Original Westminster hellraiser: The secret world of Chips Channon

It was like a scene from Evelyn Waugh. The rich and the titled were enjoying afternoon tea. At the centre of the company was a rich American snob known as Chips, who passed himself off as an English gentleman; a knight and Conservative MP whose father-in-law was in the House of Lords; a man whose great charm concealed dark secrets. Another member of the company was the glamorous Viscountess Castlerosse, whose beauty was captured in black and white by her lover, Cecil Beaton.

Suddenly, their pleasant chatter was interrupted by a howl of pain. The Viscountess had sat on a wasp. The sting was not just painful, it was embarrassingly located on the lady's behind. But Chips was neither embarrassed nor unsure about what to do. With the charm and confidence of a man who has spent his life among the rich, he persuaded the lady to allow him to separate her from her garments, applied his mouth to the wound, and sucked away the poison.

The reputation of Sir Henry "Chips" Channon now rests on the diaries that he kept for most of his life, which were published in an abridged version in 1967, nine years after he died. Even then, he was a remnant of a lost world of privilege and snobbery, in which a safe seat in Parliament could be handed down from one member of a family to another, and the scandalous behaviour of well-known public figures was kept out of the newspapers.

It beggars belief that anyone would now consider publishing the diaries of an MP with all the most scandalous bits removed. But the public has only ever seen an expurgated, sanitised version of the Channon diaries, which has not prevented him acquiring a readership of many thousands over the past four decades, for his insights into British high society before the war.

His will set down that full publication should be delayed until 2018, to ensure that no one was embarrassed by the contents. But his grandson, Henry Channon, is now reportedly considering bringing the date forward, given it will soon be 50 years since Chips wrote his last diary entry.

Until we have seen the full version, we cannot know what has been hidden - whether it is merely titbits about the sex lives of long forgotten socialites, or something as juicy as a royal scandal. One of the great conundrums that the diaries may answer is the nature of the friendship between Chips Channon and the Duke of Kent, younger brother of King George VI. We know that, coincidentally, they had sons born on the same day in 1935, who grew up together, but what went on between the fathers, in the privacy of a royal bedroom, is still a matter of speculation.

Chips Channon is a striking example of an odd phenomenon. Whereas the best diaries written by Labour politicians come from major political figures like Dick Crossman, Barbara Castle, Tony Benn and soon, possibly, Alastair Campbell, by far the best Tory diarists are people who hung about on the periphery of big-time politics. In Margaret Thatcher's day there was Alan Clark, under John Major there was Gyles Brandreth. In the 1930s there was Chips Channon. None of these was a very successful politician, but Chips was surely the worst. Almost his only redeeming feature as a politician is that he knew he was no good.

"I do not really think the House of Commons is 'My Cup of Tea'," he confided to his diary on 5 December 1935. "I am too much of an individualist, and also, too self-centred and set in my ways. Enough if I remain a mute, just adequate back-bencher, but frankly most of the problems that so excite 'the Hon Members' leave me quite cold and indifferent."

Others had had to work hard to reach the House of Commons. Chips merely drifted in. The son of a Chicago ship-owner, he fell in love with Europe and particularly with Great Britain and its class system when he arrived with the American Red Cross during the First World War. His native America, he decided, was "a menace to the peace and future of the world. If it triumphs, the old civilisations, which love beauty and pace and the arts and rank and privilege, will pass from the picture."

His contempt for the land of his birth did not inhibit him from living off American money. A grant of $90,000 from his father, and an $85,000 inheritance from his grandfather spared him from having to work, but he kept busy during the General Strike by enrolling as a special constable and distributing the strike-breaking British Gazette.

In 1933, he married into a family even wealthier than the one into which he was born. The bride was Lady Honor Dorothy Mary Guinness, of the brewing family. The couple set up house at 5 Belgrave Square, in Westminster, and at Kelvedon Hall, in Essex. Their dining room was designed by the French interior designer, Stephane Boudin, who was later hired by Jacqueline Kennedy to refurbish the White House. In 1935, the marriage somehow produced a son, Paul.

Lady Honor's father, Sir Rupert Edward Cecil Lee Guinness, had secured himself a seat as Conservative MP for Southend on Sea in 1912. When he moved up into the House of Lords, as the second Earl of Iveagh, he passed the seat to his wife. Now that she had a son-in-law, Lady Iveagh stood down at the next election, in 1935, so that Chips could take over. When he died in 1958, the local Tory association defied a campaign orchestrated by Lord Beaverbrook, and rejected 130 other candidates for the vacancy in favour of Chips's 23-year-old son, thus keeping the seat in the family until 1997. They were congratulated by Lady Iveagh, who said: "I think you have done right by backing a colt when you know the stable he was trained in."

