David Starkey: In Unhappier Times

Another day, another David Starkey story. This from the eminent human rights barrister and professor Conor Gearty, who writes of a TV debate in the late 1980s in which he was pitted against the historian and patois-hating riots doomsayer. The debate, on a programme chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby, "involved me taking a civil libertarian line critical of the Thatcher government, and Starkey saying things weren't at all bad", Gearty writes. "Then an incredible thing happened. Starkey came out on TV – declared himself gay, but unpersecuted. Dimbleby turned, delighted, to me: 'So what do you make of that, then, Dr Gearty, ah ha?' ... Clearly they all knew it was coming, a fab scoop on as-live TV. Then another amazing thing. Starkey didn't know me, had never met me, but had listened to enough of what I had said to detect an Irish accent ... 'Now Conor, like me, comes from a poor background ...' he began to proclaim, on no basis other than how I spoke. So there you have it: an obsessive self-publicist and casual maker of racist assumptions, even then, over 20 years ago."

From The Guardian Diary.
Note to younger readers: David Starkey was once "Chairman" of TORCHE, the Tory Campaign For Homosexuality Equality.
Though seeing as Starkey was unpersecuted, clearly he thought equality had been achieved some time before.
At the time of the above interview it was called Conservative Group For Homosexuality Equality.
They are now LGBTory - and they're still cunts.

Update: David Starkravingmad keeps right on digging in an unthink-piece in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday.