Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon’s diaries caused a stir in 1967. Now edited by Simon Heffer and published unredacted, they reveal even more juicy detail about British high society between the 1920s and 50s
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.
But dripping with juice as these diaries were – Channon’s chief virtue as a writer is his abiding awareness that dullness is the worst sin of all, and for this reason they’re among the most glittering and enjoyable ever written – they were also incomplete. When Channon died in 1958, aged 61, his son Paul (later a transport secretary in Thatcher’s government) green-lit their publication. But they would need, it was agreed, to be heavily redacted. Quite apart from his father’s sexuality – among Channon’s male (and often married) lovers were the playwright Terence Rattigan and, almost certainly, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia – pretty much everyone named in the book was still alive. As Chips’s ex-wife, Honor, said at the time: “Some of the catty remarks (which fascinate) MUST be cut.” She was especially worried what Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother might think. When the book did appear, then, it was as a single, slim volume: enough words to fill a Penguin paperback, the edition I owned.
