Because what the ‘people’ really want is the scheming, the dagger in the back, the booze and the banter, the vaulting acts of ambition, the grovellers and the greasers. 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. But his true metier lay in the reportage contained within his diaries, where he wrote over three million words between 1918 and 1957. His mother, who had endowed a library in Paris, had connections there, and the first volume of the diaries begins with him in that city in 1918, where he is employed as an honorary attache at the US embassy. He pulled himself together to be Gage’s best man, but after that the spell was broken too: “How could I once have been fond of him?

The new sexual details create their own surprise—not at the acts or fantasies themselves, but at the idea of a person you thought you knew performing or entertaining them. They went on two trips together, each described by Chips as a “honeymoon,” but forlornly of course without the preceding nuptials.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. Channon is never explicit about his relationship with Coats but it is highly probable that it was at times an actively homosexual one – stigmatised by its illegality, which ended only in the year of the diaries’ original publication. Arthur Colefax, the husband of the interior designer Sybil Colefax, “was a good man, talented, high-idealled, kind and boring beyond belief.

No one can have been more important to the grandiose social life at Belgrave Square than the cook, who is never once referred to; if cooks are mentioned at all it’s as a type of commonness—Lady Cambridge “looks and talks like a cook”; the New York hostess Mrs. After this, he moves first to Oxford, where he does his degree, gets his (still unexplained) nickname, and starts making useful connections; and then to London, where he shares a house with Paul of Yugoslavia and Viscount Gage (another of his lovers), and sets about wooing the Curzon family (Lord Curzon was then foreign secretary).

There is a settembrile feeling in the air – going is the summer, going, indeed, is almost everything. You might think this made him an unlikely candidate as MP for Southend, a large seaside resort popular with working-class Londoners. At the time, none less than the queen of the withering private putdown herself, Nancy Mitford, wrote, “One always thought Chips was rather a dear, but he was black inside how sinister! In 1933, Channon married the brewing heiress Lady Honor Guinness (1909–1976), eldest daughter of Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh. After a while, though, Honor is leaving parties earlier than her husband, and after three and a half years of the marriage she’s showing signs of leaving that too.

At the centre of the Queen Mother’s court was one extremely flamboyant servant, trusted friend and confidant. The guests take their places around a 25ft mirrored dining table, which echoes the room’s mirrored panelling. It’s mainly a question of what the “frumps and snobs” of Southend can do for him: Will they “help or hate me? One of the best things in the new edition of the diaries, he thinks, is a top-secret memorandum about the abdication that Channon wrote in 1937. And so it is that we now know, among a thousand other delicious things, exactly what Channon thought of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.His energy appears to have been unflagging, because almost every day finds him recounting some party or another and who said what to whom—and what they really wanted to say instead. Peter] advised divorce, said that obviously neither H[onor] nor I would be happier until we were rid of each other.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) said of this phase of Channon's life, "adoring London society, privilege, rank, and wealth, he became an energetic, implacable, but endearing social climber. He agreed to live with me after the war, and to share my house, houses, or flat: we should travel together and be happy.After George VI's accession Channon's standing in royal circles went from high to low and, as an appeaser, so did his standing in the Conservative party after the failure of appeasement and the appointment of the anti-appeaser Winston Churchill as prime minister. An average day might see a long large lunch, an early-evening drinks party before dinner at 9, then on to the Duchess of York’s, perhaps, for her party starting at 11:30 PM, or maybe to a ball, home anytime between 3 and 6:30 AM—this several times a week. Reviewing all three volumes, Joseph Epstein wrote, "A hundred or so pages into the diaries of Henry 'Chips' Channon one realizes that this scribbling member of Parliament is a snob, a bigot, vain, self-deceived, entranced by the trivial, a bore and a boor both".