[8] In the ensuing years, Inverchapel developed a close relationship with the Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and spent most of his posting explaining why Britain could not offer him any substantive aid in his struggle against the Japanese invaders.

After the British consulate in Chongqing was almost completely destroyed by Japanese bombing in 1940, other diplomatic missions evacuated, but he kept the Union Jack flying close to Chinese government buildings.

He regularly swam in the Yangtze River and, after meeting the American writer Ernest Hemingway, dismissed him derisively: "Tough?

"[9] He was moved to Moscow in February 1942,[10] where he forged a remarkable relationship with Stalin and facilitated a number of Anglo-Soviet diplomatic conferences.

His work there and at the Big Three Conferences (such as Yalta and Potsdam) put him at the centre of international politics during the final pivotal years of the Second World War.

He did not think the Soviets planned to begin spreading world revolution, but feared that they were preparing to exert their power well beyond their prewar sphere of influence.

[13] An acquaintance of Guy Burgess and Donald Duart Maclean's superior in Washington, he took their defection to the Soviet Union badly.

[17] From November 1948 to January 1949 he was a member of the British delegation to the Committee for the Study of European Unity, convened by the Brussels Treaty Organisation to draw up the blueprint of the future Council of Europe.

When he returned to the city 35 years later as British ambassador, he raised eyebrows "by going to stay in Eagle Grove, Iowa, with a strapping farm boy whom he had found waiting for a bus in Washington".

[19] While stationed in Moscow, Kerr took a liking in Evgeni [later Eugene[20]] Yost, a 24-year-old Volga German embassy butler who had got into legal trouble.

[citation needed] He is best remembered in the public imagination for a much reproduced note he is said to have written in 1943 to Lord Pembroke while he was Ambassador to Moscow.