Darren Grimes Repents At Leisure

Floor-crossing pundit Darren Grimes likes to complain that people unfairly call him stupid. On the basis of his car crash interview with appalling old bigot David Starkey, they would be right so to do. Only after Starkey’s claim “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived” had been published by his Reasoned UK site did Grimes see the problem.

Worse for Grimes, enough time had elapsed between publication and his moment of revelation for anyone and everyone who wished to pass severely adverse comment on his interview to have done so. The damage had been done, both to his and Starkey’s media careers. So he did what he knows best, and played the victim.

“Hand on heart, I wasn’t engaged enough in this interview as I should’ve been. It goes without saying that Reasoned UK does not support or condone Dr David Starkey’s words … I am very new to being the interviewer rather than the interviewee and I should have robustly questioned Dr Starkey about his comments”. Then came the lame excuse.

 

“However, whether it’s on the BBC, ITV, Sky News or on YouTube, no interviewer is responsible for the views expressed by their guests”. Yeah, right. Grimes could, and should, have cut Starkey’s comments and perhaps given him the opportunity to, shall we say, use a slightly different form of words in their place. He didn’t. He loused up.

And then he loused up some more, as he explained “I’ve been asked to clarify why I described Dr Starkey as a ‘hero’, well … It was an interview that was over an hour. My hero comment was more a reflection on how much I’d appreciated his history programmes growing up, which did a lot for me as a kid in a really crap state school with precious little in the way of history”. His problem was that his characterisation was not true.

James Wilson broke the news to him. “You are just making stuff up [Darren Grimes]? While you were at Tanfield School, OFSTED rated it as good? And the curriculum was rated excellent [Citation]?” Michael Dunn added “I went to the same school, same teachers, I’ve made a career out of my history education, have a degree in history and work in a museum with a collection of national significance, he’s lying again”.

Meanwhile, the fallout for Starkey continues. Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge is to “review” his honorary fellowship next week. As LBC has reported, he “has resigned from his position at The Mary Rose Museum, which said it was ‘appalled’ by his comments on slavery". And TV historian Dan Snow has told that his channel “History Hit has never made any original content with Starkey. He does appear on one documentary which we licensed from a third party, this has now been taken down”.

This cautionary tale of modern media was summed up by Miffy Buckley: “The fact that such a frankly stupid and out-of-his-depth ninny like Darren Grimes can segue from failed trainee hairdresser to pundit on prime time Sky News programming must surely tell us something about the state of our media, and of our political & civil discourse”.

Broadcasters keep inviting them on their shows, and they keep showing the world the true extent of their expertise - or lack of it. Grimes and Starkey should not be the only ones repenting at leisure this morning. Hello all you gullible media bookers.

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