Exclusive: Inside the uncensored diaries of Britain's most scandalous MP
When the diaries of Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, the Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea and friend and confidant of the titled, rich and famous, first appeared in 1967, they scandalised London society and created a national sensation. Malcolm Muggeridge, a leading television pundit and writer, said in his review that Channon appeared ‘grovellingly sycophantic and snobbish’, pointing to the America-born diarist’s desire to ingratiate himself with the smartest people in England.
But Muggeridge also remarked: ‘How sharp an eye! What neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ Nancy Mitford, the novelist, squawked about ‘how vile and spiteful and silly’ the diaries were, her distress compounded by her having thought ‘Chips rather a dear’. Now she believed he was ‘sinister’.
What is so surprising about these reactions is that neither Muggeridge nor Mitford knew the half of it: or even a quarter. The 1967 edition was heavily abridged and sanitised. Channon’s complete diaries, spanning 1918 to 1957, the year before he died, amounted to more than 1.8 million words; the 1967 abridgement published fewer than a quarter of a million.
This is partly because some of the diaries had been destroyed, others were missing – four volumes from the 1950s, recorded in exercise books, turned up in a car boot sale in 1991 and were returned to Channon’s son Paul – but most of the redaction was caused by the laws of libel.
In his original manuscript, Channon was candid in the extreme about many of Britain and Europe’s most prominent people, from crowned heads downwards, to many of whom he was close. He counted the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as friends, he once worshipped the Queen Mother (‘darling Elizabeth, I could die for her’), and he knew leading politicians and prime ministers, including Churchill and Eden (an Oxford friend) – and had something to say about all of them.
His one-liners about his friends and acquaintances, peppered through his diaries, are by turns crushing and amusing. ‘The Prince of Wales smiled his dentist smile,’ he writes on 6 May 1935. He also revealed their secrets, their failings, and particularly their depravities.
As many of his subjects were still alive when the 1967 edition was published, only now, 63 years after Channon’s death, is the unredacted version of the diaries being published, in three edited volumes – something that would have delighted Channon himself, as he had long intended them to be read.
In the first volume, covering the years from 1918 to 1938, which is serialised in the Telegraph starting tomorrow, Channon provides fascinating insight into two royal marriages – those of George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, along with Channon’s personal and unique account of the abdication crisis.
He also gives an insider’s insight into appeasement, the rise of Hitler – and some salacious gossip about Sir Winston Churchill’s conjugal habits.
The redacted diaries
I first read the 1967 edition of the diaries when at university 40 years ago; even in that censored version, Channon’s technicolor personality, and his social ambition, are clear from the start. Born in Chicago in 1897, Channon settled in England after graduating from Oxford, becoming an MP in 1935 at the age of 38.
When, three years later, he reaches the lowest rung of political preferment, the job of parliamentary private secretary to a middle-ranking minister, he crows: ‘There is considerable jealousy about it. Almost all the Cabinet ministers congratulated me… Letters and telegrams pour in.’
Channon’s obsessive social climbing is also immediately clear. In June 1936 he noted that ‘that arch social barometer Philip Sassoon [a Conservative MP and socialite] invited us to Lympne for the bank holiday… Our social stock seems to be rising’; and there was the occasional burst of blatant rudeness, as in this 1935 entry: ‘I met Aldous Huxley slinking out of a bank, as if he was afraid to be seen emerging from a capitalist institution, from which he had doubtless withdrawn large sums.’
Lady Selina Hastings, the distinguished biographer, worked in Hatchards, a celebrated Piccadilly bookseller, that autumn in 1967 when the diaries were published: she told me how elderly men would come in from their St James’s clubs after lunch, browse the index of the diary for their names and, mostly, walk out again almost faint with relief. Serious precautions had been taken to ensure no one mentioned, who remained living, would have cause to sue for libel (though one Tory MP successfully did).
When I later became first a political commentator and then a historian, my interest in the diaries rose further, for it was well known that less than the tip of the iceberg had been published. I knew Channon’s son Paul professionally – he was a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet and later Lord Kelvedon – and after his death in 2007, I got to know Paul’s son Henry; but I was led to understand that the diaries were, following the scandal surrounding the original publication, unlikely to be revisited for some time.
Henry and I never discussed them: so it was much to my shock and surprise three years ago – exactly 60 years after Channon’s death – that he and his sister Georgia told me they were ready to have the complete diaries published and would like me to edit them. I know people who would have killed for the chance – I was one. I accepted unhesitatingly and have never regretted it, though it has been a mammoth task. The first volume contains more than 350,000 words of Channon’s text, and around 100,000 words of my explanatory notes. The second and third volumes will be even larger.
