A talk by controversial historian David Starkey has been cancelled due to coronavirus fears.

A spokesman for venue St Andrew's Church in Deal, said: "We have made the decision to cancel the Evening with David Starkey event, planned for October 8.

"The decision has been made due to concerns over Covid safety in the church, for the numbers expected to attend."

The church did not want to comment further but it had originally set an audience limit of 200.

The number of new cases in the UK has picked up since June and stood at 41,192 today (Monday) compared with 2,988 on September 6, 2020.

This is despite no vaccine being available last September and 43,455,083 people getting second doses by yesterday.

Today's figure is also up from 37,830 last Thursday when the talk, with a question and answer session, was first announced.

Dr Starkey, from Barham, had spoken to a sell-out audience at the Deal Music and Arts Festival in 2018 in a talk titled: King Henry VIII - the First Brexiteer.

The theme for this new appearance was to be a surprise.

It was also meant as a fundraising event for the church with Dr Starkey giving his time for free.

Last year he landed in deep water when he claimed slavery was not genocide due to the survival of "so many damn blacks."

The historian made the comments during an online interview with Brexit campaigner Darren Grimes for YouTube channel Reasoned UK on June 30, 2020.

In reaction Canterbury Christ Church College wiped out his position as visiting professor and he was also angrily condemned by former Chancellor Sajid Javid who is of Pakistani heritage.

Dr Starkey had been talking to Mr Grimes about the Black Lives Matter movement and the history curriculum.

He had told the host: "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.

"The honest teaching of the British Empire is to say quite simply, it is the first key stage of world globalisation.

"It's probably the most important moment in human history and its consequences are still with us.

"As for this idea that slavery is this terrible disease that it dare not speak its name - it only dare not speak its name because we settled it nearly 200 years ago."

Dr Starkey also noted that the "only reason these young black protesters are here is because of slavery" and that "slavery was not the equivalent of the holocaust."

Dr Starkey later apologised saying his inflammatory remarks had been “blundering use of language.”

“It was intended to emphasise, in hindsight with awful clumsiness, the numbers who survived the horrors of the slave trade," he said in July 2020.

"Instead, it came across as a term of racial abuse. I apologise unreservedly for the offence it caused.”

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