Rude; Wealth; David Starkey is famous for being rich, gay and, well,

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Mar 23, 2003 | by Peter Ross

THE Mona Lisa has her smile, Dr David Starkey has his scowl, and for my money he's the more enigmatic of the two. However, there are a couple of things you may think you know about him. First, he is "the rudest man in Britain", a title bestowed by the Daily Mail on the strength of his irascible appearances on Radio 4's discussion programme The Moral Maze.

Secondly, he is the highest-paid TV presenter in Britain in terms of hourly rate. The historian behind Elizabeth and The Six Wives of Henry VIII makes (pounds) 75,000 per hour, which means that if he had been in front of a camera instead of being interviewed by me, he could have earned (pounds) 86,250. As it was, a potential (pounds) 5250 was frittered away while he and a local tradesman had a conflab about how best to have his windows remodelled. But then this the man who lists his hobbies in Who's Who as "decorating, gardening and treading on toes", so such discussion is to be expected.

Starkey has lived in the same modest semi-detached north London house for 20 years. The car parked outside - a Jaguar Sovereign, appropriately enough - is a bit flash, and he has a lot of oil paintings, but other than that, this is a comfy looking home, not at all ostentatious. A little Henry VIII doll, complete with brown wool beard, dangles from the shutters behind him as we talk.

He's on good form, as you might expect from a man who is about to publish one of the great works of his career - Six Wives, an 852- page book on the queens of Henry VIII. It was originally to have been published to coincide with the Channel 4 show, but Starkey discovered a wealth of new material and it took off from there. Still, it only took him two years to write, and in that time he also made two TV series, both of which won huge audiences. Six Wives drew 4.5 million viewers, beaten only by Big Brother in Channel 4's pantheon of ratings winners.

The result is that Starkey finds himself, aged 58, rich and famous beyond his wildest dreams. "I thought I was going to be a successful academic, take early retirement at 60, disappear off to a nice house in France and forget life," he says in super-plummy tones picked up via intensive listening to BBC radio as a child. "Instead I find myself working four times as hard as ever before, earning 25 times as much money, and then there's this business of being recognised when I sit down to have a cup of coffee in the middle of Welsh Wales. It's very strange."

Becoming famous, particularly late in life, is peculiar. Your entire, complex personality gets boiled down to a few buzzwords. In Starkey's case, he has become the rich, gay, rude historian. "Well, you see that one of them is not true," he cackles.

Which is that? "Rude. Being rude was a convenient image whilst I was doing the Moral Maze. Each one of us was a type, and I was Dr Rude. I can, of course, be acerbic, but as a public image I got bored with it."

So are we witnessing the reformation of David Starkey? "Well, not really, but once an image starts to get in the way of what you want to do, it's time to shift. I was getting typecast."

I should confess at this point that I too have been guilty of getting Starkey wrong. I'm fond of saying that if Simon Schama is the Beatles of history (wildly popular, easy on the ear, the housewife's choice) then Starkey is the Rolling Stones (priapic, sneery, anti- establishment). But the comparison falls flat. Mick Jagger is a posh boy masquerading as a bit of rough, Starkey is the exact opposite - a prole in toff's clothing. His stiff upper lip is buttressed by sheer force of will. "I've always been a passionate believer in self- determination," he says. And how.

The fact is that Starkey has changed everything about himself - his body, his mind, his voice, his faith, his sexuality - and he will change again, I'm sure. He is a work-in-progress, his magnum opus is himself.

Born in 1945, the son of a metal-turner, he was raised in Kendal. It was an impoverished upbringing and intensely religious as his parents were Quakers, a faith that Starkey has long since rejected. He suffered from two club feet, a condition which affected his childhood profoundly. "I was in and out of hospital and in and out of plaster for the first five years of my life. Then wearing surgical boots and God knows what else till my early teens. It obviously produces a sense of isolation and difference." Inevitably, he lived the life of the mind rather than the body, devouring books. It was the beginning of his transformation.

"I happen to be rather proud of where I come from," he says, "but I was never one of those who thought that authentic experience was the sort of life I or my parents had. I was aware of how narrow, how limiting, how boring it actually was. I'm very impatient with talk about human nature. The great advantage about being human is that you make your own nature. We make ourselves, we invent ourselves."

Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Starkey's mother, Elsie, was the great shaping force in his life. "She had this extraordinary power of character, of ambition. For me. It could never have been for herself. She was typical of so many women. She was born in 1907. They couldn't do, finally, anything themselves."