The British Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain had pursued the Locarno treaty of 1925 largely to facilitate German revanchism in Eastern Europe peacefully.

Hoare was an ardent appeaser who favored a deal under which Poland would allow the Free City of Danzig to rejoin Germany while returning the Polish Corridor and Upper Silesia to the Reich.

In November 1938, Raczyński closely followed the visit of the South African defense minister Oswald Pirow who arrived in Europe with the aim of effecting a colonial deal that would lead to an Anglo-German alliance.

[7] On 9 December 1938, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax told Raczyński that he wanted to see the League of Nations end its role as the protector of the current status of the Free City of Danzig (modern Gdańsk) by 16 January 1939.

[4] Raczyński expressed concern that Chamberlain might strike a deal with Hitler under which Britain would recognise Eastern Europe as being in the German sphere of influence in exchange for the Reich renouncing its claim to its former colonies in Africa.

[14] The French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet who was visiting London told Lord Halifax that the Romanians would accept aid from the Soviet Union if Poland were also involved, a viewpoint also shared by Raczyński.

[12] But at the same time, the increasing threatening statements from the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop saying that it would be war if Poland refused to allow the Free City to "go home to the Reich" led Beck on 22 March 1939 to tell Raczyński to see if was possible to reach an agreement with the British.

[16] On 23 March 1939, Beck's chef de cabinet, Michael Łubieński, told Raczyński that the British offer of help in the Danzig crisis should be treated with caution as he believed that the "peace front" was more likely to cause a German-Polish war than stop it, and because Poland did not want any sort of alliance with the Soviet Union.

[19] On 1 April 1939, Raczyński submitted to Sir Orme Sargent of the Foreign Office a note protesting on behalf of Poland that the "guarantee" was "so worded as to give perhaps the wrong impression to those who wished to minimise its importance".

[20] Raczyński was especially concerned as the Evening Standard, a newspaper owned by the "press baron" Lord Beaverbrook pointed out in an article published on the front page on 1 April 1939 that the "guarantee" was of Polish independence, not of Poland's territorial integrity.

[21] When Raczyński complained to the diplomatic correspondent of the Evening Standard about the article, he was told it was published on the orders of Lord Beaverbrook himself, who based on information from sources in 10 Downing Street.

[24] Beck told Chamberlain and Halifax that Poland would do nothing if Germany invaded Romania and made it quite clear that he no interest in any alliance that might involve the Soviet Union under any conditions.

[32] In April 1939, Britain had finally made the "continental commitment" by agreeing to send a large expeditionary force and abandoned the "limited liability" defense doctrine.

[33] The Chiefs of Staff saw little value in Polish rearmament anyhow, putting Poland 9th on the list of states requiring British arms, behind Egypt, Iraq, Belgium, Portugal, Turkey, Greece, the Netherlands and Romania.

[36] Raczyński thought the meeting went well enough as Beaverbrook seemed understanding, but on the next day found himself the object of an attack in a front-page leader (editorial) in the Evening Standard that accused him of being an "errant ambassador" who was seeking to muzzle the freedom of the press.

[39] On behalf of Poland, he signed the Polish-British alliance[40] (25 August 1939) which ultimately led the United Kingdom to declare war on Nazi Germany after the country's invasion.

[41] At about 10: 30 am on 1 September 1939, Raczyński phoned Halifax that say Germany had invaded Poland earlier that morning and the cities of Grodno, Brest-Litovsk, Lódź, Wilno (modern Vilnus), Katowice, Kraków and Warsaw had all been bombed.

[42] During the next two days, Raczyński remained his aristocratic sang-froid and told Hugh Dalton, the Labour shadow foreign secretary, that he expected Britain to honor its commitments to Poland.

[43] In Paris, the Polish ambassador, Juliusz Łukasiewicz, had stormed into the Quai d'Orsay on the morning of 2 September to demand why France had not declared war yet, and had by all account a stormy interview with Bonnet on the subject.

[45] On the afternoon of 2 September, Raczyński handed over to the Foreign Office a note saying that the Luftwaffe was mercilessly bombing Polish cities, killing hundreds of innocent people in every raid, and it was imperative that Britain declare war.

[47] He stated he learned from Corbin that the major reason for the delay was the desire to present the Anglo-French ultimata to Germany together, leading him to ask if Britain would declare war without the French.

[52] Raczyński lobbied Lord Halifax to pressure King Carol II to assure the Poles the droit de passage, saying the continual existence of a Polish government in exile was crucial to the survival of his country.

[53] To provide the Romanians with a face-saving excuse, Raczyński devised a plan under President Ignacy Mościcki would resign in Romania and name as his successor a Pole living in France while allowing the rest of Polish government-in-exile to go to Paris.

[54] On 24 September 1939, an article by the former prime minister David Lloyd George appeared in the Beaverbrook-owned Sunday Express which stated the Soviet Union was entitled to annex most of eastern Poland under the grounds that the majority of people who lived were Belarusians, Ukrainians and Jews with Poles only being a minority.

[56] During the war, Raczyński often negotiated with Edvard Beneš, the president of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile along with Hubert Ripka and Jaromír Smutný about the future relations between Poland and Czechoslovakia.

[57] Another leader whom Raczyński was in frequent contact was Paul-Henri Spaak, the foreign minister of the Belgian government-in-exile and an advocate of a federation to be called the United States of Europe to be created after the war.

In this capacity, he provided the Allies with one of the earliest and most accurate accounts of the ongoing Holocaust ("The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", Raczyński's Note addressed to the Governments of the United Nations on 10 December 1942")[60] and pleaded for action.

[63] The British foreign secretary Anthony Eden and the permanent undersecretary Alexander Cadogan served as mediators during the tense Polish-Soviet talks which came close to breaking down several times.

[63] However, Sikorski and Raczyński were unable to secure a promise that the Soviet Union would return the areas of Poland annexed in 1939 under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Molotov saying that the frontiers established in 1939 would be the post-war Polish-Soviet border.

He was the last Polish President-in-Exile who had held an important office during the era of the 2nd Republic: his successors, Kazimierz Sabbat and Ryszard Kaczorowski were in their twenties at the outset of the Second World War.