My goodness, my Chips! CHRISTMAS BOOKS

ROBERT BLAKE

*Chips' Channon (whose nickname is said by some to derive from his having shared a bache- lor house with one Fish) was a striking instance of that well-known social phenomenon, the search for identification. It is the need felt by 'displaced persons'—and people can be `dis- placed' by their own fantasies as well as by objective social facts—to discover something-- a group, a class, a cause, a nation—of which they can feel themselves a part, to which they can belong and which they may hope in the end if not to dominate, at least to have a share in dominating. It is characteristic that this `some- thing' should assume in their minds an exagger- ated distorted shape which it does not present to those who really belong and take it for granted.

The classic example of displaced persons in modern times has been the Jews—before the creation of the state of Israel, which may well in the end change all that. At one extreme there is Marx, who sought to identify himself with a proletariat which never existed in the form which he imagined, although that is not to say that his notion was wholly imaginary. At the other there is Disraeli, who endeavoured to be- long to the English aristocracy and whose men- tal picture of it, though again by no means entirely fictitious, was somehow not quite that of Lord Derby, or Lord Hartington, any more than the average Manchester cotton spinner thought of himself as Marx did. It is also characteristic that the feelings of such displaced figures for the world which they have adopted should be peculiarly intense and passionate, and that they should regard with heightened detesta- tion those who to them seem to be betraying it, particularly those whose own claim to belong is beyond dispute.

The late Sir Henry Channon was not a Jew. Indeed, one of his less admirable characteristics was a streak of antisemitism. But he was a dis- placed person—albeit self-displaced. He was an American of respectable middle-class English ancestry who detested America and nearly all Americans—except, of course, the Duchess of Windsor. At an early stage in his life he fell in love with England and later with a number of English people including Lady Honor Guinness, whom he married, not in the end very happily, and Mr Neville Chamberlain, to whom he toad- ied, not in the end very successfully. He was an inveterate diarist, and this medium is one of the least reliable forms of human testimony, though perhaps more reliable about the writer himself than about the events he describes. Nevertheless even here it is right to note that he was not a member of the intellectual or the aristocratic or the political establishment. It would be rash to draw any sweeping generalisations about pre- second war England from this curious docu- ment, Chips: The Diary of Sir Henry Channon edited by Robert Rhodes James (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 63s).

Like Disraeli, Chips was an outsider, an adventurer, a social climber and a Conservative MP. Unlike Disraeli, he possessed neither genius, oratory, ideas, style, nor a peerage, not even a barony let alone an earldom; although the House of Lords was his great ambition and no

one could have worked—perhaps that is not the word—intrigued harder for it. The reluctance of successive prime ministers to gratify him cost them a golden opportunity of repeating a famous repartee which Mr Macmillan at least would have relished. If he had made Chips a peer surely someone would have asked why, and surely the Prime Minister would not have forgotten the great Lord Salisbury's reply to a similar question about the appointment of Alfred Austin as Poet Laureate: 'Because he wanted it so much.'

It would, alas, have been difficult to give any other reason. Chips's political career barely warranted the knighthood which he got shortly before he died. His only office was Parliamen- tary Private Secretary to the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He hoped to become a Whip and thus qualify for his dream title, Lord Westover (his mother's name) of Kel- vedon, his (or Lady Honor's) country house in Essex. In fact, if he had lived longer—he was only sixty-one when he died in 1958—he might have realised his dream. He possessed the safe Guinness seat of Southend, held from 1918 to 1935 first by his father-in-law, then by his mother-in-law, Lady, Iveagh, and since 1958 by his son, Paul. In the dark Conservative days of 1964 the offer of this plum to a displaced mini- ster in exchange for a peerage might well have done the trick. But, as Chips himself would no doubt have written, 'the Reaper' had by then performed his fell work.

Part of the trouble—but only part—was that he backed the wrong political horse. He was an out and out appeaser, and the ascendancy of Neville Chamberlain was too short for a man who had only entered the House in 1935 to get very far before it ended. But plenty of people who supported Chamberlain did well enough later. After all, Lord Dunglass, who appears often in these pages, became Prime Minister, and Mr Butler, who appears even more often, very nearly did so. If Chips had carried any weight in the House or if he had been palpably honest and sincere he would have been all right. There was nothing vindictive about Sir Winston Churchill,- and the motives of many of those who supported appeasement were perfectly creditable.

