Robert Michael Kilroy-Silk (né Silk; born 19 May 1942) is an English former politician and broadcaster. After a decade as a university lecturer, he served as a Labour Party Member of Parliament (MP) from 1974 to 1986. He left the House of Commons in 1986 in order to present a new BBC Television daytime talk show, Kilroy, which ran until 2004. He returned to politics, serving as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 2004 to 2009. He had a significant role in the mainstreaming of Eurosceptic politics in the UK and has been dubbed 'The Godfather of Brexit'.
Early life
Kilroy-Silk was born in Birmingham, son of William Silk, a Royal Navy leading stoker, and his wife Minnie Rose (née Rooke). William Silk was lost at sea when aged 22, serving on , which was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Brittany by German torpedo boats on 23 October 1943. His son was 17 months old.
Robert's mother Rose remarried in 1946, to family friend John Francis Kilroy, a car worker at the Rootes plant in Warwickshire. He adopted the young boy, who from then used the surname Kilroy-Silk.
Kilroy-Silk failed his eleven-plus examination, for entry to selective schools, in 1953. He spent his first year at a secondary modern school and later passed the review exam and went to Saltley Grammar School, Saltley, Birmingham. He attended the London School of Economics to study politics and economics.
Marriage and early career
In 1963, Kilroy-Silk married Jan Beech, daughter of a shop steward. The couple met when he was 18 and she was 17. They have a son and a daughter.
After graduation he became a lecturer in politics at the University of Liverpool, serving from 1966 to 1974. He published a theoretical work, Socialism since Marx, in 1972.</blockquote>The next year he was quoted as saying, "the Labour Party must always be a class party, for it is a class war we are fighting".
Kilroy-Silk was appointed Shadow Home Affairs spokesman, resigning in 1985. In resigning his seat, he said that he had been assaulted by members of the Militant group and was reported to have had a scuffle with left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn. He wrote a book about his experiences, entitled Hard Labour, and subsequently left the Labour Party.
During his time as Labour MP, he was known as a "unapologetic nuisance" for "unfashionable" and "unpopular" causes such as penal reform, civil liberties and opposition to the tampon tax, as well as "rearguard action" against the Militant tendency; "his speeches were essentially invitations to pass him over for promotion", such as when "in one Budget debate, he accused James Callaghan’s government of following Tory orthodoxies on the economy".
Ireland
In 1992, Kilroy made a comment regarding Ireland in his Daily Express column, attacking Ray MacSharry, a former Irish government minister and EU commissioner, whom he described as "a redundant second-rate politician from a country peopled by priests, peasants and pixies". This was condemned by the then Irish ambassador to the UK, Joseph Small, for its "gratuitously offensive and indeed racist remarks". The newspaper's editor, Sir Nicholas Lloyd, apologised to MacSharry and the Irish people in general, while Kilroy added: "I accept that my references to Mr MacSharry and the Irish people were both offensive and unjustified, and I fully associate myself with this apology."
Shafted
In 2001, Kilroy-Silk hosted a television programme on ITV1 called Shafted. It was a quiz-show and at the end of the show, Kilroy-Silk would ask players whether they wished to "share" or to "shaft", with accompanying hand gestures.
The show was cancelled after four episodes, with sixteen recordings unaired, due to falling ratings. The Penguin TV Companion (2006) ranked it as the worst British television show of the 2000s.
We owe Arabs nothing
The BBC cancelled the Kilroy show in January 2004 after an opinion article, entitled "We owe Arabs nothing", by Kilroy-Silk was published in the Sunday Express on 4 January 2004. The article had first been published in April 2003 by the same paper and 'republished in error' according to Kilroy-Silk. It did not attract much national attention when first published. According to Faisal Bodi, a columnist for The Guardian, the reaction at its second publication was a measure of "the increasing organisation of the Muslim community". Bodi added: