TRIGGERnometry: Dr David Starkey Interview (Transcript)

You can’t do that.

But Burnham seems to be about to reinvent this with the benefit of yellow buses. Presumably the great symbol of Burnham, I imagine, will be London buses repainted yellow and we will spend— I’m serious, this is the symbol of Manchesterism— his bus network.

So the left is completely blind to what’s going on. And I’ll do something else. I predicted on the day that Starmer was elected that he will fail. There is a recording of it. I did it not with you, but with the New Culture Forum on the actual morning after his election victory. I said, he will fail because he represents this failed system, this system in which political power has been hived off to judges and to so-called experts in Quangos, and it’s strangling everything. The right is slowly beginning to recognize that. So there’s some hope.

Personality Clashes and the Fragmented Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There is some hope in the sense that you are talking about policy alignment. But I also think that given the personality clashes that you described, and I think they go beyond actually the defectors, I mean, I think Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage don’t particularly like each other personally. Farage has obviously been scathing about the Conservative Party. And now, of course, we sitting here don’t know exactly how impactful it will be in this particular by-election. You have another party on the right, which is Restore, led by Rupert Lowe, who hates Farage, perhaps some might argue with some reason, given their personal history. But on top of that, hates the Conservative Party, and they all hate each other.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Well, actually, let’s be much more precise about this. The relations between Rupert Lowe and the Conservative Party seem to me to be surprisingly good. After all, they made him a member of the Public Accounts Committee. The Conservative Party actually appointed him to that. The relations between Rupert and Kemi, I think, are good.

And it’s very important to remember, Rupert is this bizarrest of things. He’s presenting himself as the ultimate outsider, with all of these extraordinary young men on the web. Do you know what they’re all called? It’s a wonderful term. Let me share it with you. They’re called the Lomosexuals.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Oh, I see.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: So they’re the Lomo. You’ve got Harrison Pitt and Charlie Downes and Connor Tomlinson and whatever, all the young toughies of the right are wickedly known as the Lomosexuals. So they’re presenting themselves as these extraordinary outsiders. But what is Rupert? Rupert is a member of Boodles, the second smartest, next only to White’s, of the St. James’s Clubs. He’s hunting, shooting, fishing. Look at that ruddy complexion. He’s a farmer, he shoots pheasants, I imagine has hunted, and presenting himself as this extraordinary outsider.

So I think there are a series of really increasingly ridiculous postures being struck that do conceal fundamental agreement on policy.

Policy Convergence: The Great Repeal and Constitutional Reform

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Have you read, because what’s happening now is each one of these three parties is starting to produce serious written stuff. And if you look, Harrison Pitt wrote one of the most impressive documents on how we deal with immigration and how we deal with illegal immigration for Rupert Lowe. And if you look at the central section of that document, it takes my idea of the great repeal, the undoing of the Blairite constitutional settlement as the absolute necessary step. It calls it the great clarification or something. It lightly rechristens it, but it takes it as central policy.

Look at what Badenoch has done. She has just got the Conservative shadow attorney general, Lord Wolfson, to write a detailed paper on repealing the central piece of legislation which will be covered by the Great Repeal, which is the Human Rights Act. She’s also now come out in favour of repealing one of the most important sections of the Equality Act, the Public Sector Equality Duty, the PSED.

If you look at even more strikingly, Chris Philp, to be the shadow Home Secretary, has come out saying, “We will bring in legislation to remove all forms of judicial intervention in the process of appeal against asylum, against the failure to grant asylum.” In other words, you will remove that judicial oversight, which is primarily why, as Rishi Sunak recognized, along with everybody else, Tony Blair recognizes in his memoirs, you can’t actually get rid of asylum seekers. It’s that we could stop the boats tomorrow if the lawyers said yes. The lawyers will say no.

And as I pointed out when I heard Zia Yousuf talk about this at the IEA, if Nigel went into Downing Street and ordered the First Sea Lord to deploy the Navy and persisted in ordering him, he would find himself arrested for contempt of court.

But they’re all recognizing this. Every one of them is recognizing this. Nigel is fully committed to the repeal of the Human Rights Act. He’s fully committed now to the repeal of the Equality Act. Suella Braverman wrote a very interesting introduction, preface, foreword, or whatever it’s called, to a paper published by The Prosperity Institute, again, on the terrible problems of the Equality Act. They’re all recognizing it, but they’re fighting each other. And I despair. It’s a suicidal folly.

And if you look at the alternative in terms of the notion of going down the current route that we are now, it is simply a catastrophe. What we’ve seen with the current Starmer government is we have complete stasis. Nothing can be done. You are pursuing a policy in which you are taxing more to pay more people welfare, which makes the country poorer. It is a vicious downward cycle and there is no way you can break it without doing these fundamental changes to what happened to Britain between 1997 and 2010. Otherwise, we’re tied to a wheel.

A National Crisis: The State Against Its People

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And that’s best case scenario because come the next election, the people who might get elected from the left may be worse than that.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: They will be worse than that. I mean, we are genuinely, I think, at a moment I would argue of a national crisis which is comparable only to the First and Second World Wars. I would possibly go even further. I think we are, which is why I’ve been using, when I’ve been talking about what needs to be done, the language of grand constitutional change. I think we are at the stage of the equivalent of the reign of Charles I or the reign of James II. We are a state which has turned against its people, a state which has become the principal danger to the survival of the nation.

I mean, the thing that’s most striking about the Starmer government, it basically hates Britain. It basically hates the British. Look at Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, this absurd obsession with giving away the Chagos Islands, this absurd obsession with making concessions to IRA terrorists. We had John McTernan today talking about, after Al Cairns in the House of Commons in his resignation speech said that one of the reasons he’d resigned was the legislation which the Labour Party has been pushing through the House to make veterans who had served in Northern Ireland judiciable for what they’d done. Whereas of course all the terrorists are exempt. It’s monstrous. It is simply, simply monstrous.

But what does a leading member of the Labour Party say? John McDonagh, what does he actually say? This is why the Brits thought they got the Brits, what the IRA call the British as a term of hatred and contempt. A leading member of the Labour Party talks of his own people in those terms. The language again, which is used, which favours immigrants over the native population. I mean, it is truly, truly astonishing.

Which is, I think again, I don’t know whether you saw the New Statesman published that, which has become in many ways immensely impressive under its current editorship. And published a report on the Macclesfield constituency pointing out that burning, seething sense of things have been taken away, what we have lost, what we want back, that inchoate sense of mounting rage, which bursts forward with the events in Belfast, burst to the surface with the events in Southport.

The Failure of Britain’s Political System

FRANCIS FOSTER: David, how much of where we are do you think comes down to, like you said, legislation, but also the weakness and spinelessness of our leaders and our political class?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: The two things are very closely related. I don’t believe that the— again, you’ve got to— it’s a central point. I mean, there are different ways you could explain the current situation. I mean, I explain it systemically. I think that the actual machinery has gone wrong.

