Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57: The Diaries; 1943-57 (The Henry Chips Channon: The Diaries)

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Simon Heffer justifies some of this by saying he was ill pretty regularly towards the end of the book. He was, however, well enough to socialise with royalty throughout this period. At the start of his diaries, Channon’s diaries focused somewhat on politics (unsurprising, for a politician). He couldn’t come to a conclusion decision if he had a gun to his head, but he was clearly involved in things (albeit somewhat peripherally). By this book, he had given up all pretence of being an active politician, and was more focused on his social life. I shall miss his voice despite everything, and that of Tom Ward equally. Without doubt award is a great narrator and actor, certainly in the class of Gielgud or Olivier, or I should not have been so engaged for so long. Why don’t I know him? I shall seek anything else he has narrated. Three formidable volumes have appeared, admirably edited by Simon Heffer displaying considerable scholarship . . . Channon, for all his misjudgements, ingratiating behaviour and bigotry, is revealing about public and private life, society and sexuality, and honest about himself to a degree that makes these Diaries a weird kind of masterpiece. LRB

Reviewing the published diaries in The Observer in November 1967, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "Grovellingly sycophantic and snobbish as only a well-heeled American nesting among the English upper classes can be, with a commonness that positively hurts at times. And yet – how sharp an eye! What neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well written and truthful and honest they are! … What a relief to turn to him after Sir Winston's windy rhetoric, and all those leaden narratives by field-marshals, air-marshals and admirals!" [34] This volume comes in at 1,092 pp., aside from a very comprehensive index, and has several photos of 'Chips' Channon and some of the people with whom he had longstanding relationships. Furthermore, like the previous 2 volumes, this one has ample footnotes which are helpful in further illuminating the events and personalities who fell within Channon's private, social, and political circles. At times, it also reads like a novel, some of whose passages either unsettled me to some extent or made me laugh or smile. Whatever can be said about Channon is that he pulls no punches. His love for his only child Paul is one of the constants in his life.Channon is honest, frank, intelligent, and wrong about practically everything, but always intensely readable. Books of the Year, Spectator When this third and final volume of diaries begins in 1943, Channon is 46. You would hardly tell from the diaries that there is a war on. The Conservative MP lives in splendour in a magnificent mansion in Belgrave Square. He entertains his guests with oysters and champagne, and he spends his mornings in bed, gossiping and plotting on the telephone with the society hostesses Emerald Cunard and Lady Colefax, known as Coalbox. He acts as party planner to his neighbour in Belgrave Square, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, assembling lists of scintillating guests with only a few hours’ notice. “I am really happiest with royalties,” wrote Chips. Chips writes with such vividness that one feels one is living each day in his exalted company . . . An infectious joie de vivre permeates . . . No reader could not be absorbed by his unorthodox depiction of 1940s London and the following decade. Oldie Channon, who was a naturalised British subject (as of 11 July 1933), [17] joined the Conservative Party. At the 1935 general election, he was elected as the Member of Parliament for Southend, the seat previously held by his mother-in-law Gwendolen Guinness, Countess of Iveagh. After boundary changes in 1950, he was returned for the new Southend West constituency, holding the seat until his death in 1958. [4]

The MP and socialite 'Chips' Channon was an unlikeable character - bitchy, snobby, prejudiced and caustic. But those vices make him an entertaining diarist. This is the final volume of a triologywhich provides a running commentary on high society and politics from the 1920s onwards, edited with aplomb by Simon Heffer. Biography and Memoir Book of the Year 2022, The Times a b c Cooke, Rachel (28 February 2021). "Gossip, sex and social climbing: the uncensored Chips Channon diaries". The Guardian . Retrieved 2 January 2022. Chips’s sex life became more and more complicated, as he enjoyed “vicious evenings” of “vice” with other men. These included his brother-in-law Alan Lennox-Boyd, with whom he had begun an affair in 1940. “We are as intimate as it is possible for two men to be,” wrote Chips. None of these affairs, nor his relationship with Rattigan, were mentioned in the expurgated version of the diaries which was published in 1967 by Robert Rhodes James. Based on redacted transcripts made by Peter Coats after Chips’s death, the Rhodes James edition cut out references to Chips’s homosexuality, and volume three of the diaries contains far more surprises about Chips’s sex life than the previous two volumes.The third volume of the Channon diaries concludes the publication of all the surviving diaries that have come down to us, and as with the previous two volumes, it is a hernia-inducing doorstopper of a book. Chips really did see fit to include just about everything that he did to his diary and by 1943, with Channon’s ministerial career over, an awful lot of what went on involved Channon lounging in bed making long telephone calls to various people to snipe about others and to plan his social life. The war still had two years to run, but hardly impinged on Channon or his set, so there are not many references to world events in this volume. Channon, Henry (1967). Rhodes James, Robert (ed.). Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-85799-493-3.

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 ] 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] Colville, John. The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, Volume 1. London, Sceptre, 1986, ISBN 0-340-40269-5Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939 The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 9781461699385. Apart from politics, the main themes of the diaries are wining and dining, and sex. The chandeliers glittered on endless lunch and dinner parties, at which the finest champagnes accompanied delicious fare, even during the War when strict rationing was supposed to be in force. Lexden, Lord (23 March 2021). "Sex and politics in inter-war Britain" (PDF). The House . Retrieved 24 March 2021– via Lord Lexden.

a b c d e f g h i j k Davenport-Hines, Richard, "Channon, Sir Henry (1897–1958)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, accessed 29 August 2009 He was a century behind even in the changing mid to late 20c, sometimes even two! His erudite observations on those who wielded power and privilege are probably more reliable than many others, though is views on political policy and the unfolding sweep of history are absurd now and were not much less so as he wrote them. Myopic and prejudiced, ignorant and blinkered, his word was narrow and shrank even more so as he aged. Had he put his potentially excellent brain to real use he may have grown and become a real political player, but he was a dilettant, only an MP because of the adjacent life it afforded him, and because in those days, it was still possible to treat being an MP as a gentleman’s pastime. The greatest British diarist of the 20th century. A feast of weapons-grade above-stairs gossip. Ben MacIntyre, The Times Channon was born in Chicago to an Anglo-American family. In adult life he took to giving 1899 as his year of birth, and was embarrassed when a British newspaper revealed that the true year was 1897. [3] His grandfather had immigrated to the US in the mid-nineteenth century and established a profitable fleet of vessels on the Great Lakes, which formed the basis of the family's wealth. [4] Channon's paternal grandmother was descended from eighteenth-century English settlers. [4]So far so good. However, he really was a flawed and often repellent man. An appeaser, based on his fascistic sympathies, rather than on the grounds of loving peace, he was ultra right-wing, and a terrible snob. His views on Jews in particular, are vile, and would have been then, let alone now. I have embarked on Simon Heffer's hefty yet meticulously edited three-volume edition of the diaries of 'Chips' Channon . . . and [Chips] does write beguilingly well. Gyles Brandreth, The Oldie No praise is too high for Simon Heffer’s editing of these irresistible records of upper-class life in a vanished Britain The diaries are a lovely, gossipy mix of social and political intrigue. They cast a new light on many events - momentous and trivial, with insights - albeit very biased - into events such as the abdication crisis, and the onset of WW2. Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7.