Anyone for a second helping of Chips?

In the latest volume of Henry Channon’s diaries, the frivolous politician grapples with love, war and sadomasochistic games

HENRY ‘CHIPS’ CHANNON: THE DIARIES, 1938-43 ed Simon Heffer 1120pp, Hutchinson, T £30 (0844 871 1514), RRP £35, ebook £14.99

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“My frivolous life is over” claimed Henry “Chips” Channon in March 1938. But he was too shallow, too volatile, too hedonistic to become wholly serious. What mattered to him most was a position in high society, subsidised by his heiress wife, Honor Guinness. Even the terrors and privations of war wouldn’t eradicate the sunbathing country-house weekends and cocktails at the Savoy and Ritz. His frivolous life would persist.

American-born but Oxfordeducated and determined to be as English as they come, he served as Conservative MP for Southend and private secretary to Rab Butler in the Foreign Office. Long after the debacle of Munich and further evidence of Hitler’s treachery, he continued to be an unapologetic appeaser, nailing his colours to Chamberlain’s mast (“I love him deeply”), and endorsing “the new vigorous civilisation of the Nazis” as a bulwark against Bolshevism. He was guilty of the anti-Semitism endemic to his class during this era and he was a mindless snob – “middle-class” and “common” being two of his favourite insults. In all these respects, modern readers will find him hard to stomach.

But what his epic diary, spanning 35 years, bequeaths us is of enormous fascination, and one embarks on this second volume (magisterially edited by Simon Heffer) intensely curious to discover how this mildly appalling yet strangely appealing figure can wriggle out of his wrong-headed attitudes, not to mention the mess of his failing marriage.

In parliamentary terms, Chips never amounted to a hill of beans and when Butler migrated to the education brief in 1941, he was left an insignificant backbencher with access to the drawing rooms but not the corridors of power. Lacking any appetite for hard work, he didn’t mind that much: he was no crusader for anything except Tory stability, and never demonstrated any interest in social reform, economic policy, or even the concerns of his Essex constituents. His opinions of his colleagues were rooted in his visceral reaction to their personalities rather than their views, and there is nobody who gets a worse write-up than Churchill, “a selfish, paranoidical [sic] old ape, charmless, arrogant, grumpy” for whom Chips feels “a deep and bitter loathing” from which only his magnificent oratory redeems him. In contrast, his tender affection for his eccentric house guest Field Marshal Wavell – “almost, but luckily not quite, a saint” – is very touching.

The diary reports much petty diplomatic intrigue, largely relating to the embattled monarchies of Greece and the Balkans. It is probably of great academic interest, but the average reader will be more engaged by the oscillations of Chips’s private life, from his partiality to colonic irrigation to his amorous entanglements.

To decode the latter, one has to read between the lines. Once he had reluctantly separated from his wife, who goes off with “a dark, unscrupulous fellow of the yeoman class”, he appears to have lost his previously lively erotic attraction to women and gravitated to an entirely homosexual existence – though the diary often remains unclear as to whether his passions involved any physical activity or were just what would now be called man crushes or bromances.

With fellow MP Alan LennoxBoyd, also a married man, he regularly shares a bed, visits the Turkish baths and indulges in flagellatory games (Chips enjoyed “judicious treatment of a punitive character” as well as “jolly thorough fornication”), but theirs seems more of a friendship than a love affair. For Wavell’s aide-de-camp, the “Ariel” Peter Coats, his emotions are less ambiguous: Chips call their tryst in the Levant in 1941 “the gayest, most exquisite, most elegant episode in my life”. Things weren’t quite so rosy when Coats returned to London in 1943, and the unravelling of their relationship will doubtless form a thread of the diary’s third and final volume, to be published next year.

There are a few giggles here, as when the Bishop of Bath and Wells naively announces that “There is nothing I like better than to lie in bed with my favourite Trollope”, and a few epigrams too; cabinet minister Duff Cooper is “a peppery parakeet”, Dolphin Square is “a vast tenement of doubtful reputations”. But one of the diary’s great virtues is that it does not show off: the aim is to record what happened, not to impress posterity. Dreadful though Chips is in so many respects, his candour remains admirable and indisputable.

He calls Churchill ‘a selfish, paranoid old ape’ and Duff Cooper ‘a peppery parakeet’