Last modified on Sun 28 Feb 2021 10.28 EST
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 l