THE MAN WHO WAS ALWAYS WRONG
He thought Churchill a tyrant and Hitler semi-divine – but the real problem with Chips Channon’s diaries is that no one today has heard of his dreary friends
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-43 Edited by Simon Heffer Hutchinson £35 ★★★★★
Chips must rate as one of the most inappropriate nicknames ever. Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was a snobbish multi-millionaire who lived in one of the most expensive houses in London and liked to be chauffeured around in a green Rolls-Royce.
He probably never ate a chip in his life, unless he forced one down while trying to win over the voters of Southend, the constituency for which he served as Conservative MP from 1935 until his death in 1958. ‘Simple food always gives one indigestion,’ is one of the bons mots in this, the second volume of his diaries. Others include ‘Royalty is a heady wine’ and ‘Are all women mad? I suspect so’.
Even as London is being bombed, he swans around the city, shopping for bejewelled cufflinks, tucking into rich meals at the Savoy or Claridge’s, throwing dinner parties for 24 at his home in Belgravia, or relaxing in a Turkish bath. A phrase that regularly pops up in the diaries is ‘Had my bottom cleansed today’, or words to that effect.
Chips Channon kept diaries throughout his adult life. A shortish volume of them was published nine years after his death, but it had been heavily cut by both his wife and his boyfriend. Many of those he had insulted in them were still alive, among them the Queen Mother (‘at heart snobbish and insincere’) and ‘that scheming woman’ Diana Boothby, who ‘smells so strongly that I once nearly fainted when sitting next to her’.
Now that his victims are all dead and buried, the diaries are being published in their entirety – three volumes, each of them more than a thousand pages. The first volume, published earlier this year, covered Channon’s glory years. Already wealthy, he married an even wealthier woman (a Guinness heiress), successfully launched himself into both politics and high society, chummed up with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the years before the abdication, and was invited to the flashiest parties thrown by all the most welcoming Nazis – Göring, Ribbentrop, Goebbels – when he toured Germany in 1936.
In that volume he found Hitler ‘amiable’ and ‘semi-divine’, and was captivated by the way Göring’s ‘merry eyes twinkled. He seems a lovably disarming man’. As you may have gathered already, Chips Channon was not the best judge of character.
Or of anything else, for that matter. A convinced appeaser, as late as May 1939, we find him saying that ‘all my sympathies’ are with Hitler, and that the press has been unfair to the poor man. ‘It is hopeless in England: give a dog a bad name and he can never recover.’ On August 24, 1939, he asserts that ‘The whole House expects war: only I… do not.’ Just ten days later, on September 3, war was declared. On that day, Channon notes that this is proof of the Foreign Office’s ‘long hatred’ of the Germans, ‘and Jewry the world over triumphs’. On July 5, 1940, he further notes that ‘people are beginning to say that Hitler will never attack this country’. By the end of August, the attacks had begun.
And so it goes on, his sure instinct for faulty prediction. ‘If Hitler does attack Russia, it will be the cleverest act of his whole career,’ he writes in June 1941. ‘… His position would then seem impregnable.’ The meticulous editor of his diaries, Simon Heffer, sets him right. ‘A serious misjudgment by Channon: it was the attack on Russia that lost Hitler the war.’
Channon hero-worships Neville Chamberlain – ‘the greatest man of all time’ – and detests ‘fat wicked old Winston’, labelling him ‘the man who has never been right’. When Churchill finally becomes Prime Minister, he bursts into tears, exasperated that ‘England in her darkest hour had surrendered her destiny to the greatest opportunist and political adventurer alive’.
His only hope is that ‘Winston, with too much rope, is certain to crash one day’.
His abuse of Churchill – ‘a bully, an irritating tyrant, unfair, unkind, wrong’ – continues, come what may. ‘Winston is losing the war if he has not lost it,’ he writes in June 1942. ‘He is the most dangerous man in England.’
Like many a marginalised backbencher, Channon was convinced of his own centrality and believed that, with a word in the right ear, he could shape world events. Consequently, he devoted an inordinate amount of time to fruitless plotting. ‘The really only startling thing about my intrigues is that they always come off,’ he confided to his diary. But he was talking nonsense: the only thing they always came off was the rails. In November 1942, having just been sacked from his very lowly job of Parliamentary Private Secretary to an Under-Secretary of State, he sets his sights on the House of Lords. ‘I want to be a peer: there are many ways of becoming one. The quickest would be for Leslie Hore-Belisha to become Prime Minister. To do that he would first have to be a Conservative – so I had a confidential chat with him.’
One of the remarkable aspects of this volume is how little the war impinges on his social life. Bombs may fall, even on his own house, but he never lets them get in the way of his party-going. Sadly, most of the grandees with whom he mixes are now forgotten figures. It may be fun to hear that Queen Marie of Yugoslavia was ‘wicked, obese, obscene, evil-speaking and smelling’, but it would be a lot more fun if we knew who she was. Heffer does his best to revive these obscure royals and aristocrats by applying lengthy defibrillating footnotes to them – ‘Gilbert James Heath cote-Drummond Willoughby… succeeded his father as 3 rd Earl of Ancaster’, and so forth – but they remain determinedly lifeless.
Channon reached his peak as a social diarist in the first volume, when he was still a member of Edward and Mrs Simpson’s circle. But by 1938 they were in exile, and he had lost touch with them. Without their presence his diaries become an endless succession of the same old names and titles, few of any significance beyond their power to irritate. He drops hundreds of names – but few people alive today will be bothered to catch any of them.
Though the original volume of his diaries was heavily abridged, with many of the juiciest bits removed, it was about the right length. In these extended volumes there are nuggets to be found, but they lie buried beneath a suffocating morass of dreary social and political hobnobbery. It’s all too much. In April 1939, he writes: ‘… the Under-Secretaryship has been given to Osbert Peake, a popular, but not very great appointment. I should have preferred Ralph Assheton or Victor Raikes.’ To which the only valid response is ‘Who? Who? Who?’
But he carries on regardless. ‘I lead London society, my house is the loveliest – indeed the last and only stronghold remaining of the aristocracy and ancien régime – in society I am unrivalled,’ he boasts on page 893. But by now, with the world in peril, he has clearly become too silly and shallow a figure for anyone of any real stature to bother cultivating. Churchill cold-shoulders him, and he barely ever meets King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, who fail to include him among their 800 guests at a ball at Buckingham Palace. ‘I shall not forget this slight,’ he rages, adding that the Queen is not only ‘fundamentally treacherous’ but ‘remarkably snobbish’.
In 1941, no longer even a PPS, he sets his sights on becoming Governor of Bermuda, but fails. Instead, his old boss, Rab Butler, suggests making him Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Essex, but that never happens either.
This volume includes frequent tussles with his rich and flighty wife Honor, who, after affairs with, among others, a Hungarian count and a ski instructor, is intent on divorcing him and marrying a horse dealer. ‘I think she is a nymphomaniac… she has a horrible character,’ he rants. He worries that the scandal of divorce will mean the end ‘of a peerage, of my political aspirations, of vast wealth, and great names and position’. He entertains doubts, not only about Honor, but about all women. ‘They are untrustworthy, usually, too emotional, and not very pleasant or constructive characters. I shouldn’t mind if I never saw one again.’
Small wonder, then, that he should be plotting his own future with a dashing young lover, an interior decorator called Peter Coats, ‘a Pierrot of charm and Aryan good looks’, to whom he writes up to seven letters a day. No doubt their romance will be continuing at length in Volume 3, which is to be published early next year. But I’m not sure I still have the stamina for it.