Other ways of explaining it are to look at a single big issue, and people who I’ve been citing as agreeing with me, people like Harrison Peter or Rupert Lowe, obviously put immigration and particularly illegal immigration at the head of the list. And other people say actually it is due to the shocking quality of our leaders.

And there is the evidence. I mean, you know, we’re about to have our 7th prime minister in 10 years. There has been nothing like this since the invention of the Office of Prime Minister in the 1720s by Robert Walpole.

This is, when you were saying at the beginning, I was very struck, you said, “Your David Starkey’s a historian. We’re not going to get him talking about the present.” What we’re living through is an episode of astonishing historical importance. The reason that I’ve involved myself in it is precisely because of my historical understanding of how all this stuff was put together. So the moment when you can actually witness what, unless we do something about it, is its dissolution, is one of peculiar fascination.

But there is a reason why we’ve had this succession of failed premierships. The job is— okay, many of them were inadequate. Some of them were there for absolutely no purpose whatever. Some, they liked a resume. Some were there trying to do the right thing in the wrong way, which is Liz Truss. I mean, I like Liz, but Liz has this terrible problem. In early middle age, she now has this large label hung around her neck which says, “I give good ideas a bad name.” You know, it’s contaminating and tragic.

Boris, of course, had one good thing and then a series of catastrophic things. But fundamentally all of them were confronting the same problem, that the system works against them. This is what Dominic Cummings, you know, Boris’s right-hand man for a period of time— I always said it was terribly like the court of Henry VIII. Dominic was very, very, aspired to do the same sort of things as Thomas Cromwell. So I wrote a nice piece on Dom and Tom and they both came up, of course, against an uppity woman who was actually third wife rather than second wife, with Carrie playing power politics.

But Dominic’s analysis is exactly mine, that the structure of government makes it impossible to do anything. And of course, even Starmer— I mean, Starmer, rigid, authoritarian, unimaginative, a complete product of this system and indeed somebody who invented it.

The Guilty Men

And I think it’s important that we realize just how much guilt, and I use that word, there’s going to be another volume written in 10 or 20 years. It will be like Michael Foot’s volume on those who advocated appeasement. It will be called The Guilty Men. And they will be held, if Britain survives, those headed by somebody like Blair and Brown and with Starmer very high on the list, they will be held in the same contempt and hatred as those who were responsible for appeasement.

And I think in fact those who were responsible for appeasement were actually sensible, but that’s another matter, because they were just making sure we could actually fight a war when we actually declared it. Whereas what Brown and Blair and Starmer did— Starmer right at the beginning of the enterprise of imposing a completely alien notion of law, which is human rights law, and the Brown Equality Act.

I mean, the problem is, Francis, and you’re doing your usual sweet eye, I’m not completely understanding and I’m a bit puzzled, which is your essential role on this show. You do, you do. You do it absolutely wonderfully well. I’ve often wondered just quite how much rehearsal is called to keep it up for the length of time that you do.

But the essential point is that we’ve had this world in which, and it’s really remarkable, if you go back and you look at Blair’s memoirs— I mean, I’ve got very interested in how all this happened. And it’s perfectly clear Blair and particularly Jack Straw, the Home Secretary who was responsible for so much of this, didn’t really know what they were doing. They thought all this was zingy modernizing, you know, we’re a new country. Or indeed exactly the same with David Cameron, modernization.

But there were people like, exactly like Keir Starmer who knew what they were doing, who knew what the introduction of the Human Rights Act would do. That it would actually make it that we completely stood our system of government on its head and that we replaced a political constitution with a legal constitution.

And again, many people will think, well, isn’t that a really good thing? But the problem is law cannot adjudicate satisfactorily between the individual right and common public safety, and it cannot deal either with budgets.

The Equality Act and Its Consequences

I mean, let’s give you an example. What the Equality Act does is to introduce this notion that there is a right wage separate from the market wage and that a judge can determine it. So you have this lunacy in which because one group of people who happen to be women do a job like being dinner ladies for Birmingham City Council and another group of people who happen to be men do dustbin collecting— and dustbin collecting is much harder and much heavier and much more unpleasant work than sitting around, you know, serving slop to school children, and therefore they’re paid more.

And the argument was put to the judges, well, actually the two jobs are really equivalent. Now that demands— and Lidey, the dreadful firm of solicitors who have been responsible for pursuing so many of these absurd actions said, “Well, what that demonstrates is the market rate is not a defense.”

Can we just say this again? The market— if you as an employer pay the market rate for a job, that is not a defense against a judge saying that’s wrong. That is guaranteed to bankrupt any company and it’s guaranteed, it has already bankrupted Birmingham and it is going to bankrupt next. It is insane.

And in other words, what I think is really striking about this— this is why suddenly Jack Straw, having introduced all of this stuff, is saying, “Ooh, I think it’s possibly gone a little bit far.”

And what we’ve got ourselves into is a situation in which you can actually— that wonderful phrase, you know I’m quite fond of the Bible, although I don’t believe in God, but that wonderful phrase, “By their fruits ye shall know them.” You can judge things by their consequences. We can see what the consequences of this sort of thing have been, and they’re all bad.

English Nature and the Cost of Bureaucracy

Let’s take another interesting example, English Nature, which has been in the news an awful lot recently. This thing costing whatever it is, 2 billion a year or more to run, what has it done? It is responsible in its most recent manifestation for saying, “Wouldn’t it be a terribly good thing to kill the ponies on Dartmoor, because we believe in going back to some notion of—” isn’t it odd? We are not allowed to have an indigenous population, but we’re allowed to have indigenous flora and fauna.

Isn’t it really odd? You know, the notion that they’re the natural inhabitants to this island is perfectly acceptable if you’re talking about buttercups, but really isn’t acceptable if you’re talking about human beings. I mean, the whole madness. But in order to restore the alleged original vegetation of Dartmoor, hadn’t we better kill the ponies? Well, of course, the English, because we’re terminally sentimental people, get wildly excited about that.

But what else has English Nature done? English Nature has inflicted on HS2, if it wasn’t already a bad enough mess, an extra £100 million for a bat tunnel. It is calculated that it might save about 6 bats. No, but you laugh, but it’s not funny. This is your money, it’s my money. It’s why nothing can get done.

Even worse, we’re facing this astonishing power shortage. Vast soaring costs of electricity. What have they done to contribute to that? Our nuclear power station, which has already taken 10 times as long as equivalent structures in China to build, they have imposed costs of £600 million in order to protect fishes against getting a little bit overheated in the discharge waters.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And do you know what?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: They’ve decided that’s not enough. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to insist that we reconstitute the salt marshes. So you’re going to look at adding approximately another £1.5 billion. This is insanity. We’ve given a group, all headed by Tony Juniper, these people are fanatics. You give single-issue fanatics executive control.

