Everyone wants to see the Chinese soldiers who have marched into London. You can understand why the Royal Academy might resort to a star turn to draw attention to its own domestic, and, let’s be honest, dull-sounding autumnal draw, Making History: Antiquaries in Britain 1707-2007. Actually, the exhibition is wonderful, a collection of treasures usually hidden within the walls of its venerable neighbour in Piccadilly, the Society of Antiquaries. Check out John Bargrave’s Cabinet of Curiosities with its “finger of a Frenchman”, Aylett Sammes’s picture of a Wicker Man, the crucifix supposedly carried before Richard III into the Battle of Bosworth and Hans Eworth’s portrait of Mary I sporting a pearl so big that it was later owned by Elizabeth Taylor.

Nevertheless, making Dr David Starkey, the historian and chat-show host dubbed the “rudest man in Britain”, guest curator is sound box-office sense. The Royal Academy’s PR, who is kindly buying us lunch in Camden near where Starkey is filming a final instalment of his Channel 4 series Monarchy, says firmly that the RA employs the finest academics to curate its shows, and it is true that Starkey has form. His Elizabeth I blockbuster at the Royal Maritime Museum four years ago was a hit – although not, it seems, with the Queen.

“Her gin and Dubonnet had not been brought to her promptly enough over lunch, so she was in a very, very bad mood,” he says, recalling the afternoon that he showed her around. “I didn’t know it at the time but I discovered subsequently she is very bored at being compared with Elizabeth I.

“Anyway, she came but she was very reluctant. She marched past all the wonderful things I’d got – the Pembroke armour from Glasgow, first time it had been allowed out for a hundred years, wonderful – and then stopped at the portrait of Elizabeth. Trot, trot, trot, trot. Handbag down. ‘Pheeleep! Isn’t this mine?’ It was the only thing she said. And about a third of the objects were hers!”

Her Majesty was dressed in citron yellow. It is the sort of detail he has an eye for. He is wearing a grey suit that sets off his silvery hair. He drinks a glass of Pinot Grigio with his lunch. For a 63-year-old who has flown this morning from a writers’ festival in Australia via Los Angeles, he is exceptionally chirpy. His conversation, erudite, original but also gossipy and sometimes inaccurate, is a joy. You can ask him about anything, and I do. From Bede to buggery, he has an opinion. But the manners that the rudest man in Britain show towards me, the PR and the waitress are impeccable.

I think he is rather pleased by my suggestion that he has star pulling- power. “The Royal Academy from its very beginning has been about stars: Reynolds’s great lecture series, Turner’s performance on Varnishing Days – you know, where he finished a painting in front of everyone – and on to Norman Rosenthal. Can you imagine anyone else making the position of Royal Academy Exhibitions Secretary news?” But Rosenthal, famous enough in academic circles, is dwarfed by the supernova Starkey. It is easy to see why. Even at the £2 million Channel 4 paid for Monarchy, he is terrific value, an academic whose language is anything but subfusc. On his documentaries he reins in the mischief, but in discussion he is feral. On Question Timehe rounded on the Labour minister Douglas Alexander: “Don’t patronise me, you little twit.” At the Edinburgh Television Festival in a debate about Islam, he flattened the hyper-articulate George Galloway.

“Oh,” he says, “you can be very articulate and be actually rather stupid and I think fundamentally Galloway is stupid – which is why he’s never got anywhere.” Starkey’s politics may be Tory but temperamentally he is a rebel. He left Cambridge on bad terms with his mentor Geoffrey Elton (“be careful,” he warns, “I never held a formal post at Cambridge”) in 1972 and left the London School of Economics in 1998 after another falling out. A further paradox is that while his opinions are judgmental to the point of roundheadness, he has a cavalier’s flamboyance. He hates biographical reductionism, but wonders if his own contradictions can be explained by his being actively gay in the Seventies, when homosexuality still had an “edge and astringency”.

“You were aware that you were separate. I was never arrested but there were fairly unpleasant encounters with passing officious policemen which have left me with a lasting distrust.” Of authority? “Yes absolutely. And I think that’s actually a very good thing.”

He has spoken before of how he pursued casual sex on Hampstead Heath. I cannot imagine someone so fastidious wanting anything to do with it. “But it was wonderful. I have no idea of your inclinations, but have you ever been on Hampstead Heath on a summer’s night? Imagine those extraordinary summers of ’76 and ’77. They were like scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

A latecomer to sex – he seems to have waited until his late twenties and London – he was precocious when it came to television. In 1977 he became a regular on Russell Harty’s Behave Yourself, a rumbustious Friday-night talk show. For a while afterwards he was considered “too strong meat” for television, but Channel 4 took him up in the early Eighties. A mock trial of Richard III, in which he acted as prosecutor, got talked about. But his “apotheosis” as he puts it, came on Radio 4’s The Moral Mazein the Nineties. Originally a witness, he was soon recruited to the jury as the show’s right-wing humour. Once he cross-examined George Austin, Archdeacon of York, and asked his surprised audience: “Doesn’t he make you want to vomit? His fatness, his smugness, his pomposity.” He promises that the insult was not prepared. The Daily Mail called him “the rudest man in Britain”, a soubriquet worth, he thought, £100,000 a year – an acute underestimate, he now realises.