An early encounter with Churchill
It begins on 1 January 1918 in Paris, in the last year of the Great War. America had entered the war the previous April; Channon, then 20, had joined the Red Cross and reached France in 1917. His mother had taken him there as a child and he was already proficient in the language; but thanks to his mother’s social connections there (the family was rich, owning a shipping business), Channon plunged straight into Marcel Proust’s Paris, frequenting the salons of princesses and duchesses and living at the Ritz.
He meets Proust and Jean Cocteau and has an early encounter with Winston Churchill, in Paris as Minister of Munitions, during an air raid.
‘This time I dressed and went to the [air raid] cellars,’ he writes on 16 August 1918. ‘I have never seen such an amusing night. It was filled mostly with frightened servants and some guests at the hotel halfdressed and some frankly en pyjama… Don Luis of Spain wore mauve silk pyjamas, the Duchess of Sutherland quite sleepy and bored... Winston Churchill, fat and puffy.’
A brief return to the United States in 1919 confirmed that he would prefer to live in England; he spent 1920 and 1921 at Oxford, partly studying French but mainly partying and making social connections that would shape the rest of his life. Channon was bisexual, and there are hints later in the diaries that he may have had close relationships with men at Oxford, but we do not know for sure.
He befriended the stepchildren of Marquess Curzon, the former Viceroy of India and, at the time, Foreign Secretary, and then befriended Curzon himself: and the great proconsul was an immense influence on him, forming Channon’s attitudes and helping his climb up the English social ladder.
When Channon himself married in 1933, having become a British subject, he and his wife set up home in Belgrave Square, one of the most salubrious addresses in London. Channon’s wife was Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the Earl of Iveagh and from the hugely rich brewing family.
Lord Iveagh was faultlessly generous, setting them up in palatial style and, in addition, buying them a handsome Georgian house and small estate at Kelvedon Hatch near Ongar in Essex.
An unhappy marriage
At their marriage he was 36 and she 24; their courtship and marriage are not recorded, so we can only speculate about what drew them to each other. Channon, whose bisexuality was less developed than it would become, was manifestly smitten by her and devoted to her; she was far more restless.
After their son Paul is born, she embarks on a series of affairs and starts to disappear on longer and longer skiing holidays, leaving Channon and Paul behind.
In March 1937, having been away the best part of two months, she returns, much to Channon’s excitement. However, he recalls, ‘It was not quite the riotous reunion I had looked forward to.’ It then transpires that she ‘is a bit infatuated with a skiing guide called de Tassis, who is extraordinarily handsome and is the teacher of the Prince of Piedmont’.
By April things have taken a bad turn when Channon records in his diary that ‘we broke off conjugal relations, never in our case particularly successful.’
He later expands on this: ‘What distressed me is that we shall have no more children... Possibly Honor is jealous of my affection for our child [Paul], whom she tolerates in an indolent affectionate way; she has no deep love for him or for anyone else on earth.’
The shock of realising all this, he says, ‘made me ill’. Channon may be unsparing to others, but he is equally so to himself. As such, he exposes his own humanity.
He can seem distressingly trivial, obsessed with social climbing and like an overgrown schoolboy, but he is, fundamentally, as human and vulnerable as anyone.
Channon and Hitler
By the time his marriage starts to fall apart, he is increasingly absorbed by political life: all the more so after March 1938 when he becomes parliamentary private secretary to RA ‘Rab’ Butler, who had just become a junior Foreign Office minister. He is entirely loyal to Butler and to their head of department Lord Halifax, who had succeeded Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary a few weeks earlier and was Lady Honor’s uncle; and also to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, of whom Channon is an unequivocal supporter.
One of the most striking insights in Channon’s complete diaries is his account of the politics and manoeuvres of appeasement; something that was played down greatly in the 1967 abridgement. The reality was much starker.
On 19 July 1938, Channon writes: ‘Wiedemann, one of Hitler’s many right-hand men, has come to England and… had a two-hour talk with Lord Halifax. They discussed Anglo-German relations and the result was favourable. He was here about a month ago and tried to make contact with the govt but the Foreign Office had never heard of him. This is typical. However I made a private report about him with the result that Rab agreed to receive him... How power lies in my hands.’
What is also apparent in the full diary is the loathing Channon felt for Churchill, whom he saw as a warmonger (‘That… farceur would stir up trouble anywhere… Luckily for England and the peace of Europe he has no following whatsoever in the House of C’); and failed, until very late in the day, to see what a mortal threat Hitler posed. Channon’s complacency about Hitler stems from a fear of Bolshevism. He writes in August 1936: ‘That Germany, too, is not now communist is due to Hitler… oh! England wake up… Germany is fighting our battles.’
The Channons’ visit to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where they were entertained in imperial style by Goebbels, Göring and Ribbentrop, appeared to confirm Channon’s view that the Nazis were more friends than enemies. Simply being in the Olympic Stadium when Hitler was present overwhelmed him:
‘Hitler was coming! and did come. He looks exactly like his caricatures, brown uniform, short Charlie Chaplin moustache, and square, stocky figure, determined but not grim… One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature: I was more thrilled than when I met Mussolini in 1926 in Perugia, more stimulated than when I was blessed by the Pope.