Law, Politics, and the Failure of Governance

Now all of this— you give judges power over money. Why is SEND, why is special educational needs completely out of control? Because you set up a tribunal structure. If you declare that children with special needs have rights, there can be no budget. Law does not have regard to a budget as anybody who’s been stupid enough to sue in a court knows. Costs are of no order. There’s no consequence.

You know, the standard principle of Roman law is, “Let the skies fall, justice must be done.” But that’s not how you manage a society. The only way you can manage how much we spend on children with special needs against everybody else’s need is by politics. But we deliberately remove the final decision from politics, which comes straight back to your point.

We are in this terrible paradox that we— the standing of politicians has never been lower, but we desperately need the political process somehow to be revived because that’s the only way you can balance properly the individual against the group. Otherwise you have Singapore, otherwise MBS or Saudi Arabia or China, you have a dictatorship. So we’ve got to recover that.

The experiment of handing it to experts on the one hand and judges on the other, which is what Blair did, has been, though he didn’t fully realize what he was doing, has been utterly, completely, and demonstrably catastrophic. And the fact is now obvious, the left cannot admit it.

New Labour and the Death of Socialism

The left created this, it’s become its Bible because remember the reason that all this happened— why did all this happen under Blair? It happened because people like Peter Mandelson had already realized that the kind of Labour Party that Burnham wants was stone dead. New Labour happens because the intelligent people like Blair, like Campbell, like Mandelson knew socialism didn’t work. So they’ve got to come up with something else.

And this hyperactivity where they literally pluck down ideas from the shelf, these strange notions of international law and whatever that had been cooked up by people like Herman, people like Tom Bingham, people like Starmer, they just latch onto them. And so New Labour itself was a testimony to the failure of the old Labour Party.

What’s now happened, of course, is that the Starmer government shows the failure of New Labour, that these things do not work. And what is the Labour Party going to do? It’s going to try to go back to a double failure of old Labour.

So the right, Francis, Konstantin, has never had more open goals. But there’s been an extraordinary failure to explain, an extraordinary— I cannot imagine a political situation which should be more favorable to the right than the one that we’re in at the moment, with one very important point, which is of course that unfortunately, thanks to the folly of David Cameron, the even worse folly of George Osborne, the absurd folly of Boris Johnson, the Conservative Party, and Theresa May— I would shoot. I’m quite serious. I think, I think, I am being really serious.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: After a trial, presumably, right, David?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Yes.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes, good.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Decided by yourself, David?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: I believe in due process. But I mean, seriously, when you look at what that woman did, she is directly responsible for the full out-of-control nature of non-crime hate incidents, which begin under Cameron and flourish under her. The extraordinary activities of the College of Policing, she carries through the non-legislation. It was barely discussed for legislating net zero by 2050.

And that again, Francis, means that judges determine whether you can drill in the North Sea. That even if Starmer and whatever and Burnham, you know, this extraordinary series of somersaults he’s performing, have been talking about doing this, they will immediately be— until they repeal that, they will be taken to court and judges determine whether or not you can frack. This is utterly insane.

New Labour’s Legal Legacy and the Conservative Crisis

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I think I finally understood what you’ve been trying to tell us for a very long time, David. What you’re really saying— correct me if I’m misrepresenting— but what I’m hearing is what you’re really saying is New Labour legislated their political opinions into actual law, and then the Conservatives effectively carried it on.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Well, it’s even worse than that. What you do is New Labour legislates its prejudices into an alternative legal system, right? You introduce absolutely foreign principles. There’s a marvelous, you know, Thomas Sewell, who is extraordinary, impressive man, the Sewell Report that argued passionately— Tony Sowell.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Pardon?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Tony.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Thomas Sowell is an American economist who I like.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: He spells S-O-W.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Both equally impressive.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: And in a very similar way. But when he wrote the preface to the report, which I’ve just mentioned now from the Prosperity Institute attacking the Equality Act, he came up with this wonderful phrase. He said, “a foreign body of law, an alien body of law.” And that’s what’s happened.

So as I said, it’s why I’ve been using these medical analogies — that it is like, you know, autoimmune disease or a cancer, that you use the word constitution of your body as well as the state. And that’s what’s happened. So it’s not simply policy. It’s that this fundamental change happened.

Quangos, Experts, and the Erosion of Democratic Control

You see, again, just looking back to the business of the so-called expert committees — English Nature is one of them, the Climate Change Committee, the insane policies we’ve been having on this. And both Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, the great American president of the first years of the 20th century, they were both fascinated by the role of experts. They’re both fascinated by scientists. Churchill has Lord Charwell, he’s not yet called that, sitting around his dinner table at Checkers in his wilderness years of the 1930s. He becomes a major figure in the Second World War.

But the two of them fight for the ownership of that wonderful phrase: “You want your scientists on tap, but not on top.” And what we’ve done, of course, with this multitude of quangos — 400 and odd of them, effectively spending nearly a third of the state budget without any form of democratic control — you’ve put the expert on top. That’s why Michael Gove said we’ve had too much of experts. He didn’t explain it. You see what I’m trying to get at? All sorts of people are beginning to understand the problem, but they’re understanding it in a fragmentary way.

Rishi Sunak, in one of his Times columns, actually admitted when he talked about the Rwanda scheme, he said, “Well, in retrospect, what we should have done was change the law before we tried to introduce the scheme.” In other words, the legal structures that I’ve been talking about absolutely guaranteed its failure. So what they did was something profoundly stupid. Again, it was like Liz Truss — they adopted what’s a good policy. Rwanda is something like Rwanda is the only way we’re going to deal with it. It’s how Australia dealt with it. It’s how Italy is beginning to deal with it and so on. But they did it without making it possible. In other words, they walked straight into an open trap.

And repeatedly British government is doing the same thing. Mahmoud is going to find all the sorts of things she wants to do will face, unless she does what I think will be unthinkable — which is reversing great slices of this New Labour legislation — she will find not simply that her backbenchers won’t do it, but that immediately the legal jaws will snap shut.

The Conservative Party’s Failure to Reckon With Its Past

So again, what we should also be talking about is why do we seem to be in such an impossible mess. I think one of the reasons is — okay, I used, and Theresa May gets me very cross, but just because I think she was so — I hate stupidity. And when you see transparent stupidity, particularly if you’ve been a teacher for a long time, you learn to control your reproving of it. But when it’s on that huge public scale, and again, it’s really important, that inflicts such terrible, terrible damage — this quest for the legacy, you do something off the cuff and it inflicts damage on your country which you can quantify, I would argue, in the trillions. That is serious. That’s why the term guilty men and guilty women really comes in.

