But his interest in being spanked himself involved more furtive expeditions—so furtive that he traveled out to Richmond in southwest London by Underground, a very rare engagement with public transport.

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. The diary opens pre-Chips, in the last year of the Great War, with Henry, aged twenty, in Paris, where he’s a volunteer for the American Red Cross. He knew or was friends with all the leading politicians and aristocrats of the period, wined and dined Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson in the months before the Abdication crisis, and observed at first hand the last days of appeasement. In the following diary entries (the bold text indicates redacted information that has never been seen before) the realities are laid bare, amid the fear of invasion and the Blitz.One thing about Channon’s diaries, the first volume of which concludes just before the war in Europe breaks out (later, his house will be bombed in an air raid), is that they leave you with such a vivid sense of perspective. Our flamboyant host – and the man recording this extravaganza in his raffish, snobbish, indiscreet and utterly compelling diaries – is the flashy American-born bisexual and social climber supreme, Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon MP, a man who described himself as being ‘riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels’. Put your hand in my pocket,” he said; and I found a gold pencil engraved ‘St Valentine’s Day 1941’, and a tiny religious box he had bought in Bethlehem which contained a coin we had found in Petra and two seeds from Jarash. James Lees-Milne thought him ‘a flibbertigibbet’; to Nancy Mitford, he was ‘vain and spiteful and silly’. The Duke of Richmond “would be perfectly happy as assistant manager of a garage”, and Lady Beauchamp, only two days dead, was “a sugary, well-bred demon encased in fat and privilege”.

Not that this stops Chips becoming friends with all of them, and allegedly sleeping with at least one. 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. From his own family seat in Essex, Heffer laughs loudly (he’s speaking to me via FaceTime from a rather grandly proportioned study, the bright yellow spines of a collection of Wisden, the cricketers’ almanack, on a shelf behind him). After all, to really be successful at the task, one has to be candid, irreverent and, at times, outrageous. He gives colorful accounts of the shelling of the city by German heavy artillery and the subsequent air raids, and he mentions “working hard, many long hours a day,” and later “overwork,” but the work itself remains vague.

His friend Maurice de Rothschild attributes Channon’s “phenomenal” social success in Paris to his “extraordinary good looks and novelty”: he is “the embodiment of all that is young.

Chips’s desire to be known and seen is shot through now and then by disillusion at the world of “fashionable cretins…but then am I not one?Also, if the king abdicates Chips will no longer be in favor with the royal family, and this adds to his gloom at the prospect of the new king, George VI, who is “completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!

in the night four Treasury officials were killed when a bomb fell for the second time on that bit of the building immediately adjacent to No. At his side is his brewing-heiress wife, Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the staggeringly rich Earl of Iveagh. Sometimes I think I have an unusual character – able but trivial; I have flair, intuition, great good taste but only second rate ambition: I am far too susceptible to flattery; I hate and am uninterested in all the things most men like such as sports, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war, and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels.He’s a natural journalist, always on the phone to his contacts, and he has a lot of highly privileged information. Poor darling, she has no moral or common sense, no noblesse oblige and doesn’t realise what she is doing – social suicide. You see, I’m of the view that uncovering politicians’ foibles is absolutely as interesting as examining their ideologies and principles, and that the public should be admitted to this secret world on privileged terms.