There are exceptions. Channon idolised Lord Curzon, the former governor-general of India and cabinet minister, and his portrait of this deeply strange and complex man is gripping. When the people he is describing are particularly fruity, the diary comes alive again, as with a visit to the Duke of Argyll in 1925: “They are an odd brace, this brother and sister both past 50 and still unmarried. Lady Elspeth is the manlier of the two. Her dirty hair and unkempt appearance and appalling figure cannot hide her great beauty and distinction. She wore a knitted dressing gown that very nearly wreaked havoc with my appetite. Argyll talks in a high falsetto voice about Celtic legends and folklore and ritualism and bells – bells are his hobby…” Harris, Robert (6 June 1993). "A party animal". The Independent on Sunday . Retrieved 3 November 2019. It’s just that Chips is, certainly in his younger years, a bit of a ninny. He is so desperate to “make it” in society, and so hypnotised when he gets there, that it’s far too much who and not enough what. He lists who sat next to whom, who was excluded and who is feuding with whom this week rather than the pungent verbal detail. On the rare occasions when he does relate the actual exchanges, there is little detail or colour. For instance, “Lady Scarbrough is very angry with the Astor clan” – American, by origin, of course – “‘What did they do in the War of the Roses?’ she demanded.” Details of his 1936 trip to Germany for the Berlin Olympics and parties with Göring, Himmler and Goebbels are published for the first time. “You see these Nazi monsters all competing with each other to give the grandest balls and there’s loads of politicians from England, from all over Europe, who go there to be entertained,” said Heffer. Channon finds the Nazis vulgar, “not the sort of people he’d want to have to dinner” – but he is impressed by certain things they have done in Germany, and fears what they will do to Britain in the second world war. “He sees the Germans as a potentially really nasty threat. He’s an appeaser.” Born into a rich Chicagoan family, Channon fell in love with European culture as honorary attaché to the American embassy in Paris, where we find him when these diaries open in 1918. Living off his parents until 1933, he then married the heiress Lady Honor Guinness. He became Conservative MP for Southend in the 1935 General Election.

In spite of all, I am pro-German: I find myself mysteriously drawn towards the Teutonic race. Is it a reaction against my mother’s violent Francomania which poisoned my childhood?” When he read that Adolf Hitler had the same breed of Hungarian dog as him, “my heart warmed to him in spite of all those military operations which must, sooner or later, lead to war.” From the window before we landed I saw Peter, brown, amber, alert, handsome, distinguished, stupendous, waiting for me. I rushed out: he seemed enchanted: I was exhilarated, almost delirious with excitement... Peter had arranged a suite, he whispered, at Shepheard’s… We had a rapturous reunion. 1941 Henry "Chips" Channon and Lady Honor Guiness leaving St. Margaret’s Westminster after a rehearsal for their 1933 wedding. Keystone But it is, of course, political Channon for whom we really turn to the diary. He was at the epicentre of the pro-appeasement wing of the Tory party and high society, and at the heart of the abdication crisis. The earlier version of the diary disguised just how enthusiastic he was for the fascists, as were many of those around him. For much of this period, Channon was a fashionable anti-Semite, who feared above all a socialist revolution and the murder of the aristocracy, perhaps by guillotine. 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.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 When it comes to the great cultural figures he meets, Channon seems incurious to the point of philistinism. André Gide is “a dreadful, unkempt poet-looking person”. Stravinsky? “A small little man, unimpressive and uninteresting looking like a German dentist. He has no manners.” Proust – with whom Channon may have had a liaison – gets off a little better, but has bad manners, grubby linen and pours out “ceaseless spite and venom about the great”. HG Wells is “common” and “betrays his servant origin”. TE Lawrence is “not a gentleman”. Somerset Maugham? “Of course, not a gentleman”. His contempt for his father and mother, for Chicago (that “cauldron of horror”), and for America in general lent a special intensity to his identification with old Europe and its labyrinthine upper classes. I wish Heffer had said more in his introduction about Channon’s life before the diary opens—the time he had already spent in Europe, the schooling in Paris that must have made him fluently francophone but doesn’t explain how he came to be the darling of the faubourg Saint-Germain eight years later. The short spell at Oxford, a year after the war ended, seems to have confirmed his taste for high, and preferably royal, society. Thereafter he made his home in England, and in 1933 became a British citizen. He lived all his life on money provided by his father and later by his father-in-law, though his terrific energy and excitability meant he was capable of hard work. He certainly saw himself as playing a significant part in the affairs of his adopted country.

Channon’s mesmerized obsession with titles and rank has its counterpart in a fatuous horror of the “middle-class” and the “common,” and a twittish disregard for the “gaping proletariat.” His daily existence was sustained and made possible by a large body of servants, but they’re next to invisible here. His life appears to float on a cloud of blind entitlement. One rare evening he finds himself alone at home, “this vast house, and only me—and thirteen servants” (though might there be something very slightly common in knowing the exact number?). The rare mentions of staff come when they do something wrong—fail to fill an inkwell or don’t know their way to the Ritz. No one can have been more important to the grandiose social life at Belgrave Square than the cook, who is never once referred to; if cooks are mentioned at all it’s as a type of commonness—Lady Cambridge “looks and talks like a cook”; the New York hostess Mrs. Goelet is “an amiable cook-like person.” In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness. Visiting the Berlin Olympics in August 1936, Channon applauded “the famous, fantastic Goering.” He performed the Nazi salute when Germany won medals, and sang the Horst Wessel Song: “It had a gay lilt.” He thought the Führer was “determined but not grim. One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature. I was more thrilled than when I met Mussolini in 1926 in Perugia.” Little of this appeared in Rhodes James’ 1967 edition, nor the description of Joachim von Ribbentrop as “a genial man” or that the Nazis were “masters of the art of party-giving.” An easy mark…I am distressed to hear that Neville Chamberlain has cancer and can only live another fourteen months or so. Craig Brown Chips Channon’s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences Proust, Hitler, Edith Wharton and Tallulah Bankhead join countless random celebrities in the first, unexpurgated volume, edited by Simon Heffer You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. 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 ]

