Sometimes I think I have the character of a very clever woman—able, but trivial with flair, intuition, great good taste and second-rate ambition,” Henry “Chips” Channon wrote in a diary entry dated July 19, 1935. “I am susceptible to flattery, and male good looks; I hate and am uninterested in all the things men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.” As I arrived [at Kelvedon, Channon’s country house in Essex] I met Honor riding away with her agent, a dark horse-coper [dealer] named Woodman whom I much mistrust. He is a dark stranger and no doubt mulcts her of much money. She is completely dominated by him, probably infatuated and I see serious trouble ahead.

The dishonesty, deviousness and occasional depravities of the upper classes are laid bare: “He will talk about people’s personal lives, their sexual behaviour, their treatment of other people. All human life is there.” If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

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Heffer, Simon (5 September 2021). "Will I marry again? Or shall I live with Peter?". The Sunday Telegraph . Retrieved 5 September 2021. For a passionate royalist like Channon, the heir to the throne is naturally a great prize, his boringness as a man overlaid by imperial-scale glamour. At Lady Curzon’s ball in February 1926, “the Prince of Wales was charming and we had a long talk about our American friends. Everyone noticed…” But this enhanced mood is far from constant. He can find the prince “surly and ill at ease,” and repeatedly “looking rather vulgar.” On one occasion he looks “like a racing tout”; he has a “dentist smile.” Yet as Edward VIII he inspires Chips’s loftiest gush: he is the “adored Apollo,” the “world’s idol,” the “beautiful boy King” (he was forty-two at the time, two years older than Chips himself). His affair with Wallis Simpson is “one of the greatest romances in all history.” What a “temptation for a Baltimore girl! To espouse the Emperor of the earth.” But it is, of course, political Channon for whom we really turn to the diary. He was at the epicentre of the pro-appeasement wing of the Tory party and high society, and at the heart of the abdication crisis. The earlier version of the diary disguised just how enthusiastic he was for the fascists, as were many of those around him. For much of this period, Channon was a fashionable anti-Semite, who feared above all a socialist revolution and the murder of the aristocracy, perhaps by guillotine. Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939 The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 9781461699385. Disgracefully, none of this appeared in Rhodes James, who seems to have been working from a bowdlerized, often redacted, and sometimes rewritten version given him by Channon’s last lover, Peter Coats. To have agreed to work under those circumstances was profoundly unprofessional.

He wrote two more books: a second novel, Paradise City (1931) about the disastrous effects of American capitalism, [3] and a non-fiction work, The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933). The latter, a study of the last generations of the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavarian kings, received excellent notices, and was in print twenty years later. Some critical reservations reflected Channon's adulation of minor European royalty: The Manchester Guardian said of his account of the 1918 revolution, "he seems to have depended almost exclusively on aristocratic sources, which are most clearly insufficient." [11] Despite this, the book was described on its reissue in 1952 as "a fascinating study... excellently written". [12]Channon’s hatred of his native America is visceral. “The word is never on my lips, rarely in my mind,” he claims, unconvincingly. “I never even dream of it and I don’t really believe it exists. I am not at all sure that ugly, horrible continent is not merely the invention of the Rothermere press.” In fact the land of his birth tormented him, and recurs often. ‘I’m always so ashamed of my American passport,’ he writes. In March 1938, the rising Conservative minister Rab Butler, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office appointed Channon his Parliamentary Private Secretary. [4] Butler was associated with the appeasement wing of the Conservative party, and Channon, as with the abdication, found himself on the losing side. In the words of the ODNB: "Always ferociously anti-communist, he was an early dupe of the Nazis because his attractive German princelings hoped that Hitler might be preparing for a Hohenzollern restoration." At the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Channon attended the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, where he was very impressed. [18] From the window before we landed I saw Peter, brown, amber, alert, handsome, distinguished, stupendous, waiting for me. I rushed out: he seemed enchanted: I was exhilarated, almost delirious with excitement... Peter had arranged a suite, he whispered, at Shepheard’s… We had a rapturous reunion. 1941