Scholar of royalty

I understand you're happy to do an interview,'' I say to Dr David Starkey when I call him up to arrange a meeting.

And then, because this doesn't sound quite right, I find myself adding, “perhaps ‘happy' is overdoing it''. “Well,'' says Starkey on the other end of the line, “that depends on how fabulously untrustworthy you are.''

We meet at a place close to the London School of Economics, or LSE, where Starkey was a young don in the early 1970s.

Since 1999, he has made four hefty television programmes a year and on December 26, his 17-part series, Monarchy, finally reached its conclusion.

With his characteristic blend of high waspishness and even higher clarity, Starkey turns his attention to the Windsors — from Edward VII to Elizabeth II. You might expect there to be a lot of gleeful skewering here — Starkey, after all, isn't a man to disdain the rapier.

Yet, here you would be wrong. Other Windsors may come in for a brisk pasting but his verdict on the Queen is sympathetic and generally favourable. Starkey also looks ahead to what life might be like under Charles III.

“Charles appears to be this hopeless fuddy-duddy figure completely out of step with the modern world. Yet, all the things that people — including me — used to laugh at him for, such as ecology and organic farming, have turned out to be rather sensible,'' Starkey says.

Much will depend on Charles himself. Which side of him will win out, the conformist or the radical?

“It is just impossible to tell as he seems to have these two completely unintegrated personalities.''

Starkey knows just what it is like to have unintegrated personalities: He has been carrying his own set around with him for almost as long as he can remember. “I could easily have spent one half of my life in a psychiatric hospital and the other in the Priory,'' he says.

The fact that he did neither is testament to his determination to succeed against considerable odds.

Brought up in Kendal, where his mother was a cleaner and his father worked as a foreman in a washing machine factory, Starkey was born with two club feet. He was an only child whose intelligence and deformity set him apart from everyone else.

“It was slightly odd,'' he says. “My mother was mistrustful. She disliked most of the people and I suppose she passed that on to me. I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child. I had no interest in sport and no ability at it. But I had a very powerful imaginative life.''

By the time he was 11, Starkey had read the whole of Dickens as well as portions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. At his grammar school he excelled and gradually grew more confident. Then came Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and all at once, Starkey emerged into the light.

It was while he was at Cambridge that Starkey became fascinated with the monarchy. “All my friends said that this was going to be a mistake.

Anyway, I went ahead for the simple reason that it interested me. Then when the monarchy became debatable, no other modern historian knew anything about it.''

Throughout his early life, Starkey had a succession of what he calls Svengalis — people who sought to mould him in their own image.

In each case, though, Starkey went along with it for a while and then broke free. “In the end, all these people go too far and want you to be a mini-me. And I never wanted to be a mini-anyone else.''

At some stage Dr David Starkey, bright young history don, transformed himself into “Dr David Starkey'', razor-tongued media personality.

His media potential had already been spotted at Cambridge — he did a stint on a television show called Behave Yourself with Russell Harty. But his big break came with Radio 4's The Moral Maze.

“I suppose my media personality was shaped by The Moral Maze. The idea behind it was brilliant — to be this kind of intellectual tag-wrestling with these bizarre, exaggerated characters.''

It was a role that Starkey took to with gusto. Stories of his rudeness and arrogance soon passed out into the tabloids. I wondered how much of the Starkey that people hear on the radio or see on television is the real him and how much is a deliberate media construct.

“It's a mixture, I think. I do have a tendency towards showmanship. Towards self-indulgence and explosion and repartee and occasional silliness and going over the top. All these are obviously part of my character.

But at the same time it's a bit like character acting. One of the reasons I left The Moral Maze is that I became bored with being Dr Rude. Fortunately, this was just at the time when my history programmes started to be seriously successful.

Ever since, I seem to have managed this double-act — of not having ceased to be Dr Rude and becoming one of Britain's best-loved historians.''

Now that his work on Monarchy is over, Starkey plans to finish his biography of Henry VIII — it is due to be published in 2009.

There are also plans for other television series, other books, other outlets for the Starkey brand. It is all a long way from Kendal and the callipers and the jeers in the street.