The blow, long foreseen, has fallen. Honor looking sheepish, soon bolted out the truth. She wants me to divorce her so that she may marry Mr Woodman. Apparently his wife is about to sue him, naming Honor. Channon never made it in politics. The peak of his achievement was to be parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, when he was under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office (explaining the appointment of this rich, social climbing ninny to sceptical colleagues, Butler said it reflected his need to attach a first-class restaurant car to his train). Nor were the two novels he wrote much cop. His real genius was for friendship (though some of those on whom his happiness depended secretly thought him spurious and toadying). “Yes,” says Heffer. “His friends loved him. He was unstintingly generous, and desperately keen to be liked. He found people fascinating, though I think he was rather lonely, too.” In his comments accompanying the published selection, Rhodes James stated that "Peter Coats edited the original MS of the Diaries." [30] He also stated that Coats arranged the preparation of a complete typescript of the Diaries as Channon's handwriting was often difficult to read. [31] Coats also carried out an initial expurgation before the editorial discretion exercised by Rhodes James. [32]

The greatest British diarist of the 20th century . A feast of weapons-grade above-stairs gossip. Now, finally, we are getting the full text, in all its bitchy, scintillating detail, thanks to the journalist and historian Simon Heffer, whose editing of this vast trove of material represents an astonishing achievement. Channon is a delightful guide, by turns frivolous and profound. Ben Macintyre, The Times But he hasn’t answered my question. What about companies that are struggling to trade? What about the fishermen, and the daffodil farmers? “Look, I don’t want anyone’s business to go down the crapper,” he says. “But only a small number are affected.” Quoting a favourite Vote Leave figure, he suggests only 6% of UK businesses export to Europe (unfortunately, while this number may not be inaccurate, it’s also misleading, because it translates to an estimated 340,000 businesses). After this, having gone on for a bit about how much he loves his annual holiday in Brittany and how “infantile” it was of Emmanuel Macron to diss the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, he finally winds up by saying: “In the end, everyone will calm down, and it will all be sorted out.”

A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in 1967. Only now, sixty years after Chips's death, can an extensive text be shared. As I arrived [at Kelvedon, Channon’s country house in Essex] I met Honor riding away with her agent, a dark horse-coper [dealer] named Woodman whom I much mistrust. He is a dark stranger and no doubt mulcts her of much money. She is completely dominated by him, probably infatuated and I see serious trouble ahead. When the diaries of an obscure politician called Sir Henry “Chips” Channon were first published in 1967, they caused a sensation, and not only among those whose names appeared in their index (“vile & spiteful & silly,” announced the novelist Nancy Mitford, speaking for the walking wounded). Channon, an upstart Chicagoan who’d unaccountably managed to marry the daughter of an exceedingly rich Anglo-Irish Earl, moved in vertiginously high circles. As a friend of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, he had enjoyed a ringside seat during the abdication crisis; as the Conservative MP for Southend he had looked on with fawning admiration as Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler, and abject horror as Winston Churchill succeeded him as prime minister (Channon was in favour of appeasement). Most eye-popping of all, during a visit to Berlin for the Olympics in 1936, he and various other of his smart English friends had partied wildly with leading Nazis, among them Hermann Göring, whose floodlit garden had been made over to look like a cross between a Coney Island funfair and the Petit Trianon in Versailles – a theatrical coup that seemingly drove both Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop half mad with jealousy. You might think this made him an unlikely candidate as MP for Southend, a large seaside resort popular with working-class Londoners. His attitude toward it was at first frankly careerist—“about five or ten years here and then a peerage” (which is something he repeatedly craves; a knighthood, the year before he died, was as far as he was to get). It’s mainly a question of what the “frumps and snobs” of Southend can do for him: Will they “help or hate me?”In the following diary entries (the bold text indicates redacted information that has never been seen before) the realities are laid bare, amid the fear of invasion and the Blitz. The English society that Chips was a part of is done with Belgrave Square. Today, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska occupies Chips’s old house at No 5. The neighbours mostly have foreign names. And the son of a former KGB operative and, one is tempted to assume, crony of President Putin has entered the House of Lords as a British parliamentarian, a man who throws Gatsby-like parties. Hardly anyone one knows or meets has not had some bombing experience to tell. ‘Bomb-bores’ infect the body social. Lexden, Lord (23 March 2021). "Sex and politics in inter-war Britain" (PDF). The House . Retrieved 24 March 2021– via Lord Lexden. The short answer is, a lot. But first it should be admitted that, when Channon is up against other writers giving an account of the aristocracy in the last days of its pomp, he is only quite good.