Historian David Starkey has said he is ‘absolutely in favour of compulsory vaccination.’

Interviewed on the Triggernometry podcast, Starkey claimed that history was on his side. He said:

If you actually look, one of the great reasons we have eliminated infectious illness it is vaccination…We have eliminated illness after illness.

When Starkey went on to claim with characteristic hyperbole that ‘there’s no libertarian argument against compulsory vaccination’, he was challenged by his interviewer. But Starkey remained insistent:

I’m sorry. You are a member of society in which if you go around unvaccinated you are likely to infect others.

It’s quite possible that Starkey’s opinions were coloured by his childhood misery suffering from polio. Starkey’s was the last generation to have been seriously at risk from the disease. After that it was effectively ended by vaccination.

But it’s still an odd and unexpected position from a historian better versed than most in the way authoritarian regimes (such as that of his speciality, Henry VIII) routinely abuse power and have no respect for the rights or freedoms of ordinary folk. It’s even odder given Starkey’s recent history as a high profile victim of the cancel culture mob.

Articulate, trenchant, catty, quotable, David Starkey was for a time probably the best-known historian in Britain. The author of several bestselling books on the Tudors, Starkey presented a number of tie-in documentary series, was a regular panellist on BBC political debate shows Question Time and The Moral Maze, and proved so unassailably bankable that in 2002 Channel 4 paid him £2 million for just 25 hours of TV programming.

His fall from grace, however, was as meteoric as his rise. After some incautious remarks on the subject of slavery in a 2020 podcast, Starkey fell victim to the cancel culture mob. Apologising for his ‘clumsy’ and ‘deplorably inflammatory’ words did him no good whatsoever.

As a high profile conservative, Starkey was far too good a scalp for the woke Establishment not to claim. In the subsequent orgy of recrimination, Starkey was abandoned by his publisher, lost his position on the board of the Mary Rose Trust, lost his honorary fellowship at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and a number of other titles and honours he had accumulated in his distinguished, hard-working and honourable career.

It might have been expected that Starkey’s humiliation would have left him chastened, more sympathetic to the plight of the oppressed and perhaps more reluctant to open his mouth without shoving both feet in it.

But apparently not.

I’m cancelling David Starkey. He is not one of us. He’s yet another massive disappointment.