Who remembers Chips Channon? Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was an American born Conservative MP, a Bright Young Thing, and a marvellously indiscreet diarist. Or so he is alleged to have been. His diaries have never been published in full, so scandalous was their content — particularly of his promiscuous liaisons with many of the great men of the day. The editor of the expurgated version (1967), Robert Rhodes James, remarked that the Great and the Good shuddered when told that Channon had a kept a diary.
The word is that the diaries are soon to be published in full, although this has been a frequent rumour over the years. I hope that it’s true. Nancy Mitford apparently saw excised excerpts of the diary sometime after Channon’s death in 1958 and concluded that he was ‘black and sinister’, which is a perverse advert for their publication.
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