callmemadam | Chips with everything part three: Vol II of Chips Channon’s Diaries (Reply)

Volume one left me wanting more of Channon’s scandalous, fascinating diaries so I was delighted when the second volume came up as a Kindle deal. Part two begins in 1938: politicians are still divided into appeasers and the rest. Channon is by now almost in love with his hero, Neville Chamberlain. ‘My god’, he calls him, and cherishes every little word or smile he gets from him. He is still working with Rab Butler at the Foreign Office, which he relishes because he feels at the heart of government. His enemies remain Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper and others opposed to appeasement. Is he beginning to see through the Nazis? He wonders if the Germans have ‘gone mad’ because their treatment of Jews is ‘cruel and unnecessary’. This doesn’t prevent his making shockingly anti-Semitic remarks throughout the rest of the diary. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia, Channon seems more annoyed that Hitler broke his word to Chamberlain than he is by the fact itself. The war, he opines, is all the fault of Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden. How he hates them! (Simon Heffer captions a photograph ‘Churchill and Eden mongering war’). Yet he says of Churchill, ‘I hate him but we can’t do without him’. According to him, the mandarins (i.e. in the Foreign Office) have ‘always wanted war’ and ‘Jewry the world over triumphs’. His private life is less happy than his public one because of the coldness and unpredictable humours of his wife. He loves her and wonders if she is ill. Little Paul, their only child, is still the apple of his eye.

This volume seemed twice as long as the first one; perhaps it’s just twice as tedious. Once war begins, it really makes little difference to Channon’s life, except that he decides to send Paul to America. What he himself calls the ancien régime lifestyle continues. His favourite occupations are sunbathing naked, having ‘a Turker’ (Turkish bath) and shopping: ‘shopped’, ‘shopping’ and ‘we shopped’ appear over and over again. This was not popping down the road for a loaf of bread but buying some pretty trinket by Fabergé or Cartier. He and his friends give each other so many Fabergé cigarette cases that you wonder how they can be so valuable today. His house is full, nearly always someone staying. Some, one has heard of (Rab Butler, Rex Whistler, Field Marshall Wavell), while others are long forgotten. The poor chap can’t even be alone in his room because people come and sit on his bed while he’s having his breakfast and while he’s dressing. One can’t help feeling people used his agreeable home as a superior hotel. Luncheons, cocktail parties, tea parties, dinners go on just as before the war with plenty of food and champagne flowing. ‘Dined at Boodles.’ ‘Lunch at the Ritz.’ When you think of ordinary people queuing for food, making Woolton pie and eating at British Restaurants, it makes you sick.

His marriage is over and Honor wants a divorce so that she can marry ‘her yeoman’. He calls her filthy names while she’s ‘living in sin’. At the same time, he is carrying on with a number of different men and planning a long-term future with the love of his life, Peter Coats. His in-laws are against divorce and he works hard on them to ensure that he gets plenty of the loot, ‘for Paul’. Channon seems quite delusional about his own importance. As an MP, he’s bored by his constituents and never speaks in the House. Instead, he’s scurrying about ‘intriguing’, spreading gossip and trying to get jobs for his friends. How can he think he and his friends are at all important? Who cares about all those minor royalties he’s so fond of? Not I, for sure. He’s still wrong about everything, considering Hitler’s invasion of Russia ‘a masterstroke’, for instance. Ha, ha! Yet you can’t help enjoying the read and his occasional felicitous turn of phrase. On Churchill: there was ‘no room on the government bench for (Churchill’s) baroque bottom.’ On Sir John Reith: ‘To go out with him would be like dining with Gibraltar.’ Philip of Greece: ‘is to be our future Prince Consort (this was in about 1941), which is why he is serving in our navy!’ He considers Philip probably the best-looking boy he’s ever seen. Volume three next! I’ll be waiting for the Kindle deal.