But why is the Conservative Party in the mess that it is? Why is Kemi, who is quite impressive in her way — I don’t think she was going to be, but she’s performed reasonably well — why has she failed so badly? Because they haven’t admitted what went wrong. Until the Conservative Party does a full-scale reckoning, it’s analogous to the situation that we found ourselves in in the 1970s.

In the middle of the 1970s, the entire post-war structure was collapsing. From ’45 onwards, if Britain was a 90% socialist country — it was arguably more socialist than East Germany, or as socialist as East Germany. And what was striking in ’51 is that Churchill’s Conservatives went along with it. So from ’45 through to about ’75, there were two parties that, in the phrase of the day, the current phrase of the web, it was the uni-party, and it didn’t really make all that much difference. The Conservatives were mildly more financially competent than Labour, but not much. The same policies — prices and incomes boards, the nationalized industries, all of that stuff, Keynesian economics and so on, the determination to maintain full employment even with featherbedding failing nationalized industries — all of that continued whoever was in power.

And it was only after Edward Heath’s defeat in the election of ’73, ’74 that you get Keith Joseph coming along and saying, “I’ve called myself a Conservative, I haven’t been. I’ve sat in Conservative cabinets who’ve done nothing Conservative.” And you get that reinvention — well, it wasn’t unfortunately what they invent. What he and Margaret Thatcher invent isn’t really the Conservative Party at all. They’re Gladstonian liberals with Manchester School economics, the old Manchester School, the good Manchester School, not Burnham-esque. But at least you get a difference. There’s actually a political debate in Britain.

And unfortunately what happened in 2010 is that Cameron and Osbourne — and it’s easy to see why — you look at William Hague, you look at those terrible years in which Blair just ran rings round them, and they decided if you can’t beat them, you join them. But that of course means you’ve got an albatross hung around your neck. Every time Badenoch gets up in the House and says, “Look at the number of illegal crossings,” all Starmer needs to do is say, “Oh well, the relevant legislation you passed, and there were even more illegal crossings when you were there than we have now.”

And what I do not understand — unless Badenoch is so frightened that half the parliamentary party will leave and join the Lib Dems, which I think may well be the reason — she has never explained why the Conservative Party got it so badly wrong. What she’s done interestingly is take a tip from you, which is probably a bad idea. And she’s said the only reason that the Conservatives got it wrong was because I wasn’t leading them. In other words, a narrow personal point. Whereas of course the answer is very simply, they got it wrong because they followed the wrong policies as established by the Labour Party. That’s the answer. And until they say that.

And of course, Thatcher had the enormous advantage — she had no need to say it because Edward Heath threw his big salt. So he made completely clear that there was a fundamental difference. And Badenoch hasn’t been able to do that.

And I think, again, with all the very promising things — and remarkable if she really has managed to screw the leftish members of her party up actually to leaving the ECHR — somebody like Jessy Norman, who is the son-in-law of Tom Bingham, who was the leading legal brains behind all of this stuff, actually wrote a book with Peter Oborne on the conservative case for human rights. So if you persuaded him to repudiate the act, that’s pretty good going. But she will get no credit and she will not have a ground with which to deal with Farage.

The War Within Conservatism

And again, I spent much of the last 2.5 years touring around the country with my friend Mark Littlewood, ex the IEA. And we’ve been going around Reform associations and Conservative associations. The first thing that I do when I go to a Reform association — Konstantin, you know so much of this game is pantomime, which is one of the reasons you’re a very good public speaker — and I always begin by saying, “Well, I’ve got to make a confession. This is the Reform Association and I remain a member of the Conservative Party.” F* off, you know. And then what I do is, “That’s fine. I’ve been honest with you. You will be honest with me. Come on, hands up. Everybody who was a member of the Conservative Party.” Half the hands go up. I say, “Right, keep them up. How many of the rest of you have voted Conservative?” Virtually every hand goes up.

So what we’re dealing with is a genuine war within Conservatism as to what it actually is, what it means, what its relationship with the past, what its relationship with the desired future, what it thinks is worth carrying forward, what it thinks has gone wrong. It’s exactly the kind of debates that happened in the middle of the 1970s, and even more so in the middle of the 19th century after the Great Reform Act — the great clash between Robert Peel and Benjamin Disraeli.

“If Britain Survives”: The Spectre of National Bankruptcy

FRANCIS FOSTER: David, that was magnificent. And despite my facial expression, I understood everything. However, there’s one thing that you said where a chill ran down my spine. It was 3 words where you said, “If Britain survives.” And you’re not a man to use hyperbole or to say words when you don’t mean them. Why did you say that?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Because I think it is possible that it won’t. If we head down the route that we are doing now, we face national bankruptcy. Bankruptcy. That’s one thing. In other words, we face, if we’re lucky, something like the IMF intervention of 1976, although I think our situation is very, very much worse. The level of our indebtedness is much greater than it was in the 1970s, and that’s not nice. If you look at what happens with Greece, you deal with enforced cuts in public sector salaries of 20%. And more. You deal with confiscation of elements of bank accounts. That’s one thing we face.

We are playing profoundly dangerous games with Russia. We are challenging Russia publicly, led of course by that ass Boris Johnson, who is asinine in this regard. And we’re doing it without the strength. Again, go back to Theodore Roosevelt, who seems to me to be one of the first politicians of the era of mass democracy. And he really understands. And he’s also got a marvelous gift of phrase. He is the one who says, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” And we do the opposite. We yell from the housetops and we have a bent twig, which is the state of the British Armed Forces. This is profoundly dangerous.

At the same time, we have a demoralized population. Thanks to the left, we have spent the last 50 years saying that British history is to be ashamed of, that patriotism — constantly, constantly citing Dr. Johnson, who meant something different — is the last refuge of the scoundrel. We’ve spent time denigrating our armed forces with people like Lord Hermer and Keir Starmer himself, imposing ludicrous conditions in which you effectively say war is an act of policing.

FRANCIS FOSTER: What?

The Failure of Law and the Lessons of History

DR. DAVID STARKEY: The absurdity of judgments that a lad in 18 or whatever under some, the threat of imminent death, does he pull the trigger or not? You know, some fat judge or overfed QC, KC, 40 years later decides whether it’s legal or not. Intolerable.

But so we’ve in fact destroyed the social basis of our army. We’ve destroyed the ideological basis of our army. We’re in the ludicrous position that we support Ukraine. Well, yeah, very nice. What is the war in the Ukraine? Ukraine is a war of national identity. People are fighting to belong to one tribe or another. A country that wasn’t quite sure whether it was Russian or Ukrainian, people are being forced to choose. They’re forced to choose a language. They’re forced to choose a historical myth. You’re fighting to defend absolute frontiers.