A friend of royalty
Channon knew George V’s four sons – the future Edward VIII and George VI, and the Dukes of Kent and Gloucester – from the early 1920s, and enjoyed a special friendship with the Duke of Kent, a neighbour in Belgrave Square. He had met the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth, and later still the Queen Mother) before her marriage, and swung from early devotion to her to a strong sense of irritation later on – not least because of her attitude to Wallis Simpson.
It was in 1936 that perhaps the most revelatory events in these diaries occur, in the buildup to the abdication and its aftermath. Channon had made himself close to Wallis Simpson after she had met the then Prince of Wales.
He first expresses his concern about the developing situation in early July 1936, five months before Edward VIII officially announced his abdication: ‘The Simpson scandal is growing, and she, poor Wallis, looks unhappy,’ he writes.
‘The world is closing in around her, the flatterers, the sycophants, and the malice… It is a curious social juxtaposition that casts me in the role of Defender of the King. But I do, and very strongly in society, not for loyalty to him, so much as for admiration and affection for Wallis, and indignation against those who attack her.’
His predictions about the abdication crisis are astute: ‘Certainly he wants to marry Wallis,’ he writes on 7 November 1936, more than a month before the abdication speech. ‘But if he married her… he must immediately abdicate, and if he did not we should see unrest… It is a thrilling problem.’
But it is Channon’s observations about Wallis Simpson’s often-forgotten ex-husband that are most startling of all, almost the only person to come out of the abdication well: ‘He, Ernest, never wanted a divorce,’ writes Channon on 31 January 1937.
‘But the late King followed him about in his own house, at meals, came to even his bathroom begging, imploring Ernest for his wife’s sake, Wallis’s sake, to get her a divorce. Life for Ernest S became unendurable… Ernest thinks the King secretly consulted Baldwin, Winston Churchill and Lord Hailsham last July, “sounded” them on the subject of divorce and that all three advised, separately and secretly, against it.’
It is a passage, drawn from a conversation one of Channon’s friends had with Ernest’s mistress, and marks what a vital historical document this is – thanks to his wide access to the powerful and famous and the particular insight it gave him into world events.
Channon himself may be dismissed as a lightweight and a snob, but he was a brilliant observer, in a position where he had much to observe. He was also all too human – and that combination of unbridled description, candour and humanity makes his diaries one of the most precious, essential and revelatory British historical documents of their time.
The Diaries of Chips Channon Vol 1, edited by Simon Heffer, is released on 4 March (Hutchinson, £35); buy now for £30 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514
Chips Channon on...
The gossipy diarist was king of the one-liner. Here's what he wrote about some of the most high-profile people of his day
George VI
‘Bertie York, or Pork, as we now all unkindly call him. [He is] good, he is dull, he is dutiful and good-natured. He is completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!’ Also, ‘[He is] enormously improved [since marriage]. [His wife] has him completely under her thumb.’
Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother)
'She is fundamentally lazy, very lazy and charming, always gay and pleasant and smiling. She has some intelligence and reads a lot, but she is devoid of all eye, and her houses have always been banal and hideous… She will never be a great Queen for she will never be up in time!’
Duke of Windsor (‘The ex-king’ in Channon’s diary)
‘I also have always thought that [he] suffers from sexual repression of another nature. His horror of anything even savouring of homosexuality was exaggerated.’
Duchess of Windsor
'Wallis is a woman of charm, sense, balance, and great wit. She has dignity and taste; she has always been an excellent influence on the King... She would have been an excellent Queen. She was never ill at ease and could in her engaging drawl charm anyone; she is, however, une maîtresse-femme, a gambler with life and ambitious.’
Sir Winston Churchill
‘Winston as PM would be worse than war.’ ‘Mrs Churchill confided to someone that she never knew when she was safe from [him]; he exerts his conjugal rights at odd times and in unexpected places – frequently after a debate.’
Adolf Hitler
'He is always right, always the greatest diplomat of modern times.’
The Queen
‘I have a feeling the child will be the Queen of England and perhaps the last sovereign. The baby becomes the first lady in the land and the third heir to the crown.’
Edith Wharton (American writer)
‘She was a tidy, crisp, stately, ironical woman devoid of charm; indeed she impressed me as being rather grim… [She] was always preaching her superiority to the rest of her compatriots. Indeed she was justified.’
Lady Honor Guinness (Channon's wife)
'V charming, but at times vague and moody.'
Freda Dudley Ward (Socialite and married paramour to the Duke of Windsor)
‘Always Queen of the bitches, that silly undernourished hysterical little woman.’
Extracted from The Diaries of Chips Channon Vol 1, edited by Simon Heffer. Read the full serialisation starting tomorrow inside The Telegraph
