Chips Channon Audiobooks

The unexpurgated Chips Channon diaries, society gossip raised to a twentieth-century art

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Who is Chips Channon?

Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon (1897-1958) was an American-born British Conservative politician and, far more durably, one of the most famous political and social diarists of the twentieth century. Arriving in England in 1920, he fell so completely for London society that he turned sharply against his native America, convinced its cultural and economic dominance threatened the older British and European civilisation he adored, and set about remaking himself as an establishment figure.

Elected to Parliament in 1935, he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler at the Foreign Office from 1938, keeping the post under Churchill though ministerial office never came – his closeness to the Chamberlain camp saw to that. Posterity has ruled the politics a sideshow. It is the diaries that matter: first published in a discreetly expurgated edition in 1967, they finally appeared in full, edited by Simon Heffer, in three volumes between 2021 and 2022.

Chips Channon in audiobooks

Our catalogue carries Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1), the opening instalment of the unexpurgated Heffer edition, and the diary may be the most audiobook-friendly form there is: gossip, after all, is a spoken art. Channon had the diarist’s essential double gift – he was in the room, and he could not resist recording what the room would have preferred he had not noticed, which is precisely why the first edition needed pruning. For listeners who like their history at eye level – society, Westminster and the political class observed from the inside – this is long, rich, gloriously indiscreet listening.