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. If I have any advice for aspirant diarists it would be this: diarists are not creatures of the crowd; they must live among it yet remain detached from it, like spies. They should take things they have discovered and report upon them and be considerably cautious when doing so. And like the spy, their best work should mostly be done alone and without fanfare. When they finally come in from the cold, wearing a tin hat is advisable. Otherwise, they should wait, like Chips did, until they and everyone else are six feet under. The King has become known as RS, rubber stamp, as Winston has absorbed all power and is, in fact, a virtual dictator… There is some speculation as what will happen on Wednesday next when the Conservative Party meets to elect a new leader in Neville’s place; in all probability everything is rigged for Winston to succeed! 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.” a b c "A Chronicle of the British Establishment's Flirtation with Hitler". The Economist. 4 March 2021 . Retrieved 4 January 2022.

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 was born in Chicago to an Anglo-American family. In adult life he took to giving 1899 as his year of birth, and was embarrassed when a British newspaper revealed that the true year was 1897. [3] His grandfather had immigrated to the US in the mid-nineteenth century and established a profitable fleet of vessels on the Great Lakes, which formed the basis of the family's wealth. [4] Channon's paternal grandmother was descended from eighteenth-century English settlers. [4] The unexpurgated diaries also reveal how Channon’s close friendship with Edward VIII began in the 1920s. “He writes about travelling around America with him. He can see the Prince of Wales is a slight flibbertigibbet, but he likes him and they have a good friendship. So by the time of the abdication, he’s very supportive of him,” added Heffer. London looked a mess today . . . . in the night four Treasury officials were killed when a bomb fell for the second time on that bit of the building immediately adjacent to No. 10 Downing Street. The Germans evidently think that Winston sleeps there. Actually he sleeps in the War Room.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. 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… The Rhodes James edition omitted the Paris and 1920s diaries entirely, and began in 1934, with the entries organized in narrative chapters. Its omission of the scandalous and the libelous was to be expected, since it appeared only nine years after Channon’s death, but the reader could not have been aware of the trimming, editing, and liberal rewriting of countless quite ordinary passages, or had more than a vague suspicion that a complex confessional picture of Channon’s private life had been suppressed. As Heffer reveals, Rhodes James was not allowed to see the original diaries at all and was obliged to work from bowdlerized transcripts prepared by Peter Coats, the writer and garden designer who was Channon’s boyfriend in the latter part of his life. The year 1967 may have brought the decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales, but it was much too soon for anyone involved to want to come clean about Channon’s affairs with men, before, during, and after his marriage. As this new edition shows, Chips flirted with girls, found sexual relief with female prostitutes, and had friendships of “violent intimacy” with a number of grand and wealthy women, but the deep pull of his emotional life was toward men, male friendships, and masculine environments. The diary thus gives fascinating glimpses of queer desires and practices mixed in with a hectic narrative of social and political life, and of a failing marriage. 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. The best diarists are flawed individuals who exist on the fringe of events and are natural observers and acerbic wits. Snobbery helps too. Think Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Alan Clark. Henry “Chips” Channon (1897-1958) has long been seen as one of these too. But it is only with the publication of these unexpurgated diaries, superbly edited by Simon Heffer, that we can truly recognise quite how perfectly he fits the type.

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.” In the highly abridged first version of Channon’s diaries, prepared by his partner Peter Coats and published in 1967, the end of his marriage is presented as a vague matter of fact, with an almost complete absence of detail. Coats went to pains to conceal the truth about its demise and his own relationship with him, for two very good reasons. First, his ex-wife, Lady Honor Svejdar (as she had become after her second marriage) was still alive, and indeed was sent the proofs to read and to amend where she felt necessary; second, Coats, who hardly features in the first edition despite having been central to Channon’s life for its last 19 years, appears not to have desired the recognition he was due. 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 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] 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, Henry (1967). Rhodes James, Robert (ed.). Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-85799-493-3. The King broadcast a message at six. He is always embarrassing, shy-making: no enthusiasm or vividness and the painful pauses hurt. I suggested long ago that the Duke of Gloucester do the actual broadcasting – no one need ever know. He gets almost every political forecast wrong. He predicts a decline in socialism in early 1926, and a huge revival of Roman Catholicism. He wildly misreads the 1926 general strike, suggesting it was a “real revolt skilfully engineered by Moscow” which would end in civil war. The king, he says, “is supposed to be white with terror and apprehension”.I drove in the afternoon with Honor to her farm: the crater caused by the bomb – it must have been a 1,000-pounder – is really immense. All my suspicions and distrust of Honor’s bailiff, a Mr Woodman were revived. He is insolent, swaggers about, and treats her with scant respect. She allows herself to be so familiar with that sort of people. I think I am wise in saying nothing; usually she tires of them. But I foresee trouble with that man; serious trouble, probably financial. Lexden, Lord (23 March 2021). "Sex and politics in inter-war Britain" (PDF). The House . Retrieved 24 March 2021– via Lord Lexden. There is a settembrile feeling in the air – going is the summer, going, indeed, is almost everything.

Peter and I had a rapturous reunion. He told me that he had fixed it for Palestine: ten days’ leave and [we] are off at dawn on Sunday. The world is a lovely, lovely place. At last, after a three hours’ conversation I promised to let her know my decision in January. Of course I shall give in – but it is the end of Southend, of a peerage, of my political aspirations, of vast wealth and great names and position – all gone, or going. Somehow I didn’t care as I ought. Will I marry again? Or shall I live with Peter? 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. Reviewing the published diaries in The Observer in November 1967, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "Grovellingly sycophantic and snobbish as only a well-heeled American nesting among the English upper classes can be, with a commonness that positively hurts at times. And yet – how sharp an eye! What neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well written and truthful and honest they are! … What a relief to turn to him after Sir Winston's windy rhetoric, and all those leaden narratives by field-marshals, air-marshals and admirals!" [34] The most gripping arc in the diary, though, concerns the abdication, pressing so close that you can smell its feverish breath. Channon is a fan of Wallis Simpson – surprising given that she is another provincial American on the make. But he genuinely admires her as “a good kindly woman who has had an excellent influence on the young monarch”. She has, he is sure, no particular plan to marry the king and certainly no desire to upset the country. By contrast the Duchess of York, whom we know better as the Queen Mother, is a frisky little sexpot with whom half of Clubland is in love, including Channon himself: “Darling Elizabeth, I could die for her.” She won’t make a decent queen, though, because, unlike disciplined Wallis, she can’t get up on time, is prone to making catty remarks and, absolutely worst of all, has started putting on weight. Anyway, Channon asks, who cares which one of them gets to be queen since neither of them is actually royal? For his money, Princess Marina of Greece, the luscious, promiscuous well-dressed wife of his lover the Duke of Kent, would have done the job better than either.

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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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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. 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. 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.