“It’s partly gay banter isn’t it? It’s partly the banter of any good conversation. It partly, of course, very much reflects the grilling techniques of Cambridge supervisions. I think a lot of people found that confusing. They thought we were going for people’s souls, but what you were going for was their brains.” Perhaps the programme’s chairman, Michael Buerk, also misunderstood. In his memoirs he called Starkey “a relatively impecunious historian at the LSE, frustrated and angry”.

“There were elements of that. I certainly think that a sense of boredom with an academic career was already very marked,” he says. He pauses to take aim at Buerk. “Michael has never been any use at following an argument. That was always evident from his chairing of the programme. I’ve been fascinated by the way Michael’s character has changed. When he was doing the programme it was in the immediate aftermath of the famous Ethiopian business and [his programme] 999. He was seen as this kind of goody-two-shoes. It was perfectly obviously to anybody in the programme that he was, in fact, a Daily Telegraph-reading old fart and a reactionary – which is why I like him so much.”

Starkey’s success on the Maze led to a well-paying job on Talk Radio where he hosted a weekend phone-in. It was here he was, for once, bettered in combat. “The only person who’s ever mastered me, and I think it’s important to put such things on the record, was Denis Healey. I thought he’d be an amiable old buffer and he was every bit as much the officious political thug he had always been. He took me to pieces.”

If the child is father to the man, one might assume that life in his childhood home on a council estate in Kendal, Cumbria, was a cockpit of vituperation and debate. It seems not. His mother, Elsie, a cleaner “was powerful, domineering, could be very aggressive” but, no wit. And his father, a factory foreman? “My father liked words but he was sweet and gentle. Except when he lost his temper. No, I think it must be self-generated. I didn’t learn to read very quickly but I developed, apparently, a command of sentences very early.” He was born with club feet, one of which was operated on repeatedly and painfully. He clung to his mother and she to him; the classic conditions, he half-jokes, for male homosexuality to flourish. He enjoyed his progressive-minded primary school but found his grammar school overwhelming. At 13, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was off for four months.

“It was the contrast between my liberal primary school and a very competitive, intensely male grammar school. One’s sexuality didn’t come into it.

“I was refusing to go to school, faking illnesses, all the usual things. Making myself sick. I seem to remember toothpaste as an emetic. But actually I came back much more confident and resumed my rightful place as one of two in the A stream.” He acted – why am I not surprised? – in school plays and won a scholarship to Cambridge where, I assume, he discarded his northern accent. He claims that he never really had one, having learnt to speak from the BBC Home Service. In any case, his estrangement from his parents predated his elevation. “I’d always been so close to my mother that, I suppose, really, our relationship never recovered from my first day at school. Happens to a lot of children: the sense of desertion, abandonment.”

It must have hurt that his mother, who died in 1977, never accepted that he could be happy as he was, as a gay man. “I think she didn’t accept that she would be happy, which is rather more to the point. No, it is very sad. You are trying to tease out my life and, indeed, institutional rebellion has been part of the pattern, but a much more important one, actually, is the way in which there have been shaping figures who have been, if you like, Pygmalions. They have wanted to shape me. My mother was very much that and I think Geoffrey Elton was very much that. If you remember, he was German essentially and he had this notion of the doctor-father, the sense of a kind of filial duty which a student owes to his teacher. Well I always thought that was intellectually ludicrous. The whole purpose of teaching is that you produce people who are better and more interesting than you are. If not, you’re failing as a teacher. And, I suppose, the first really key figure in my television career, John Slater [producer of Behave Yourself] was very much the same. They all somehow feel that they own you.”

So is it his dislike of institutions or his fear of being owned that accounts for his not having “married” his boyfriend of a dozen years, the publisher, James Brown? “I would say that I didn’t become gay to get married.” But it might provide James, who is 27 years his junior, with some rights? “I think it matters enormously if you were dependent on officially provided pensions or you lived in council housing, in other words when you are dependent on the state machinery. I’m not.”

Comprehensive though our conversation has been, I feel we may have short-changed the Society of Antiquaries and its exhibition. I ask if he can think of an object that future antiquaries might usefully rescue from our own age. “What a funny question! History only works one way. Remember Hegel’s line about the owl of Minerva overspreading its wings only at dusk? You in the present can’t possibly tell what the future will find interesting about you.”

I know what I would include in my cabinet of curiosities. It would not be the finger that Starkey has shown to so many over the years, but the vulgarly large ring he always wears upon it. Assiduous future historians would note it was bought not with the proceeds of a brilliant, if late flowering, academic career but with a cheque from a television company. They would puzzle at our culture’s values but recognise, I trust, that it adorned a genuine star.

Making History is at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly until December 2, 2007

David Starkey is at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 14, 2007. To book call 01242 227979 or visit cheltenhamfestivals.com

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