DAVID Starkey is never happier than when he is at his most contentious. He recently called the BBC’s adaptation Wolf Hall “wonderful fiction” and said as a nation we’re at great risk of dying of niceness. Now he reckons the whole Richard III re-interment has been a fuss about nothing.

Professor Starkey was speaking at York’s Literature Festival where he told the audience, the city was “well out of it”, and that a “burial in a naff pseudo cathedral in Leicester, rather than the glorious Minster of York is just about right”.

Many who live here will take a rather different view. Richard had close links with York and we think this city had a fair claim to bury the last Yorkist King.

But perhaps we could agree on one thing. A line has been drawn under the proceedings, now this city should remember his memory in its own way.