The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, contemporaries of Channon’s, are written about at length in his diaries. At one point, he notes, "I don’t think Wallis would be content as the consort of an ex-King: the situation would be untenable." Bettmann // Getty Images For a passionate royalist like Channon, the heir to the throne is naturally a great prize, his boringness as a man overlaid by imperial-scale glamour. At Lady Curzon’s ball in February 1926, “the Prince of Wales was charming and we had a long talk about our American friends. Everyone noticed…” But this enhanced mood is far from constant. He can find the prince “surly and ill at ease,” and repeatedly “looking rather vulgar.” On one occasion he looks “like a racing tout”; he has a “dentist smile.” Yet as Edward VIII he inspires Chips’s loftiest gush: he is the “adored Apollo,” the “world’s idol,” the “beautiful boy King” (he was forty-two at the time, two years older than Chips himself). His affair with Wallis Simpson is “one of the greatest romances in all history.” What a “temptation for a Baltimore girl! To espouse the Emperor of the earth.” The Labour MP Chris Bryant has recently published The Glamour Boys, about the important role gay men played in the anti-appeasement movement. Channon’s diaries reveal that gay connections were just as important on the other side. When Channon visits Berlin in April 1928, he is as enthralled as Bryant’s protagonists – intellectuals and politicians such as Cooper, Harold Nicolson, Maurice Bowra and Bob Boothby – by the sexual freedom of the city: “later we went to two ordinary dancing places and we saw men actually kissing each other… I never expected it to be so open.”

That same frankness tells on Channon’s politics, though. He’s an intolerable, pro-appeasement bore on the subject of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and his political views are frequently inexcusable (as late as March 1938 Channon wrote, “I hate society at the moment: it is too fanatically anti-Hitler”). Despite—or perhaps because of—all that, his entries remain vivid and propulsive. 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.There are one or two people at court, around the royal family, who Channon really takes against and who he feels are conspiring to get rid of Edward VIII. And that didn’t come out in the original version.” A gay relationship with “a very prominent friend” was also censored and will be revealed for the first time.

London looked a mess today . . . . 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. 10 Downing Street. The Germans evidently think that Winston sleeps there. Actually he sleeps in the War Room. In some ways, the landscape is very familiar. This was already a modern, car-based economy, vomiting up the ribbon developments and standardised housing where so many of us still live. It was a society enjoying mass, American-produced entertainment. It was a culture inflected with modernism; hedonistic, and increasingly open to sexual experiment. But the Britain of the 1920s and 1930s was also much more stratified, industrially regimented and fiercely class-divided in an almost Victorian way. Its politics were class politics. The King has become known as RS, rubber stamp, as Winston has absorbed all power and is, in fact, a virtual dictator… There is some speculation as what will happen on Wednesday next when the Conservative Party meets to elect a new leader in Neville’s place; in all probability everything is rigged for Winston to succeed!The English society that Chips was a part of is done with Belgrave Square. Today, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska occupies Chips’s old house at No 5. The neighbours mostly have foreign names. And the son of a former KGB operative and, one is tempted to assume, crony of President Putin has entered the House of Lords as a British parliamentarian, a man who throws Gatsby-like parties. Henry Channon and Lady Honor Guinness on their wedding day in London, 1933 J. A. Hampton / Getty Images Sometimes I think I have the character of a very clever woman—able, but trivial with flair, intuition, great good taste and second-rate ambition,” Henry “Chips” Channon wrote in a diary entry dated July 19, 1935. “I am susceptible to flattery, and male good looks; I hate and am uninterested in all the things men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.” The King broadcast a message at six. He is always embarrassing, shy-making: no enthusiasm or vividness and the painful pauses hurt. I suggested long ago that the Duke of Gloucester do the actual broadcasting – no one need ever know.

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. 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. Channon’s hatred of his native America is visceral. “The word is never on my lips, rarely in my mind,” he claims, unconvincingly. “I never even dream of it and I don’t really believe it exists. I am not at all sure that ugly, horrible continent is not merely the invention of the Rothermere press.” In fact the land of his birth tormented him, and recurs often. ‘I’m always so ashamed of my American passport,’ he writes.No one seems to know how he met Honor, the daughter of Lord Iveagh, a member of the Guinness family – the diaries are missing for this period – but with their marriage in 1933, the gates to a lavish world are flung fully open. His father-in-law helps him to buy his house in Belgravia, with its grand dining room, a “symphony” in silver and aquamarine that has been decorated to resemble a certain rococo royal hunting lodge near Munich, and an estate in Essex (though his marriage to Honor doesn’t last; both are determinedly unfaithful – in this volume, she with her skiing instructor). Hugely rich and preposterously well-connected – if there is a ball, Chips will almost certainly be in attendance – he is now well on his way to becoming the Pepys of the interwar years.

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. 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]The best diarists are flawed individuals who exist on the fringe of events and are natural observers and acerbic wits. Snobbery helps too. Think Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Alan Clark. Henry “Chips” Channon (1897-1958) has long been seen as one of these too. But it is only with the publication of these unexpurgated diaries, superbly edited by Simon Heffer, that we can truly recognise quite how perfectly he fits the type. For all his gross misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, Nazi sympathies, and world-class snobbery, Chips Channon was undoubtedly an inspired diarist. However repulsive a figure he was, after devouring this volume, readers will be anxious for the next. The author Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?