Born in Chicago in 1897, ‘Chips’ Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958.
His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in 1967. Only now, sixty years after Chips’s death, can the original text be shared.