The scorchingly honest assessments of the great and not-so-good that flowed from ‘Chips’ Channon’s poison pen.
The writers of British political and social diaries tend to be witnesses of great events rather than the main players. Disraeli and Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher left no daily journals, presumably because they were too busy making history, as opposed to watching it unfold.
The diarists we read and remember – Alan Clark, Chris Mullins and Henry Channon’s friend and contemporary Harold Nicholson – were close enough to power to have a ringside seat, but sufficiently distant and detached to observe with a caustic and cynical eye. And they are of course great gossips, for as ‘Chips’ Channon writes: ‘What is the use of a discreet diary? One might as well have a discreet soul.’
Chips Channon s diaries can read like a drunken round of Consequences spectator.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from spectator.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
When they were first published in 1967, the diaries of MP Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon enthralled and appalled the nation in equal measure. Malicious and delicious, the diaries skewered some of the grandest names in society and politics.
What no one realised was that the diaries had been heavily censored. Now they are being published for the first time in their full, outrageous glory.
The American-born Chips, as he was known, settled in Britain after graduating from Oxford and became a social climber on a grand scale, becoming friendly with the future Edward VIII the then Prince of Wales in 1920.
Chips (pictured) was bisexual and had numerous sexual liaisons with both men and women. Our second extract features some of those, together with his fabulously indiscreet observations about London society
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