Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38

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While his adult life was spent thrillingly among the high-ups – “I’m only happy really with royalty” – his origins were relatively modest.

But this novelettish sensibility, the tone of cheap historical romance, is combined with a sharp eye and tongue. Channon was on close terms with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and the Duke of Kent, although whether those relationships extended beyond the platonic is not known. Channon’s tendency to extreme fandom of the powerful is no doubt an expression of his own ambition, and is by turns engaging and troubling. Soon he is falling for his fellow Tory MP Jim Thomas, the “dark, vague, selfish, self-centred, faun-like young man whom I find irresistible,” driving lovestruck past his house late at night, “talking” till 3 AM, “nights of drink and lechery.Before his marriage Channon lived in two all-male ménages, first for a “gloriously exuberantly happy” two years in Mayfair with his Oxford friends Prince Paul of Serbia, “the love of my life,” and Henry, 6th Viscount Gage, always known for some reason as George. He’s a natural journalist, always on the phone to his contacts, and he has a lot of highly privileged information. Chips was ‘frequently horrified by the scandalous tone it has; one might think we lived in a world of cads and rotters; this is far from true, but the weaknesses of the great and one’s friends are more amusing to chronicle than their dignified conduct which one takes for granted’. Channon took Litvinov's remark as evidence that the Soviet Union wanted to push the world into another world war. One of the best things in the new edition of the diaries, he thinks, is a top-secret memorandum about the abdication that Channon wrote in 1937.

Boris Johnson recently put both Evgeny Lebedev, the proprietor of the Evening Standard, and Veronica Wadley, its former editor, into the Lords.Simpson “enormously improved” the prince, and thinks her good, kindly, and clever; he sees how Edward, who was marvelous at being Prince of Wales, “will mind so terribly being King. He was always getting into uniform and dashing around the corner to the palace, and having a housemate who was also a doting slave must have been useful. Channon had a way of charming grand and unapproachable old men, and in his earlier English life Curzon, who’d been viceroy of India for six years and foreign secretary for five, was a very grand example indeed, “the last of the patricians, the great political Olympians.