be like television documentary. Those days were a bit past, I think. it's going to be the equivalent of I've always enjoyed lecturing what we mentioned beforehand and I think I say this safely now

I've always regarded public speaking as the best form of oral sex so what this is going to be it's the equivalent of me doing an extemporary lecture which is the thing I most enjoyed when I was an academic and I'm going to be doing on a huge range of topics obviously I'll be covering the tutors obviously I'll be covering the monarchy but I've just done one that I think is really great on a statue.

The statue of somebody was in the slave trade, a man called William Beckford, one of the biggest objects in the Guildhall in London. But he was also a leading campaigner for radical politics and liberty and the extension of the franchise. Slave owner, radical libertarian. And that's, of course, the paradox at the heart of the American Revolution. So what I will try and do, I will try and give people that sense of the engagement with a mind.

I mean, it was what I loved aspects of teaching in the years when I was a university teacher, in which, but again, it needs what you were talking about. It needs the ability to talk without limits, to talk, to criticize, but not to criticize to destroy, but to criticize, to develop and to encourage. But above all, to open the mind. History is wonderful because, by definition, you have to engage with different values. See, this is the great problem, the refusal to accept that can be any other values and the values of the moment. Sir Thomas More had values that were pretty much the opposite of ours. That doesn't mean that he was a bad man. He was a very great man. But he just happened to have

different values. It's a form of mental tourism. that genuinely broadens the mind. And so I'll be trying to... And I think talking is... We all know about reading, and reading is utterly fundamentally important. But I think talking, that... We talk about the author's voice with a book.

But talking, talking, the thing that's now offered with things like YouTube, actually enables you to have the reality of that conversation of two minds. I'm sure I will not get it right to begin with. There'll be a period of experiment. I'm hoping people will bear with me and enjoy it and criticize me,

which I'm very happy, but also that we can all learn a little bit from each other. David, I'm very much looking forward to it and as someone who runs a YouTube channel, I assure you there will be plenty of criticism. Don't you worry about that. David Starkey talks, I'm really looking forward to it. Thank you so much for coming back.

and thank you all for watching and listening at home. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or Roar Show. Always go out at 7pm UK, 2pm Eastern Standard, or if you like your trigonometry, on the go. Always available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button

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