Henry Chips Channon: The Diaries, 1938-43

First edition, first impression.  xxii, 1098pp, with black and white plate illustrations.  Black cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering to spine. Grey endpapers. Silk ribbon marker bound in. Large 8vo.  Cloth a little pushed in at spine ends else neat, clean, bright and tight throughout.  In its original illustrated dust jacket, not price clipped, very slightly bumped on extreme edges; short, closed nick on the upper corner of the rear panel.

The second of three volumes of Henry Channon’s unexpurgated dairies, edited by Simon Heffer and published by Hutchinson between 2021-2022  (an expurgated edition was published in 1967).  Channon (1897-1958) was an Anglo-American politician, Member of Parliament for Southend and then Southend West from 1935 to his death, closely associated with Neville Chamberlain’s faction of the Tory party.  He served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler while Butler was Foreign Secretary from 1938 onwards and as such was a first-hand witness to Chamberlain’s efforts to appease Hitler. His association with the failed appeasement policy was likely the reason he never achieved ministerial office.  As well as a politician, he was a naturalised London socialite and a recognised author and diarist.  Despite his American birth, his anti-American stance was reflected in his 1929 novel, Jean Kennedy and later, Paradise City (1931). In 1933 Channon married the brewing heiress Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the Rupert Guinness, the Second Earl of Ivaegh.  They had a son together, Paul, who himself served as Member of Parliament for Southend West from 1959 to 1997 and as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and then Transport.