Born in Toronto, Canada, he worked in the United Kingdom for the Daily Express and as a theatre critic for the London Evening Standard and was a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Conservative Party from 1935 to his death.

[2][3] In 1915 Baxter enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force of World War I, becoming a signals lieutenant in the 122nd (Muskoka) Battalion, CEF in France.

[1][6][7][8] Under the headline "Three Nights of Horror" Baxter reviewed for it in November 1922 a dramatisation of The Secret Agent, which he called "actionless and unmoving", and two other plays.

[10][11] Baxter had a musical connection to the Sitwell circle: William Walton dedicated a piano arrangement of a piece from Façade (1926) to his wife Edith.

[1] He wrote the "Atticus" gossip column in the Sunday Times and was commended for his journalism by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as "a most loyal supporter of the Government".

An article Baxter wrote about two weeks after the Munich Agreement in the Star of 1938 was in a German report from London of 15 October taken to have shown up "in a masterly way the spitefulness of the speeches made by Opposition Conservatives and describes the Führer's answer to them as a well-deserved retort.

[22] In 1942 Baxter was appointed by Lord Beaverbrook as theatre critic for the Evening Standard, a post which he held for the eight years, combining it with his duties as a Member of Parliament.

[24] In Shulman's account, Gavin Lambert wrote an anonymous "sardonic knifing of all of Fleet Street's working theatre critics but was particularly derisive about the 'merciless volubility' of Beverley Baxter", published in an undergraduate magazine Panorama edited by Kenneth Tynan.

"[25][24] Tynan responded with an open letter to the Standard, published 22 May 1951, declaring that his performance was "not 'quite dreadful'; it is, in fact, only slightly less than mediocre": in July Beaverbrook appointed him as replacement for Baxter as the paper's theatre critic.

He slammed the 1953 performance of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana, suggesting that Edward German's light opera Merrie England would have been more suitable for Elizabeth II's coronation.

[30] His maiden speech in December 1935 argued that the problems of depressed areas in Britain could be alleviated by encouraging emigration to the other countries of the British Empire.

On 10 March 1940, Baxter published a piece in the Sunday Graphic, criticising Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. who was US ambassador to the United Kingdom, for a lack of advocacy encouraging Americans to enter the war.

[7] Baxter's reaction was recorded in the diary of Henry Channon, for 12 June 1940: "Beaverbrook himself is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who has finally married the Mayor!

[38] He opposed European integration, and in 1948 was one of eight Conservatives to vote against Marshall Aid (with Max Aitken, Eric Gandar Dower, Harry Legge-Bourke, Anthony Marlowe, Arthur Marsden and Sir John Mellor).

Unwilling to exploit the political advantage himself, he asked Victor Raikes, a Tory MP hostile to the Labour government, to raise the matter in the House of Commons.

Raikes put down a Private Notice Question, referring to the accurate prediction in Carvel's paper the Star of budget measures.

In early January 1923, he had made a last-minute effort to save the life of Edith Thompson, who had been sentenced to death for murder, in what he believed was a miscarriage of justice.

In his memoirs Strange Street, he provided an account of the events, concluding that "on an appointed day we shall rub our eyes and believe that it could only have been in a nightmare that judicial killing was ever countenanced by a supposedly civilised people".

After Churchill returned to power in 1951, Baxter condemned the Foreign Office under the previous Labour government for having been "like a branch of the State Department".

He continued to support the abolition of capital punishment and acted as a sponsor of Bills to that effect brought in by the Labour MP Sydney Silverman, and spent a great deal of the late 1950s campaigning for a reduction in theatre tax.