The same cannot be said about Channon. He seems from his diary—and one must admit that other diaries may exist unpublished with equally-, candid revelations—to have been influenced partly by funk, fear of military service (perhaps he regretted his extraordinary action in lower- ing his age by two years in the reference books);

partly by a well-founded belief that the social world of Emerald Cunard (he quotes a happy quatrain, 'The only solution Is revolution, But that would be hard On Lady Cunard') was un- likely to survive a war even if we won it; partly by an eye fixed, as Sir Winston Churchill said of Harcourt, `earnestly, but not unerringly, upon the main chance.' He was also, like others, wholly taken in by the Nazis. Did not many of the German ex-royals believe in Hitler, and did not Chips believe passionately in royalty of every scrt? And so he persuaded himself that Hitler might be paving the way for a Hohenzollern restoration, though anything less probable it is hard to conceive. Whatever his reasons it is a dismal reflection that a man who could write 'Goering, his merry eyes twink- ling, shook us both by the hand; he really is a most disarming man' should within eighteen 'months have taken the first small step in what is usually the road to promotion.

Chips's account of his elevation is disarm- ingly naive. 'Rah Butler,' he notes after the resignation of Eden (which he described as `the greatest event since the formation of the `National Government'), `is a scholarly dry stick but an extremely able canny man of great am- bition. I must cultivate him.' Two days later the chance comes. He meets Mr Butler and Harold Balfour in the 'Aye' lobby:

'I went up to them by the mercy of God, and congratulated Rab on his recent appointment to the Foreign Office [Under-Secretary]: actu- ally I said "Europe is to be congratulated." He beamed and as I walked away (so Harold says) he asked about me, and Harold, of course, lauded me to the skies, and then suggested that he made me his PPS.'

One can doubt the casual connection, for Mr Butler may have had perfectly good reasons for his choice and he could not see Chips's diary, but the fact remains that a week later Chips is on the PPSS' bench:

• . my appearance there made a- mild sensa- tion in the House, of pleasure to my friends and rage to my enemies, whom I suppose I must try to conciliate. I hope I behaved with dignity; certainly I was beautifully dressed, though Rab says I must abandon my black Homburg hat— it is too Edenesque—and buy a bowler. Bowlers are now back .. . I `Chips at the Fo—shades of Lord Curzon, and how pleased he would be.'

Four days later he writes the much-quoted _ entry. 'An unbelievable day, in which two things occurred. Hitler took Vienna and I fell –in love with the Prime Minister.'

One must admit that snobbish, fatuous, wrong headed and clich6-ridden though this diary is, it makes compulsive reading. Chips did, al- though in an untypical and caricatured form, represent an attitude in both politics and society which was less uncommon than one would like to think—and he spilled the beans. The sections about his social success are even funnier than those about his political success, partly because it was much greater: he did, after all, entertain King Edward VIII to dinner at 5 Belgrave Square. But naturally, as in politics, he backed the wrong horse. At times he is in despair. At the height of his social career he and Lady Honor are invited to eleven dinner parties on one night.

But with 'the Yorks' on the throne life looks much blacker; on one dreadful evening there were two grand balls and the Channons were invited to neither. However, they recovered. On 20 June 1939 'there is a great Channon wave on at the moment. We are Popular, repandus, in- deed run after. We are asked to every lighted candle, to every dinner. ...'

It is surprising that Mr Paul Channon, who inspired a devotion which is one of his father's most amiable traits, should have allowed the publication even in an edited version (and how many editors have there been? See p 205 n 2) of a diary which, however readable, must, at least to this generation, do its author little but harm. However, that is his affair. The final editing by Mr Robert Rhodes James, a very distinguished biographer, can only be judged by those who have seen the originals which, Chips hoped, would remain unseen for half a century.

His introduction is excellent, although it leaves some important questions unanswered. For example, Chips seems to have inherited less than $200,000 from his own family—a mere trifle in terms of his post-matrimonial style of life, and well before the finish of the war we hear from the diary of his impending divorce. Yet he remains at the end owner of Kelvedon and 5 Belgrave Square, of an income large enough for a reduction of 6d on income tax to give him an extra £1,000 per annum net, and of his Southend seat. Evidently the Guinnesses supported him, but why not be more explicit, if the diary is to be published at all? Two final points: many of the people and events men- tioned in the diary will mean nothing to readers without much fuller annotation; and the index is wholly inadequate, a mere mechanical list of names and page numbers such as no self- respecting publisher should permit.