‘Chips’ Channon was a snob and anti-Semite who thought Hitler semi-divine

Henry “Chips” Channon: The Diaries 1918-38
Edited by SIMON HEFFER
(HUTCHINSON, 1,024 PP, £35)
Tablet bookshop price £31.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Diaries allow us to look into the hidden soul of politics. They can be worthy but worthwhile, like those ­written by Tony Benn or earlier by Richard Crossman. Or they can be colourful and bitchy, like the recent account of the court of David Cameron and the domestic Tory politics of Brexit as Boris Johnson pushed aside Theresa May to become Tory leader and prime minister, written by Sasha Swire, wife of a Tory MP and a member of the Cameron inner circle.
Henry “Chips” Channon was the son of a wealthy American who arrived in Paris in 1918, just as America entered the First World War to win it after the incompetence of British and French generals. He then went to England and scrambled a place at Oxford at the same time as Anthony Eden.

He was charming, a flatterer, loved beautiful things from dinner services to old masters and enjoyed sex with English public schoolboys. Above all, he was very rich, so he could buy his way into English society with lavish entertaining. He became even richer by ­marrying a Guinness heiress, though he records visits to Mayfair brothels as well as gay sex during this marriage.