Why the fuss about the Donbas and all the rest of it, or whether the Crimea? We can’t even protect our frontiers. We make no attempt at protecting our frontiers. So we’ve got ourselves into a mess in which we somehow imagine that if you utter nice words and belong to elaborately titled international organizations, the world will run, you know, like a prayer book. And I’m afraid it doesn’t.

There’s that phrase of Cardinal Wolsey, “naked to his enemies.” We’ve left ourselves naked to our enemies and we’ve many. And there’s just this refusal to contemplate — nations have, the first duty of the state is to defend and to administer justice. And we failed hideously.

The resignation of Healey — I’m probably going back to Dennis Healey. It’s John, it’s John, John Healey, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah. The former Secretary of State for Defense with that excoriating series of resignation letters. And then a clown like Lammy as head of the judicial system. I mean, just one despairs. Government failing its two central duties.

But unfortunately, you see, the failure really begins under the Conservatives. This is the catastrophe, the worst cuts. And again, Thatcher not escaping, you know, the reason that the Falklands happens is we make foolish reductions to the Navy and to the practice sending ships to the Falklands, and the Argentinians draw the obvious conclusion. Similarly, it is George Osborne in his transcendent folly that imposes so-called austerity across the board apart from foreign aid and the NHS.

I mean, this is what I mean about the Tory Party adopting the values of the left. The only things that were protected from austerity were foreign aid and the NHS, the totems of the left. By the Conservative Party. And instead you begin this catastrophic program of cutting back on criminal justice and legal aid.

Something Very Bad Has Happened

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And all of the things you described, David, nobody — I would put it to you that there’s probably a handful of people in the country that understand them at the level that you are describing them at. But the ordinary person at this point, and I’d say this from talking to people in all kinds of walks of life, hasn’t worked out what’s happened. But what they really have worked out is something very bad. Something very bad has happened.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Right. That’s exactly what the article about Makersfield is about in the New Statesman published today, saying exactly that, that there is. And again, it’s what you expect, that how on earth do ordinary people who most of the time rightly don’t greatly care about politics, but they have an instinct. They know, they see, they see everything from the potholes to the tips to the fly-tipping to the extraordinary things that they hear their children say that they’ve been taught in school to the manifest, the two-tier horrors of what happened in Southport, of what happened — unimaginable — what happened in Belfast and what happened in Southampton. And all of them are the same, the same issues are involved.

But you see what again, both of you, people find it difficult to understand. So the term two-tier is very useful, but it suggests something sort of, “oh well, it’s probably just you’ve got a woke chief constable or something like that.” You see, it’s not. This is what is terrifying. It is embedded in law. And this is what has gone so terribly wrong. The law’s turned against itself and it was done with noble motives.

This is what, you know, so often, you know, again, one becomes old and hackneyed. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The intentions were good. Yes, they were. I belong to a minority. I’m a Puff. And no, no, no, no, but no, no, I know because I was in, I’ve been on the receiving end of nasty policemen, right?

FRANCIS FOSTER: And you also saw the AIDS crisis.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: And I indeed lived through it. Terrible consequences. And I fought for the equalization of the age of consent, but I fought through it through the political process, not by claiming abstract right, which is why I think it stuck in Britain. In other words, why it’s not been challenged. Whereas Roe versus Wade, where you used unions to secure so-called abortion rights in America, fell to bits because it was on the basis of extreme legal construction. You were straining the legal argument.

Lord Bingham and the Turning of the Law Against Itself

DR. DAVID STARKEY: So, if you go back to — I mentioned one man and I want to focus on him again because I think he’s so important. There was a serious, genuine, really brilliant, and I think in many ways noble lawyer, a man called Tom Bingham, Lord Bingham, who was the senior law lord before it was turned into the Supreme Court. And he is the one who really reconceives of law in this different way.

And he delivers a lecture in Australia — possibly wise to do it in Australia rather than here. And this is what he says, and it’s really important that we all understand this. He says quite explicitly, “human rights law is anti-democratic. It is counter-majoritarian. It protects the minority as against the majority.” And you know what? He lists the minorities. Do you know what’s at the head? The mentally sick. Rudi Carbaner, Kaloch Karne. Racial minorities. Gypsies. All the problem groups.

So when you look at why the state completely failed to incarcerate Rudi Carbaner or Kaloch Karne, the presumption of the law is you don’t. In other words, what we can see is when it comes to the balance between the individual right and public protection, the legal doctrine of embodied right is disastrous.

Again, this notion that their rights means prisoners have got the right to vote, which was supposed to be forced on Britain by the Human Rights Court in Strasbourg. It is an absurdity. You see, again, human rights — it is also the wonderful capture of language by the left. They sound wonderful. Paddington Bear. I always say it’s sort of Paddington Bear. Again, equality — who could possibly object? But you see, the problem is what you do with those ideas.

Traditionally, I mean, again, the great contrast is between the French and the American revolutions. If you look at the French, the French are the first people to come up with a declaration of — it’s called the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. But of course, the moment you do it, you have the Terror. So you put it in a box and forget about it. And by the way, when it comes back, because of the very loose nature of Napoleonic law, which is a series of general principles anyway, you know, yet another set of general principles get lost in it.

It’s when you embed that stuff in a common law system where words are taken seriously that you have the disastrous consequences. But I mean, if we go back to what Bingham is saying there, he is — the law itself is turned against its principal purpose. The principal purpose of the law is to protect the law-abiding citizen. And also the principal purpose of the state is to protect itself.

If you constantly go on about, “oh, our duty is to the world” — you know, the man who’s just been made a Knight of the Garter, The King being, of course, as soaked in this stuff as the leftist lawyers. Gus O’Donnell, who was the head of the Treasury. There’s the famous conversation, which is reported by David Goodhart, when they were in conversation, and I think it was Mark Thompson, who was the Director General of the BBC and then went off to run the New York Times, and David Goodhart. And the conversation was, “well, what is the actual purpose of government?” And O’Donnell said, “oh, you know, I didn’t think my purpose was just to pursue the prosperity of Britain, it was the wellbeing of the world.” I mean, that’s what’s gone wrong.

And conservatives again had no defense because people like Churchill, you know, Churchill was a liberal really. Remember, he crosses the floor of the House twice. And Churchill in that expansive postwar phase after ’45. Conservatism bought this stuff. It was defenseless. And one of the things we’ve got to do on the right is to retrawl our past, re-explore our past to find out what left us so vulnerable. How did we lose the principle, the main principle?

