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

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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 It’s just that Chips is, certainly in his younger years, a bit of a ninny. He is so desperate to “make it” in society, and so hypnotised when he gets there, that it’s far too much who and not enough what. He lists who sat next to whom, who was excluded and who is feuding with whom this week rather than the pungent verbal detail. On the rare occasions when he does relate the actual exchanges, there is little detail or colour. For instance, “Lady Scarbrough is very angry with the Astor clan” – American, by origin, of course – “‘What did they do in the War of the Roses?’ she demanded.” 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] 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?

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 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.” At the Berlin Olympics Channon had been a ready dupe for Nazi propaganda and was entirely taken in by a visit to a labor camp, repeopled for the purpose with “smiling and clean” eighteen-year-olds, “fair, healthy and sunburned.” But the diaries make horribly clear that his excitement at Nazism also fed on his own anti-Semitism, expressed in a casual, lurking contempt for Jewish friends such as Philip Sassoon and the Liberal MP and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha: a semi-sedated prejudice easily reawakened. He records grotesque fantasies of shouting “Heil Hitler!,” on one occasion at a Jewish businessmen’s dinner in his own constituency. To a reader amused by the social whirl of the diaries, such things make disturbing reading, but Heffer was right to leave these and other even more offensive things in, not only for the fullness of the portrait but because they help explain the widespread British reluctance to take Hitler’s genocidal program seriously.It was of course a supreme instance of the American assimilation into British society that Chips had devoted his life to—or could have been, if only the king had played his cards more adroitly, had his coronation, and then married the love of his life. Here Channon’s American common sense fails to get the measure of the powerful reasons of state and church preventing such a plan. The insight he has into the case is more psychological. He notes how Mrs. Simpson “enormously improved” the prince, and thinks her good, kindly, and clever; he sees how Edward, who was marvelous at being Prince of Wales, “will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and not imaginative nature can bear.” 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!” Good-looking, charming, and possessed with social grace enough to warrant invitations everywhere, Channon set about recording his life with such diligence that one understands that he saw it, and not politics, as his real career. After all, this was a man who blandly recounted burying his diaries alongside Fabergé eggs to protect them during the war. Nor is he exactly faultless on the detail. He gets it wrong on some titles and flags. He constantly gives people’s ages and is wildly out, sometimes by as much as a decade: Heffer’s wryly corrective footnotes are themselves a minor pleasure. 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 blow, long foreseen, has fallen. Honor looking sheepish, soon bolted out the truth. She wants me to divorce her so that she may marry Mr Woodman. Apparently his wife is about to sue him, naming Honor.Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939 The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 9781461699385. 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. In 1967, the historian Robert Rhodes James edited a version of the Channon diaries covering 1934 to 1953. As this volume makes clear, he did a spectacularly bad job of it. Insofar as he was even allowed to see the originals rather than heavily redacted copies, Rhodes James bowdlerized the diaries disgracefully, later stating untruthfully in a preface that “the full diaries are not really scandalous and I omitted very little of historical value.” Essential resource on 20th century politics 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 Poor darling, she has no moral or common sense, no noblesse oblige and doesn’t realise what she is doing – social suicide. He is a penniless, tough adventurer after her money. I tried to move her without success and I saw that he has carefully trained her, schooled her in what to say. She will regret it to her dying day. She offered to make any adequate financial arrangements for Paul and me; swore that she would never have children by this fellow, declared that she didn’t care what happened; was indifferent to the world’s opinion and disdain. She were better dead . . .

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.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] 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] The Rhodes James edition omitted the Paris and 1920s diaries entirely, and began in 1934, with the entries organized in narrative chapters. Its omission of the scandalous and the libelous was to be expected, since it appeared only nine years after Channon’s death, but the reader could not have been aware of the trimming, editing, and liberal rewriting of countless quite ordinary passages, or had more than a vague suspicion that a complex confessional picture of Channon’s private life had been suppressed. As Heffer reveals, Rhodes James was not allowed to see the original diaries at all and was obliged to work from bowdlerized transcripts prepared by Peter Coats, the writer and garden designer who was Channon’s boyfriend in the latter part of his life. The year 1967 may have brought the decriminalization of homosexual acts in England and Wales, but it was much too soon for anyone involved to want to come clean about Channon’s affairs with men, before, during, and after his marriage. As this new edition shows, Chips flirted with girls, found sexual relief with female prostitutes, and had friendships of “violent intimacy” with a number of grand and wealthy women, but the deep pull of his emotional life was toward men, male friendships, and masculine environments. The diary thus gives fascinating glimpses of queer desires and practices mixed in with a hectic narrative of social and political life, and of a failing marriage.