We all know a good-hearted person with a knack for attracting calamity. Enter 27-year-old Darren Grimes, a talented British broadcaster who, having just slipped on his latest proverbial banana peel, cheerfully assures National Review by Skype that he is more or less all right. Grimes, a charismatic Northern lad with the gift of the gab (as we Brits say), has, in the past several years, managed to attract the wrath of the Electoral Commission, the BBC, and now the Metropolitan Police. His offense? Being conspicuously conservative and — one cannot help but notice — not especially careful.
Grimes’s latest run-in with the British establishment began on June 30 of this year when, in response to the George Floyd protests, he invited the renowned (now disgraced) English historian, David Starkey, onto his YouTube show to discuss the lack of scholarship behind the Black Lives Matter movement. In the course of the interview, Starkey told Grimes that transatlantic slavery did not constitute genocide since “so many damn blacks” had survived. It was a flagrantly offensive remark, one that many considered to be unequivocally racist — though seemingly not Grimes, who let it slide.
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