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

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Channon, Henry (1967). Rhodes James, Robert (ed.). Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-85799-493-3. As I arrived [at Kelvedon, Channon’s country house in Essex] I met Honor riding away with her agent, a dark horse-coper [dealer] named Woodman whom I much mistrust. He is a dark stranger and no doubt mulcts her of much money. She is completely dominated by him, probably infatuated and I see serious trouble ahead. Heffer, Simon (20 February 2021). "Exclusive: Inside the uncensored diaries of Britain's most scandalous MP". The Telegraph . Retrieved 23 February 2021. Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939 The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 9781461699385.

To make things sadder still, it looks as though the British royal family is going the same way. The general strike of 1926 and the increasing influence of Labour MPs at Westminster – “Bolshies” snorts Channon, who was returned as Conservative member for Southend in 1935 – suggests that George V’s reign could be the last. Not least because the next generation is so unsuited to the job. The four boys – the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York, Kent and Gloucester – all seem nervy, epicene, mummy-damaged (although Queen Mary herself, all chilly sparkle, is naturally divine). Not that this stops Chips becoming friends with all of them, and allegedly sleeping with at least one. Things have got really bad when he notices that the Duke of Kent, who has popped round to dinner from next door, has taken to wearing trousers that have a zip instead of a button fly. It is like hearing the tumbrels rumble in the street. 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.” Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7. On the same visit he was entranced by Hermann Goering (“his merry eyes twinkled… a lovably disarming man”), impressed by Joseph Goebbels, who he thought looked like Clement Attlee, and was easily fooled by a Potemkin concentration camp (“tidy, even gay, and the boys, all about 18, looked like the ordinary German peasant boy, fair, healthy and sunburned”). He concludes, after a conversation about the left-wing outrages in Spain, that Germany is not communist only thanks to Hitler: “Oh! England wake up. You in your sloth and conceit are ignorant of the Soviet dangers and will not realise that… Germany is fighting our battles.” He wrote two more books: a second novel, Paradise City (1931) about the disastrous effects of American capitalism, [3] and a non-fiction work, The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933). The latter, a study of the last generations of the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavarian kings, received excellent notices, and was in print twenty years later. Some critical reservations reflected Channon's adulation of minor European royalty: The Manchester Guardian said of his account of the 1918 revolution, "he seems to have depended almost exclusively on aristocratic sources, which are most clearly insufficient." [11] Despite this, the book was described on its reissue in 1952 as "a fascinating study... excellently written". [12]

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The Diary enquiry, Sunday 24 October, 17:00-18:00, Andrew Roberts (chair), Dominic Sandbrook, Simon Heffer, Sasha Swire, Emma Soames and Michael Gove discuss the power of the political journal, from Chips Channon to today, via Thatcher’s Britain

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.Channon was a snobbish, sexually voracious Tory who revered Hitler – and a new edition of his journals shines a startling light on interwar Britain. 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. But he hasn’t answered my question. What about companies that are struggling to trade? What about the fishermen, and the daffodil farmers? “Look, I don’t want anyone’s business to go down the crapper,” he says. “But only a small number are affected.” Quoting a favourite Vote Leave figure, he suggests only 6% of UK businesses export to Europe (unfortunately, while this number may not be inaccurate, it’s also misleading, because it translates to an estimated 340,000 businesses). After this, having gone on for a bit about how much he loves his annual holiday in Brittany and how “infantile” it was of Emmanuel Macron to diss the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, he finally winds up by saying: “In the end, everyone will calm down, and it will all be sorted out.”

In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness. 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. 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. All safely history – yet I think Chips Channon is significant precisely because of his wild misjudgements. They were commonly shared. They were founded on fear of the unknown, and consequent political hysteria. It led him and huge swathes of the English aristocracy to fawn on foreign fascists – never thinking that what started there could come home to roost. In the 2020s, with the democracies again in decline, we should not feel entirely smug.The Duke and Duchess of Windsor meeting Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1937: Channon was a friend of the Duke and socialised with the Nazis during a 1936 visit. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images 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 wrote a long letter to Peter in Egypt: I mustn’t expect too much of him, as he is only 30 – eleven months younger than Honor. Still I want and need and crave him now. I have no future, a bombed house probably in Belgrave Square, the loss of all my possessions, Kelvedon gone, my wife alienated, my child far away and perhaps forgetting me. All is bleak and dour indeed. 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. In March 1938, the rising Conservative minister Rab Butler, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office appointed Channon his Parliamentary Private Secretary. [4] Butler was associated with the appeasement wing of the Conservative party, and Channon, as with the abdication, found himself on the losing side. In the words of the ODNB: "Always ferociously anti-communist, he was an early dupe of the Nazis because his attractive German princelings hoped that Hitler might be preparing for a Hohenzollern restoration." At the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Channon attended the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, where he was very impressed. [18] Letter from Peter from Cairo: he says that Anthony Eden’s visit flopped at the end. He also adds that he won’t let me down; so perhaps we shall live together and I shall have the most charming of companions to désennuyer ma tristesse and keep me young. My affairs are improving.

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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] Chris Mullin Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature Delights of the second volume, edited by Simon Heffer, include a bomb dropping on Channon’s dinner party and an Austrian archduke arriving to clear the debris You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Robert Rhodes James quotes in his introduction to the diaries a self-portrait written by Channon on 19 July 1935: