I made it. Three volumes and some 3,500 pages later, I have completed the final installment of Chips Channon’s unexpurgated diaries. Was it worth it? I’ll come back to that ….

Volume 3 opens in 1944 with Britain still at war with Germany and Channon still sitting as a Member of Parliament. His interest in politics seems to have waned in the years covered in these diaries and his position remains unchanged as a minor and marginal figure in British public life. Channon seems to have made few friends in Parliament (and many enemies) and any hope of advancement or influence appears to have been extinguished by 1944. Despite this, there are some interesting and colorful depictions here of Parliamentary life at important moments and of some legendary figures in action like Churchill, Rab Butler, and Lloyd George. Nevertheless, there is little in this final volume to interest history lovers, other than some colorful accounts of a few key moments such as VE Day and Churchill’s shock defeat in the 1945 election.

With little to interest or divert him on the political front, Channon’s focus shifts to the personal. Although his relationship with Peter Coats continues, he falls hard for the playwright, Terence Rattigan, a romance that introduces Channon to a younger, more bohemian circle that includes John Gielgud and Frederick Ashton. The center of his social circle remains, however, the now familiar assortment of British aristocrats and European royals, with whom Channon lunches and dines as energetically as he did in the preceding volumes. His relationship with his only child, Paul (later to become a Cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher), is a close and touching one in these years.

By the time I had turned the final page of the final volume, I was certain that Channon was, in many respects, a repulsive character. Snobbish, racist, anti-Semitic, spoiled, foolish, and conceited, he accomplished little despite all the benefits and good fortune that came his way and that he did so little to earn. But here is the paradox. This dilettante left us not only a compelling portrait over forty years of an age of huge historical significance and of a political scene he witnessed first hand and at close quarters. He gave us one of the most exposing, most sustained, and most honest self-examinations in history. Wrong about almost everything that mattered, and often self-deluded, Cannon’s gift was this decades-long diary, a remarkable study in introspection.