What is so terrible — that question you asked me — we were the world’s best governed country. Why does everywhere talk about a parliament? Because they were copying ours. Still the role of common law as the world’s best system of commercial law. However, catastrophically it’s gone wrong in terms of public law and criminal law in Britain itself. And the just quality of the British public service, the civil service until very recently. Things have gone wrong very, very recently. The roots are deeper, but we need to explore that past to find out what we need to recover.

Because again, the temptation is revolution. The temptation is, faced with this mess that I described, that we say, “okay, knock it all down and start again.” That is the infinite catastrophe. The attempts at doing that invariably fail, right? The only reason the American — there’s only been one successful revolution, and it’s the American Revolution. And that was successful because it wasn’t a revolution, right?

The American Revolution Was Not a Revolution

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’ve always thought that. It’s not — it’s a war of independence.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: It’s a rebellion. It’s rebellion. And rather than, you know, when the French with their revolution, they tried to alter everything from the system of weights and measures to the actual areas of government, to the names of the days of the week, for heaven’s sake, and transform law and everything else. The Americans keep it all. And what you finish up with, to, by the way, the absolute fury of radicals like Tom Paine, is a very lightly modified system of the British government. The president is an elected king. The Senate is a version of the House of Lords. The House of Representatives is a version of the Commons with a speaker.

And as I always tease my American friends, the administrative — I’m going to test you — the administrative officer of the House of Representatives, what’s he called?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t know.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: The Sergeant at Arms. Americans haven’t the faintest idea what a Sergeant at Arms is.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I do.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: But it’s there because the British Parliament has a Sergeant at Arms. So what I am trying to do — which is why I slightly bridled when you sort of said, “oh, you’re a historian, but now we’re talking about the present” — it seems to me the only way that we can get out of this mess is by realizing that our present has erred terribly precisely because it’s repudiated our past. And what we have to do is to reconnect.

We’ve to realize, whereas people like Blair and whatever, although they talk about the hand of history, they clearly regard it just as, you know, fuddy-duddyism, old-fashioned, you know, just to be thrown away. But in fact, properly, the history of a people is an organic thing. It’s like a fertile soil. You need that fertile soil of the past for things to grow. It’s not surprising all of these things went wrong under Blair because what he effectively did was to tear everything up by the roots. And then you’re very surprised 20 years later when they’ve all withered, you know, because you pulled them up.

The Revolutionary Spirit and the Divided Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, David, first of all, let me ask you to unbridle yourself because I was not remotely suggesting that your expertise in history is not relevant to the present moment. On the contrary, it’s one of the reasons we love having you on the show. And we’ve often talked about the present. And you mentioned the revolution on the way in to have this conversation today.

I revisited our first ever interview and it opens with the phrase, Starkey’s — it’s you saying Starkey’s rule of revolution is that every revolution reproduces the worst features of the ancien régime. But I would put it to you that the rise of Restore in particular shows you that in this country now, at a fairly low level, but nonetheless, there’s a rising spirit of revolution. There’s a rising, let’s throw this whole thing out and start again.

I mean, I don’t think it’s an accident that Rupert Lowe’s favorite historical character is Cromwell. And much of the language and the rhetoric is of that nature. And that I think is also part of the reasons why I bridled at your suggestion that the right is united around policy. I don’t think it is. I don’t think it’s united around policy or personality.

Now, of course, there are some areas on which they increasingly agree, but I think you articulated the problem beautifully in terms of the right. You said it’s the most fertile opportunity for the right to fight back. But what you have is the Tories who are tarnished by their time in government, and like you say, they have not made the mea culpa that they need to be able to move on. You have Reform, but I think part of the issue for Reform is just time. It’s like people are very fed up, but the next election’s 3 years away. And so increasingly the rhetoric is amplified, which is where you have Restore come in as a personality clash with Rupert and Nigel, obviously.

But there’s also now a feeling like this whole thing doesn’t work. Which clearly it doesn’t. I mean, objectively it doesn’t. But I think the conclusion from some is now actually we just have to throw away the whole thing and we have to go in an almost radical revolutionary route. And that to me is also part of why I think it’s more difficult for the right to unite around all of these things. Would you agree?

FRANCIS FOSTER: Sorry, go. There’s also one element that I’d like to add to that, which is there are a faction on the right who not only want to tear everything down, they want revenge for what they feel that has been inflicted upon them.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: I think on that latter point, I am not entirely unsympathetic.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I’m very sympathetic.

Stripping Honours and the Danger of Vengeance

DR. DAVID STARKEY: But let me distinguish. I think that what we must recognise is that we did one really important thing in the early 18th century. This is after the fall of the Tory government under Queen Anne, and the coming to power of the current royal house, the House of Hanover. We at that point looked as though we were going to continue impeachment — so with Robert Harley, the Earl of Oxford — it looked as though we would do what had always happened up to that point, that when a leading minister falls, you get confiscation and execution. We didn’t do it and we haven’t done it from that point onwards. And I don’t want to do that.

What I think would be legitimate, and because I think as a measure, there needs to be a measure of public disapproval — that point that I made about the guilty men — I would do it by the stripping of honours. It seems to me that it is entirely appropriate that people like May be stripped of her peerage. I think it is entirely appropriate that Blair be stripped of the Garter. And there needs to be an act of public shaming, but there is always the risk of that, of course, that it just becomes tit for tat, which is what it did before.

So maybe, and also the pursuit of vengeance is a foolish one because it does terrible damage to people. I mean, I know I experienced cancellation. There is a risk that you simply let your hatred of those who did it consume you and it destroys you. And it’s a foolish thing to do as an individual or as a person.

But to go back, I do not believe that Restore has got — and look at why is it called Restore? It’s called Restore precisely because Rupert Lowe was one of those who first accepted my analysis. Because if you remember, the point that I made is there’s this gigantic shift under Blair, Blair Brown. What we need to do is a great act of repeal in which we undo it, and then we restore, we have a new restoration.

And I think the problem with Rupert, and he will forgive me saying this, I think he’s not the most coherent of thinkers. And he’s of course got a group of radical young men and some rather sillier middle-aged men who are supporting him. The middle-aged men in particular, going off and playing with rather silly bits of pseudo-political philosophy, which have been dredged up from Eastern, from Germany and whatever at various periods. But I don’t believe it amounts to anything very serious. If you look at their actual policy recommendations, they pretty much fit the same. The debates are the same if you read Harrison Pitt’s paper. And the only way they will be able to do anything is by winning a majority in Parliament.

The Myth of the Ordinary Politician

Where I think things are going wrong at the moment, and it’s even the game that’s being played on the right — it goes back to your point, Francis, about politicians. This weird business, and Makersfield demonstrates it really interestingly, both Robert Kenyon, and also the Reform candidate and Andy Burnham themselves, they’re playing the ordinary chap routine. We are just completely ordinary people. And somehow the fact that we’re just ordinary people — you know, except, you know, do it with a different accent. I’ve now forgotten to do Northern, I’ve been away.

