PROFESSOR SIMON HEFFER ON CHIPS CHANNON

Our first speaker was Professor Simon Heffer, who has written biographies on, amongst others, Thomas Carlisle, Vaughan Williams, Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and as "most of us spent lockdown staring at the ceiling and avoiding people on walks", Simon achieved an extraordinary historical feat of a mammoth 3 volume collection of the political diaries of Chips Channon.

Simon told us "Yes, it was my lockdown project". Simon summarised with Proust who Chips had tried to get into bed in 1918. This wasn't brought up in the diaries until 1947, as though it had taken Chips 30 years to remember, which annoyed Professor Simon Heffer.

Chips's mother had befriended various French people in the war as she worked on trying to raise money for the library in Paris. That's how they got to know Proust. When war broke out, she was nervous about her "little Chips" getting killed by the Germans, that she got him a job working for the American Red Cross in Paris. This meant that Chips stayed at the Ritz for a year. Simon said, "before Al Fayed owned it, it was a slightly more upper class hotel in those days". This is when Chips first starts writing his diary.

Then Chips comes to England and the diary disappears. He gets into Oxford "by some means or another" and does a two year degree in French, which he only just passes. He forms his greatest friendships in those days, but the diaries are missing. Simon Heffer would like to get his hands on those diaries, which is not the most outrageous claim because when Robert Rhodes James was writing his version, a man appeared on his doorstep one day with two bulging carrier bags saying "I think these belong to you". He had found the diaries of Chips Channon from 1952-1967 in a car boot sale. The two last missing periods are 1919-1922 and the early 1930s.

The third and final volume by Simon Heffer, covers Chips's relationship with Terence Rattigan, the British dramatist and screenwriter, best known for The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy. Chips had an affair with Rattigan for three years, but he also had a devoted boyfriend who was in India, who then returns to the UK.

There was obviously a very serious '"bitch fight" between the two lovers, said Heffer, and Rattigan looses - that story is not in the book.

Chips didn't want the diaries published for 60 years because they were filled with so many insults and so much abuse. Professor Heffer did check out all the outrageous claims that Chips had made, and mostly they were found to be true. Although, what Chips did get wrong on many occasions, were people's ages, for example "an old gal of 92" - when she was actually only 67.

Heffer described Chips as "one of nature's journalists". He had "an acute eye for detail" and "particularly for personality". Chips would have found the most interesting person in a room and got all the dirt out of him or her that was necessary, and then go home and write out exactly what he'd been told, be that morning, noon or night. He managed to do this for the best part of 40 years.

Heffer doesn't think anyone can possibly afford to write about the period between the war and the 1960s, without consulting the Channon diaries, because "Chips knew more or less everybody or anybody that he would have thought was worth knowing".

Chips was very discombobulated when his great friend King Edward VIII decided to abdicate, because Chips could no longer leave his calling card with the Queen and King. Rather like Wallace Simpson, Chips was an American "on the make". Chips considered the next King George VI to be "boring" and the Queen Mother "common" - Heffer thinks he learnt about the term "common" from "our dear friend Nicky Haslam".

Chips concentrates on politics and is determined to make something of himself as a politician. He is very rude about Churchill. His views can be described as "poisonous".

However, although Chips is a snob and also a self-hating American, Heffer describes him as "irresistibly fascinating".

Heffer revealed "I don't think if I had a daughter, I would want her to marry Chips" but then again, for many reasons, he probably wouldn't want to either.