Only ‘old, ugly women’ make it on TV now, blasts David Starkey

OUTSPOKEN historian David Starkey — one of television’s most prolific Tudor experts — claims that his broadcasting career has been ruined by the popularity of his female rivals.

Lashing out in particular at Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard, whom he argues gets more airtime, the 73- year- old presenter twists the knife by launching a deeply personal attack on her appearance.

‘The only chance I have of being on TV again is if I were very ugly. I think only old, ugly women can get on TV. Like Mary Beard,’ he tells me at a party in Westminster, adding that he’d only be hired now ‘if I had “tombstone” teeth and rather funny hair and made a lot of noise about that fact’.

It’s a stark change from 2010, when he branded the works of his female rivals — such as Amanda Foreman, who once posed naked holding copies of her book Georgiana, Duchess Of Devonshire — as ‘historical Mills & Boon’.

He also complained that female historians are ‘ usually quite pretty’ and keen to show off their good looks on their book covers.

Clearly no stranger to feuds, Cambridge-educated Starkey also incurred the wrath of fellow Tudor expert Lucy Worsley in 2009 by claiming that female historians had reduced Henry VIII’s life to a ‘soap opera’ by focusing on his marriages. Their five-year spat came to end only when the pair were hired by the BBC to co-present a programme about Hampton Court Palace. His fresh attack on Beard, 63, proves that his penchant for ruffling feathers has not diminished with age. ‘Mary Beard was completely invented by A. A. Gill,’ he continues, referring to the late Sunday Times journalist’s comment in 2012 that she was ‘too ugly for TV’.

‘If he hadn’t have been so rude about her, we’d have never heard of her.’

At the time, Twitter-loving Beard said she had received a ‘deluge’ of support on social media following Gill’s remarks.

Unsurprisingly, Starkey has something to say about that, too. ‘She [Beard] tweets a lot. Twitter is so silly.

Paraphrasing the then-Tory leader’s 2009 comment, he adds: ‘Like David Cameron said: only t**ts tweet’.