Channon was first elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 1935. In his political career he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler at the Foreign Office from 1938 in the Chamberlain administration and though he retained that position under Winston Churchill he did not subsequently achieve ministerial office, partly as a result of his close association with the Chamberlain faction. He is remembered as one of the most famous political and social diarists of the 20th century. His diaries were first published in an expurgated edition in 1967. They were later released in full, edited by Simon Heffer and published by Hutchinson in three volumes, between 2021 and 2022. [1] [2] Biography [ edit ] Early years [ edit ] a b c Cooke, Rachel (28 February 2021). "Gossip, sex and social climbing: the uncensored Chips Channon diaries". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 January 2022. For all his gross misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, Nazi sympathies, and world-class snobbery, Chips Channon was undoubtedly an inspired diarist. However repulsive a figure he was, after devouring this volume, readers will be anxious for the next. The author Channon, pictured here in 1934, was an American-born member of the British Parliament and an expert social climber whose recently released diaries are causing a stir in elite circles on both sides of the Atlantic. Bettmann // Getty Images

Nobody who was worried about their future reputation would leave a pair of sentences like that lying around. Channon’s tendency to extreme fandom of the powerful is no doubt an expression of his own ambition, and is by turns engaging and troubling. The lineup of heroes worshiped in this volume starts with Lord Curzon. Channon had a way of charming grand and unapproachable old men, and in his earlier English life Curzon, who’d been viceroy of India for six years and foreign secretary for five, was a very grand example indeed, “the last of the patricians, the great political Olympians.” Curzon’s stepson, Hubert Duggan, “beautiful, strong and nectar-like,” was a friend and crush of Channon’s, and Curzon, you feel, was the sort of father Channon himself might have liked to have. Curzon’s last illness, death, and funeral in 1925 give the diary the first of those elegiac sequences in which Channon is an intimate witness to state affairs—the more so as Curzon’s second wife, Grace, an immensely wealthy widow from Decatur, Alabama, was one of several titled American women who became close friends of his. He wrote two more books: a second novel, Paradise City (1931) about the disastrous effects of American capitalism, [3] and a non-fiction work, The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933). The latter, a study of the last generations of the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavarian kings, received excellent notices, and was in print twenty years later. Some critical reservations reflected Channon's adulation of minor European royalty: The Manchester Guardian said of his account of the 1918 revolution, "he seems to have depended almost exclusively on aristocratic sources, which are most clearly insufficient." [11] Despite this, the book was described on its reissue in 1952 as "a fascinating study... excellently written". [12] Channon is never explicit about his relationship with Coats but it is highly probable that it was at times an actively homosexual one – stigmatised by its illegality, which ended only in the year of the diaries’ original publication. Coats, a fastidious man, was certainly not ready to reveal that relationship to a wider world, even had Channon’s family wanted him to.Channon’s hatred of his native America is visceral. “The word is never on my lips, rarely in my mind,” he claims, unconvincingly. “I never even dream of it and I don’t really believe it exists. I am not at all sure that ugly, horrible continent is not merely the invention of the Rothermere press.” In fact the land of his birth tormented him, and recurs often. ‘I’m always so ashamed of my American passport,’ he writes. In the 1960s many of the people he wrote about were still alive and could have sued for libel. “There will be people whose reputations will be damaged when this comes out,” said the historian Simon Heffer, who is editing the diaries in three volumes. Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7.

Channon, who then gives the reader a ringside seat at the abdication crisis, is delighted that Edward VIII is also rumoured to be a Nazi-sympathiser, and constantly ridicules doddering old Winston Churchill, Duff Cooper and others who could see what was coming. He is honest enough to accept that he is a coward, who desperately hopes he will be too old to fight in any coming war.a b c d McSmith, A, "Original Westminster hellraiser: The secret world of Chips Channon", The Independent, 13 April 2007 Ferguson, Donna (3 November 2019). "Revealed: uncensored diaries of the Tory MP who partied with Nazis and the idle rich". The Observer . Retrieved 3 November 2019.

It was of course a supreme instance of the American assimilation into British society that Chips had devoted his life to—or could have been, if only the king had played his cards more adroitly, had his coronation, and then married the love of his life. Here Channon’s American common sense fails to get the measure of the powerful reasons of state and church preventing such a plan. The insight he has into the case is more psychological. He notes how Mrs. Simpson “enormously improved” the prince, and thinks her good, kindly, and clever; he sees how Edward, who was marvelous at being Prince of Wales, “will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and not imaginative nature can bear.” Also, if the king abdicates Chips will no longer be in favor with the royal family, and this adds to his gloom at the prospect of the new king, George VI, who is “completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!”This first volume of his diaries ends two decades later in September 1938. By then Chips was parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, undersecretary at the Foreign Office. (The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was Lady Honor’s uncle.) The diaries are candid. “There’s an awful lot of drinking and drug-taking – not necessarily by him – but it’s a very decadent society he moves in,” said Heffer. Most of his friends don’t work for a living. “They are the idle rich. And he looks at it and he’s not censorious, but he describes it in great detail.” It’s not that Channon doesn’t penetrate these inner sanctums. He’s like a deathwatch beetle on Benzedrine. He drills his way into balls, dinners and country house weekends, squeezing his elegant form between European heads of state and English grandees, exchanging catty remarks with dowager duchesses or King George’s solemn children. As soon as he has married a member of the fabulously wealthy Guinness family, he has the King (by now Edward VIII) round to dinner. And the American celebrities who amused the aristos are in the diary jostle too – Tallulah Bankhead, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cole Porter, Fred Astaire. Nor is he exactly faultless on the detail. He gets it wrong on some titles and flags. He constantly gives people’s ages and is wildly out, sometimes by as much as a decade: Heffer’s wryly corrective footnotes are themselves a minor pleasure.

Peter drove me home and we made a detour and parked the car for a little in the moonlight by the Nile and he made a curious confession. If only this glorious sunlit love life could go on forever . . . In some ways, the landscape is very familiar. This was already a modern, car-based economy, vomiting up the ribbon developments and standardised housing where so many of us still live. It was a society enjoying mass, American-produced entertainment. It was a culture inflected with modernism; hedonistic, and increasingly open to sexual experiment. But the Britain of the 1920s and 1930s was also much more stratified, industrially regimented and fiercely class-divided in an almost Victorian way. Its politics were class politics. Cooke, Rachel (28 February 2021). "Gossip, sex and social climbing: the uncensored Chips Channon diaries". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 July 2021. It’s almost hard to think of someone who doesn’t appear in the diaries. In volume one, he has a fling with the actress Tallulah Bankhead (“I sat in her dressing room and watched the lovely pink creature change, pink stays, pink flimsy garments, pink tummy…”), dinner with HG Wells (“difficult and petulant… he betrays his servant origin”), and is bent over an altar and spanked by the Catholic priest and werewolf expert Montague Summers (“one should really always do everything once”). Later, Evelyn Waugh, Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams will all appear.This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with Chips descending into poor health but still able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles.