I loved David Starkey’s documentaries when I was a kid. His confident erudition, his capacity to sum up a person or idea in a wonderfully pithy phrase: he made history come alive to me more than any teacher I had at school. Then something happened in the summer of 2011.
Starkey appeared on BBC’s Newsnight to discuss the riots that engulfed London that August. On it, he said that white working-class people in Britain “had become black”. By this, he meant “a particular sort of nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion”.