Whereas people like Andy Burnham was at Cambridge for God’s sake. Read English literature at Cambridge. You can’t have anything much more South and Poncey than that, can you? But playing this game of being an ordinary person, this idea that the solution to what’s gone wrong with our politics is a House of Commons of completely inexperienced people is a madness. It’s a madness that they will be just chewed up and spat out by this judicial legal expert civil service machine that we’ve been talking about. And it’s very easy to see why. And it’s also, of course, one of the myths of democracy. We want our politicians to be just like us. Please, God, no. But you can see at a moment like this the power of that.

Farage, Thatcher, and the Need for Articulation

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, of course.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: But it is, there is a tragedy, and I think again, it’s tragedy, particularly at the moment of Farage, that you can see what he’s trying to do. I don’t know whether you read the long-form essay that he published on Substack on two-tier. Well, it wasn’t terribly well written. It was very rambly. It repeated itself. And although everything in it was very good sense, anybody reading it who wasn’t like you and me would just go straight to sleep.

Whereas, you know, he has got real rhetorical gifts, he’s not using them. He’s not yet stood on that platform. Maybe he can’t, maybe he doesn’t have the confidence to do it. Maybe he doesn’t have sufficient interest in ideas.

Let’s go back to Thatcher, or indeed Blair. Blair was passionate about ideas. Everybody’s saying that’s what is so catastrophic about Starmer is even though he is one of those who formulates the ideas of the current miasma, he can’t articulate them, he can’t explain them. And the only way we will get out of this is by people who can clearly articulate, A, what’s gone wrong, B, what needs to be done to begin to put it right.

And then even more importantly — I mean, I’m not pretending anything I’ve been saying is a panacea. It is simply the first thing a new government that wants to do anything will have to do. It’s the first step. In other words, you’ve got to strike off — it’s like one of these slavery liberation films. It’s the moment at which you cut your fetters, or Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. That’s not a very welcome analogy, but you have to strike off the fetters before you can do anything at all.

But that requires what Thatcher was able to do. Articulate ideas, explain why, carry people with you. And again, I think that the population is ready for it. This sense of, this terrible sense of nostalgia, of loss. And it can go in one of two directions, can’t it? It can go to the violence and people like David Betz talking about the evident risk of small, low-scale civil war. It can go in that direction.

Or if there is somebody who can seize that moment, can explain to people what’s gone wrong, why it’s gone wrong, who was responsible, what’s got to be done to put it right, it can then be turned around. It can become positive. It can become a moment of genuine restoration and revival, as has happened very frequently in the Anglo-British past.

You’ve turned what could have been the disaster of Magna Carta, the ensuing French invasion and whatever, you had a man, William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, with the imagination, with the capacity, with the combination of political and military skill able to turn it round. You had that extraordinary moment in 1689 when both the Tories and the Whigs came together to remove an impossible king and to do so in a fashion which you were able to, wonderful, pretend nothing had happened. You’d removed a king in a dynasty and you pretended nothing had happened. The kind of non-revolutionary revolution. That we were describing with America, but there’s that terrible hole in the landscape.

The Divisions on the Right

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, this is why I’m honing in on the divisions on the right, because for a long time it looked like Nigel Farage is the man to do it. He’s still in prime position out of the —

FRANCIS FOSTER: In pole position.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: In pole position, yeah. It’s the right term. To do it. But look, I can sort of see the Tories doing some kind of pact with Reform towards the next election. But the enmity between Restore and Reform is such that I don’t see that happening. And I think there’s a very real chance that the voters split and therefore you get actually a different form of government.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: A red-green coalition, God help us.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right. So in terms of your perspective, what do you think should happen between those parties on the right?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: I want a miracle, don’t I?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah. Well, this is why I keep coming back to this issue.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Please, I’m quite good in an analysis, but I’m not God yet. I haven’t undergone an apotheosis, but one just hopes a sense of what is at stake penetrates their minds. These are people who claim to be acting for the benefit of the country, can they not just think and reflect and look at what the possible consequences of their choice, when indeed the certain consequences of some of their choices will be?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I don’t think they can though, because if I —

DR. DAVID STARKEY: They’re so blinded by —

The Incentive Structure Driving Infighting

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, if I sit in each of their chairs, here’s what I would say to what you’re saying. If I’m Kemi Badenoch, I’d say to you, I mean, Rupert Lowe is, you know, we agree with him on some things, but he’s way out there. And not a big party, not a serious person to do business with. Nigel Farage has no experience of government. He’s good at talking, but we can’t work with him. And he hates us, keeps talking down our party. How can I do a deal with him? And by the way, the thing she will never say publicly, but we all know, like you said, half her party are Lib Dems. In fact, most of her party are Lib Dems, because the other Tories either got voted out or are now in Reform.

And if you’re Nigel Farage, you say, how can I do a pact with the Conservatives? Who I’ve been saying have ruined the country for the last 15 years and did. And how can I deal with Rupert Lowe, who keeps, you know, with all the history that we have, who is an extremist and all the rest of it? And from Rupert Lowe’s perspective, he’s saying, well, look at Reform. They keep saying Reform is now the establishment, which seems a stretch, but there you go.

So from each of their individual positions, there is a reason why this infighting is going on. It’s not accidental.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: No, no, no. I’ve never suggested that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I know, I’m not saying you are saying that. And so therefore, I agree with you. My hope is everybody understands what’s at stake. But I think the individual circumstances of which leader that we are talking about are such that the incentive structure drives them in the exact opposite direction.

The Need for a Political Miracle

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Well, I think that’s true if you look at it at party level and personality level. I think in view of the magnitude of the issues, this is why I was emphasizing policy. And I think again that party members in many ways have a higher wisdom than their leaders. And this is one of the reasons that I’m so keen to push saying, look seriously at policy because the plain truth is on the big questions, there increasingly is not a sheet of paper between them. What there is is difference of rhetoric.

I mean, in other words, if we look with Restore, yes, the lads, the lomosexuals play, play, play, they need, frankly, the best way is slightly to give up. I mean, they’re cosplaying revolutionaries. And the online world enables one to do that. And sensible people just need to have a little giggle and say, you come on, boys, you know, really, you’re not quite that big chap, you know. And it’s all too important and it matters too much and there’s too much at stake. But I did use that word miracle and we’ve been an extraordinarily lucky country, but every so often luck does run out.

Is the Next Election Existential?

FRANCIS FOSTER: David, do you think the next election is existential for this country?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Yes, I think the whole of our conversation suggests that. I think the point is that the path that we are on now is guaranteed. And this again is the predictive element of the analysis. I want to emphasize this, that I’m assuming I’m now donning a mantle of prophecy because it seems to me that the analysis that I’ve given has worked both analytically, in other words, you’re looking back, but it has now turned into an accurate instrument of prophecy.

