Nothing compares with Chips Channon’s diaries for sheer exuberance

‘Why was he born so beautiful, why was he born at all?’ When ‘Chips’ Channon strolled into the House of Commons tea room in 1951, this was the chant with which encircling drunken Labour MPs mocked him. Politically, he was inessential they thought, and epicene. He admitted to being the best-dressed of MPs, but reckoned the young socialist Anthony Crosland to be the most beautiful. As a historical record keeper, though, he has cut a deeper and more ineffaceable mark than any of his tormentors.

Nothing compares with the unexpurgated Channon diaries. They are rich, exuberant, copious and shatteringly honest. For those interested in the parliamentary politics of 20th-century England, in the conniving and jostling among European traders of influence, in the swansong of aristocratic glamour in Mayfair and Belgravia, in the capering duplicity necessitated by a criminalised sexuality, the diaries are matchless. Some readers of the two previous volumes have felt indignant at the reflexive racism of his generation. Prigs have tut-tutted at the relentless pleasure-seeking of his set. Despite this squeamish belittling of Channon’s achievement, his shrewd, unsparing self-portrayal makes his life story one of the great ego histories of his century. His editor Simon Heffer, who has been deftly aided by Hugo Vickers, deserves a lifetime award for his strenuous efforts in mastering 3,000 pages of text with such precision and nimble wit.

Channon – a Chicago-born adventurer who was Anglicised by a few terms at Christ Church, Oxford – began his diaries in 1918 as a real-life counterpart to Proust’s voluminous novel A la recherche du temps perdu, which he adulated. After his marriage to a Guinness heiress, acquisition of a vast house in Belgrave Square and election as Conservative MP for Southend in 1935, Trollope’s novels and Charles Greville’s journals became the models for his record of parliamentary intrigue, political score-settling and jobbery.