Scandal isn’t what it used to be. In these days of leaks, fake news and kiss-and-tell it is easy to forget the potentially crucifying consequences for the nobs and politicians of a really juicy revelation, even a few years ago. Marriages ended, children disowned, careers destroyed, public disgrace.
Time was when every high society family lived in fear of its own Galahad Threepwood, the PG Wodehouse character always threatening to publish his scandalous memoirs: “A man who should never have been taught to write and who, if unhappily gifted with that ability, should have been restrained by Act of Parliament from writing Reminiscences.”
Such a man was Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, Conservative MP, snob, bigot and social mountaineer, who perfectly embodied the qualities vital to the task: a capacious ear for gossip, a neat turn of phrase, a waspish desire to tell all, and easy access to the highest social circles across Europe. Salacious, certainly. But his unexpurgated Diaries 1918-38 also remind us just how admiring much of the British establishment was of Nazi Germany — and what a mountain Winston Churchill had to climb to prepare the country for war.
Unsurprising, then, that Chips’ diaries were so heavily edited when they first appeared in the 1960s, with just 250,000 words culled from two million. Chips was on intimate terms with the royal family. He had married Honor, daughter of Lord Iveagh and scion of the very rich Guinness family, but also had a string of homosexual relationships, including with Jim Thomas, my predecessor as MP for Hereford. There were many secrets to be protected.
Yet even that bowdlerised edition convulsed politics and polite society. Initially denounced, the diaries were later acclaimed as a riot of revelations and a priceless insight into the social and political life of the British upper crust between the wars and afterwards. You liked Alan Clark? This was his template.
Now, by permission of the Channon estate, at last we have the real thing: the first volume of the unexpurgated diaries, running from the end of the first world war to the eve of the second, edited by the writer and journalist Simon Heffer. It is a mighty tome, more than 1,000 pages long, with two more to follow.
Given Channon’s Olympian capacity for dropping names, one shudders to think how many hours it must have taken Heffer to gather up and make sense of them all. But by the end, the reader feels as though they had been living in Plato’s cave only to emerge dazed and blinking into the harsh sunlight of Chips’ true and often revolting views.
All those mentioned are dead. But it is hard to believe there is any living denizen of Burke’s Peerage who will not approach this book with concern amounting to panic as to what Chips may say about their friends and relatives. Mrs Cavendish-Bentinck is “dripping with jewels . . . looks like a ferret that has got loose in Cartier’s”. The future Edward VIII has a “dentist smile”.
Like many great observers, Chips himself — and it was always “Chips”, though no one quite knew why — was an “outside insider”. Born to a wealthy family in Chicago, he came to detest America and all it stood for, and to venerate European culture and civilisation, wherever they might lead.
He yearned to be English and, possessed of an easy charm, powerful allies and a great capacity to spend money, he rejoiced in his ascent into high society. He is the parvenu cuckoo in the aristocratic nest. But with his rampant snobbery comes a talent for self-mockery, an affection for his wife that survived estrangement and, later, divorce, and a love for his son Paul that shines through the gossip.
Even early on, Chips was aware of the value of his diaries. In 1924, he could already see that they might become more than a comfort for his old age: “Although I am not Clerk of the Council like Mr Greville nor Secretary to the Admiralty like Mr Pepys, nor yet duc et pair as was M. de Saint-Simon, I have nevertheless had perhaps unusual opportunities for intimacy with interesting people and almost genius for ever being at centre of things.”
No small ambition; but so it proves. As his life proceeds, the effect is to give a natural flow to the book.
At the start, we have the social gadabout, blending Woosterish antics with a Lady Bracknellesque capacity for acid comment: “Oh! Why are these minor royalties so stupid and unattractive?” But by the end, Chips is in parliament as the MP for Southend West, as awareness slowly dawns that Britain is hurtling towards a second continental, and ultimately world, conflict. Here, in Auden’s “low dishonest decade”, the diaries are replete with fascinating insights: on the abdication crisis of 1936, the resignation of Anthony Eden as foreign secretary, the Berlin Olympics and much else.
Yet there is also one very striking thread: the all but unerring inaccuracy of Channon’s political judgments. On virtually every major issue of the day — the Nazi threat, the need for rearmament, Mussolini, appeasement, the Anschluss of Austria, the abdication, Churchill as potential leader — he is at once well-informed and wildly wrong.
The Nazis, whom like many he saw as the last bulwark against Bolshevism, excite his admiration with their demonic energy and flair for display. Visiting Berlin for the 1936 Olympics, he is hopelessly gulled by a visit to a Nazi labour camp full of smiling, healthy boys, and exults at the glories of the Göring party, with a full corps de ballet dancing in the moonlight. Hitler “is always right, the greatest diplomat of modern times”.
The diaries also bring out the true extent of Chips’ hostility to Churchill. Chamberlain has saved the world at the 1938 Munich conference, while Churchill is “that fat, brilliant, unbalanced, illogical, porcine orator”, “a devil who must never be trusted” and “the most dangerous man in Europe”, whose unbridled speeches for rearmament threaten the delicate balance needed to deal with Germany.
Chips’ views are his private confessional, with an eye to future publication. Yet in no way were they idiosyncratic. On the contrary, they faithfully reflected the conventional wisdom of the great majority of the Conservative parliamentary party at the time, and the distaste amounting to hatred of many of them for Churchill.
Yet it was Churchill who was right, and Churchill who made the difference.
Jesse Norman is financial secretary to the UK Treasury and author of Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why it Matters (Allen Lane/Basic Books)
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38, edited by Simon Heffer, Hutchinson, RRP£35, 1,024 pages
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