I prophesy the Burnham government will fail and will fail worse. That we are in a cycle, we’re in a downward cycle. We’re chained to a wheel. Everything that you do, everything they do makes things worse. The operations of law make race relations worse. The Equality Act makes, amongst other things, makes running a company worse. The tax policies make youth unemployment more likely. Make the business of employing anybody more difficult. In other words, we’re in this lunatic situation that if you said, what is the worst thing you can— this is a bit like your analysis now of the parties and the personalities. If you said, what is the worst thing that you could do, that is the most likely choice that the government will make.

So yes, but what is also extraordinary is that there’s a solid 20% and more of the population that is so purblind that it believes in this stuff. I mean, again, one of the things that— and we haven’t really talked about this— the whole of the left believes in— and we talked about magic— the left fundamentally believes in magic. This is why Polanski is such an interesting figure. You know, he genuinely believes in magic. You know, if you think about it enough under with a pendulum and allegedly going into hypnosis, you can grow your tits. And the left’s approach to policy is absolutely identical.

You know, you believe, you know, the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, 6 impossible things before breakfast. I mean, Lewis Carroll is fascinating on all of this. Again, the famous interchange with, what’s he called? What is the big egg called? Oh, falls off a wall.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Humpty Dumpty.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. But Humpty Dumpty, that exchange between Humpty Dumpty and Alice where Humpty Dumpty says, “Words mean what I want them to mean, neither more nor less.” And what does Alice say? Question of power. It’s the whole absolute— just extraordinary. And again, this is the whole point of George Orwell. It’s why you have the essay on language at the end, on Newspeak, at the end of 1984.

The left believes in words over everything. Again, the whole business of gender transitioning. The idea of gender is the triumph of words over biology. You know, that extraordinary moment, if you remember, when Lord Winston, the last moment that he appears on Question Time, when he says, you know, I am terribly sorry, I know I will never appear on Question Time again, but your sex is in every actual cell of your body. Yeah, says that.

Words Over Reality: The Left’s Magical Thinking

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, my favorite bit of that was Fiona Bruce’s response. Do you remember? No. Well, she went, “Some people might disagree with you.”

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Here is our leading public biologist, you know, and some airheaded woman who is best, you know, acting as a dolly to Philip Mould in front of a picture, you know.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, just— well, actually, I think it’s worse than that because my experience with Fiona is that she’s actually pretty sensible about lots of things, and she’s always—

DR. DAVID STARKEY: But she’s not allowed to be.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But she’s not allowed to be. I don’t know, that’s what I mean. I think it’s worse in that respect.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Yeah, I mean, but it is— remember, if there is— we’re dealing with things which are the leftist mythic, you know. As Thatcher said, the facts of life are conservative, but you want to believe it’s different and it’s a religion. I mean, not for nothing, you know, Labour is a moral crusader, it’s nothing, it’s a religion. And or indeed like Islam, they are religions. And the fact that people believe nonsense doesn’t unfortunately stop them believing nonsense.

But again, it should be such an— sorry, I’m sounding really pathetic. It should be such an opportunity on the right. The doors are open, the windows are open. We’ve got a political structure which is manifestly collapsing. We’ve got half the political establishment spouting nonsense. You can even see with Blair semi-rowing back is awareness of the catastrophe. And so on and so on.

The Venezuela Parallel

FRANCIS FOSTER: But you know, I do understand, David, why people are going to the left. It’s very similar to Venezuela. So Venezuela in the late ’90s, it was a failed state. People knew that if— we had democracy, but people knew that all that would happen is that somebody would come in, they would talk a good game, they’d rob the country blind, so would their cronies. Everything would continue to collapse. Everything would continue to fall apart. And at the end of their term, they would go to Costa Rica or some other country like that and live off their ill-gotten gains. Chávez was starting his campaign and people went, “Can it be any worse than what’s gone before?” I mean, it was.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: I was just going to— I fear that—

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Spoiler alert, it can.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Spoiler alert, spoiler alert. It can be a great deal worse. But there’s another spoiler alert there. I don’t actually believe that our political class is pillaging the country.

FRANCIS FOSTER: No, no, but I’m not saying that they are. But what I’m saying is that people saw a failing system. It’s different, but nevertheless the system is failing and they go for the emergency measure.

DR. DAVID STARKEY: But what I think is more peculiar is that they haven’t, the left, or well, it’s dabbling, though it doesn’t look to be dabbling terribly seriously with the Greens and Polanski. The left is persisting. The left has got this enormously long history of being a central part of the failure. But the true believers continue. Whereas at least on the conservative side, there’s a serious, however heavily disguised it is, there’s a serious degree of rethinking. On the left, there’s actually regression.

The attempted rethinking of New Labour having catastrophically failed, what do they do? There’s a very good reason, of course. The Labour Party is the most nepotistic of parties. Everybody is everybody else’s uncle, brother, sister, whatever you look at it. And of course they have to keep going because otherwise, however, this is where I’m afraid I do slightly agree with, not so much corruption, but there is a political machine. It’s got, either you’ve got to acknowledge that it’s been a disaster and dissolve it, or you desperately try to keep going.

But I would hope that the one thing that will happen is that the utter catastrophe, because I’m certain that a Burnham government will be an utter catastrophe, really will perform that final act of dissolution of this thing. It seems to me it is now bound to tear itself apart even more dramatically than the Conservative Party did. I mean, you’ve now, with the fall of Starmer, you are at that stage. This is the equivalent of the fall of Boris Johnson, weirdly. Although I think there are very strong similarities actually between Boris and Burnham. Again, people who like to be loved, the left, the nice chap, the good communicator. All deeply depressing.

Where Is Britain’s Churchill?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: As always, David. That’s why we have you on, to feed our inner pessimism and sense of doom. Happy?

FRANCIS FOSTER: No.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: David, always a pleasure. Before we head to questions from our supporters on Substack, what is the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: Nothing. It seems to me that we covered that ground. And the one thing, the thing that is, and again, one’s going to sound terribly naive, we are missing, what are we missing? We are missing the person who can do all the things we’ve been talking about. We are missing the equivalent of a Thatcher. We are missing the equivalent of Churchill at the key moment of William the Marshal or whoever. And there is, we’ve got to hope somewhere there is some man or woman who’ll be capable of standing up and doing that.

FRANCIS FOSTER: You think it’s Theresa May?

DR. DAVID STARKEY: I do not believe in the living dead. A zombier? Please God, help us.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where David’s going to answer your questions.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Julius Caesar was voted dictator temporarily by the Senate to save the Republic and never stood down. Could you ever, ever advocate for a dictator in a possible dystopian future Britain?

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