Even from what they knew about the Channon stable, you might think the Southend Conservatives would have wanted to look outside. In the 1930s, Chips was a notorious appeaser - a "toady" , in the opinion of Duff Cooper, a prominent anti-appeaser. His political heroes were Lord Halifax and Neville Chamberlain: "Doubtless very great men, who dwarf their colleagues; they are the greatest Englishmen alive," he claimed. A diary entry in 1938 ran: "An unbelievable day, in which two things occurred: Hitler took Vienna and I fell in love with the Prime Minister."

But his energies went principally into a social circle that included Mrs Wallis Simpson, to whom he was introduced by another American socialite, Emerald Cunard. He was privy to the secret affair between the American divorcee and the future King. He also knew about Edward and his lover's Nazi sympathies, which he attributed to Emerald Cunard's influence. She, apparently, had been bowled over by von Ribbentrop's dimples. "A full, exhausting day. We had a luncheon party here, and the plot was to do a 'politesse' to Mrs Simpson," Chips wrote on 5 April 1936. "She is a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman, but as I wrote to Paul of Yugoslavia today, she has already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to ... She has complete power over the Prince of Wales ..."

"Paul of Yugoslavia" was the king who signed a pact with Germany in 1941, whereupon he was overthrown by pro-English officers. He and Chips shared a house in Westminster in the early 1920s. Chips referred to him in 1934 as "the person I have loved most". He probably was not referring to love in the platonic sense.

The Southend Tories must also have known that when nine-year-old Paul Channon came home at the end of the war, after being evacuated to America, his mother was gone. She had run off with a Czech airman.

What they could not know was that her flight was provoked by her husband's promiscuous homosexuality. In addition to the rumoured dalliance with the Duke of Kent, there was an undoubted affair with Peter Coats, alias "Petticoats". There was also the playwright Terence Rattigan. In 1945, Rattigan was writing The Winslow Boy, which made him Britain's best-known and best-paid dramatist. He read early drafts to Chips, and dedicated the play to the young Paul Channon "in the hope that he may live to see a world in which this tale will point no moral".

And, who knows, perhaps there is much more to be learnt from the diaries. Sir Robert Rhodes James, the Tory MP who edited the published version, said he saw well-connected people go white when they heard that Chips had kept a journal.

Chips Channon was not an admirable character. He knew it, and seemed to revel in it. "I have flair, intuition, great good taste but only second-rate ambition," he wrote. "I am far too susceptible to flattery; I hate and am uninterested in all the things most men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am rivetted by lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels."

"As I re-read my diary," he recorded on another occasion, "I am frequently horrified by the scandalous tone it has. One might think we lived in a world of cads." He was not alone in being horrified. "Everybody is on about Chips's diary," Nancy Mitford complained. "You can't think how bile & spiteful & silly it is. One always thought Chips was rather a dear, but he was black inside."

But good diarists do not have to be agreeable people. What they need is the qualities that Samuel Pepys brought to the trade: a relentless curiosity and a frankness about themselves and those around them. As Channon himself wrote: "What is more dull than a discreet diary?"

The five other great political diarists

Samuel Pepys

The great 17th-century diarist is the man who set the standard for everyone who has followed. He began keeping a secret diary in 1660, just as Charles II was brought back from exile to take the throne, and gave up in 1669. He left his diaries, carefully preserved, among his papers, probably guessing they would be found and enjoyed by posterity. Lots of gossip, shameless name-dropping and no self-justification are what made Pepys so great a diarist.

Harold Nicolson

Like Chips, Sir Harold flirted with right-wing politics, joining Oswald Mosley's New Party in 1931. However, he quickly broke with Mosley, and served as a National Labour MP from 1935-45. Unlike Chips, he was a prominent opponent of appeasement, but like Chips, he was gay (his wife, Vita Sackville-West, was one of Britain's best-known lesbians). His diaries, one of the finest records of the period, cover the years from 1919 to 1964.

Richard Crossman

Crossman began his diary when he first entered the Commons, as a left-wing Labour MP, in 1945. From 1964-70 he was, successively, minister for housing, leader of the Commons, and secretary of state for social services. He died in 1974. His diaries were the first blunt record of the uneasy relationship between a minister and his civil servants. A contemporary of Barbara Castle and Tony Benn, who also published diaries.

Alan Clark

Despite his devotion to Margaret Thatcher, Alan Clark never progressed further than a middle-ranking defence minister. Famous for his wealth, and for speaking his mind, he once created a sensation by making a Commons speech while clearly the worse for drink. His diaries covering the 1980s, including the fall of Margaret Thatcher, were a best-seller, not just because of the political intrigue, but for the insight they gave into Clark's rich sex life.

Gyles Brandreth

A well-known TV presenter and writer, Brandreth was mainly famous for his garish sweaters before he became Conservative MP for Chester in 1992. He then sold the sweaters at a charity auction, toned down his dress sense, and served as a government whip, before losing his seat in 1997. Some suspect he entered politics in order to write his diary, which is a very funny account of the disintegration of John Major's government.