Chips with extra sauce

Chips Channon was the ideal political diarist – truthful, vulnerable and gossipy.

- Simon Heffer

Having just spent three years editing Chips Channon’s diaries, I had to form a rigorous view of what makes a good political journal.

Where does one start? The diarist needs a proclivity for outrage, and it helps to be an outsider looking in: so we shouldn’t have high hopes for diaries from David Cameron.

The diarist needs energy and a passionate interest in others – so we might get Boris Johnson’s only if someone else writes them, but even then they would probably be late.

Above all, the best diaries need to have an author who knows, or thinks he or she knows, everybody; historical interest; candour; disclosure; wit; and above all revelation of the diarist’s character.

As an example, here’s Channon from 23rd November 1935, days after his first election to the House of Commons:

Brendan Bracken lunched with us alone; he drank four brandies and told us all the latest gossip, sexual and political… Everyone is enchanted about Duff. He is Secretary for War at the age of 45. The secret has been well kept, and Diana [Cooper] denied even the chance … poor Charlie Londonderry has been given the sack … I know him intimately and have always liked and trusted him: we have even been to brothels together in Paris.

Happily, he drops names with which most readers of his diaries will be pleasantly familiar – Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s henchman; DuffCooper, whom he detests, and Lady Diana, whom he adores; and then gives us something we probably didn’t know about Lord Londonderry.

Then, a month later: