Richard Davenport-Hines

Nothing compares with Chips Channon’s diaries for sheer exuberance

The third volume, covering the years 1943-57, brings his riveting descriptions of parliamentary plots and sexual liaisons to a triumphant conclusion

Chips Channon (left) talking to Peter Thorneycroft in January 1957 at the time of Harold Macmillan’s appointment as prime minister. [Getty Images] 
issue 03 September 2022
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  • Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries, 1943-57

    Simon Heffer

    Hutchinson, pp. 896, £35

‘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.

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