Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38

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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”. 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 ] Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939 The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 9781461699385. 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”. Henry "Chips" Channon and Lady Honor Guiness leaving St. Margaret’s Westminster after a rehearsal for their 1933 wedding. Keystone

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.

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Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. No one seems to know how he met Honor, the daughter of Lord Iveagh, a member of the Guinness family – the diaries are missing for this period – but with their marriage in 1933, the gates to a lavish world are flung fully open. His father-in-law helps him to buy his house in Belgravia, with its grand dining room, a “symphony” in silver and aquamarine that has been decorated to resemble a certain rococo royal hunting lodge near Munich, and an estate in Essex (though his marriage to Honor doesn’t last; both are determinedly unfaithful – in this volume, she with her skiing instructor). Hugely rich and preposterously well-connected – if there is a ball, Chips will almost certainly be in attendance – he is now well on his way to becoming the Pepys of the interwar years. Channon’s third great love—though in this case unconsummated—was for Neville Chamberlain, in whose government he served. “I am mad about him,” Channon wrote, “his caring gentleness.”

At the Berlin Olympics Channon had been a ready dupe for Nazi propaganda and was entirely taken in by a visit to a labor camp, repeopled for the purpose with “smiling and clean” eighteen-year-olds, “fair, healthy and sunburned.” But the diaries make horribly clear that his excitement at Nazism also fed on his own anti-Semitism, expressed in a casual, lurking contempt for Jewish friends such as Philip Sassoon and the Liberal MP and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha: a semi-sedated prejudice easily reawakened. He records grotesque fantasies of shouting “Heil Hitler!,” on one occasion at a Jewish businessmen’s dinner in his own constituency. To a reader amused by the social whirl of the diaries, such things make disturbing reading, but Heffer was right to leave these and other even more offensive things in, not only for the fullness of the portrait but because they help explain the widespread British reluctance to take Hitler’s genocidal program seriously. He says some silly things. But I felt the same indulgence I have for my sons. I would love to have met him, though I’m sure he’d have been a pain in the arse, always looking over your shoulder to see the next most interesting person coming into the room. His great redeeming feature is that he knows how ghastly he can be.” Heffer, Simon (5 September 2021). "Will I marry again? Or shall I live with Peter?". The Sunday Telegraph . Retrieved 5 September 2021. Davenport-Hines, Richard (5 March 2021). "Living, loving, partygoing". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 4 March 2021. Only two months more – avant le deluge! – avant le divorce . I am reconciled to the idea now. I shall be free, but shall be a long time recovering from Honor’s selfishness; her treachery, her harlotry; her boredom with the war and with me and her complete indifference – cruel indifference – to her child

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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? Four previously unknown volumes turned up at a car boot sale in 1991. [37] It was reported after Paul Channon's death that his heir, the diarist's grandson, was considering authorising the publication of the uncensored texts. [9] An unexpurgated three-volume edition, edited by journalist and historian Simon Heffer has now been published; the first volume was published in March 2021. [38] While the 1967 edition began in 1934, the complete version begins in 1918, and runs to 1938. [39] However, diaries Channon wrote between 1929 and 1933 remain missing. The second volume, running from 1938 to 1943, was published on 9 September 2021; [40] the third volume, covering years from 1943 to 1957, was published on 8 September 2022. [6] [41] 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. Heffer, Simon (4 September 2022). "Secretive sex, political spats and the end of WW2: Chips Channon's final scandalous diary". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 27 February 2023. 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.

Channon's parents were Henry Channon II and his wife Vesta ( née Westover), [3] known as Harry. [4] After graduating from Francis W. Parker School and taking classes at the University of Chicago, [5] Channon travelled to France with the American Red Cross in October 1917 and became an honorary attaché at the American embassy in Paris the next year. [3] Channon associated with the artistic elite of Paris, having dinners with the writer Marcel Proust and poet Jean Cocteau. [6] Duchesses float in and out, there are excursions to Versailles and notes-to-self – 'I long for an affair in the grand manner' 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 ImagesGood-looking, charming, and possessed with social grace enough to warrant invitations everywhere, Channon set about recording his life with such diligence that one understands that he saw it, and not politics, as his real career. After all, this was a man who blandly recounted burying his diaries alongside Fabergé eggs to protect them during the war.