Nowadays he is best remembered for the remarks he made in the House of Commons on 7 May 1940 during the Norway Debate, attacking the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, for incompetence in the fight against Hitler's Germany.

Many of Amery's Parliamentary contemporaries pointed to this speech as one of the key drivers in the division of the House on the following day, 8 May, which led to Chamberlain being forced to resign and his replacement by Winston Churchill.

[2] His mother Elisabeth Johanna Saphir (c. 1841–1908),[3] who was the sister of the orientalist Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner,[4] had come to India from England, where her parents had settled and converted to Protestantism.

[2] Winston Churchill (born December 1874) was junior to him at Harrow, and on one occasion mistook Amery, who was very short in stature, for a younger boy and pushed him into Ducker, the school outdoor swimming pool.

[2] Standing as a Liberal Unionist (a party, whose strength was by this time concentrated in and around the City of Birmingham and who were in an electoral alliance with the Conservatives) Amery narrowly failed to win the 1908 Wolverhampton East by-election, by eight votes.

Later, working for the war cabinet secretariat in Lloyd George's coalition government, Amery was vested with parliamentary under-secretary like powers, and at the request of Lord Milner, he redrafted the Balfour Declaration.

[13] Amery argued that German attempts to dominate Europe along with the Middle East were intended to serve as the basis to make the Reich the world's number one power.

[15] Amery expressed much concern about the possible defeat of Russia under the Provisional Government which had taken over after the ousting of the Tsar in the February Revolution (March 1917 by the western calendar), writing that German control of Eastern Europe would be a major step towards allowing Germany to achieve "world power status".

[17] Amery was commissioned by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to write a declaration promising the support of H.M. Government for Zionism while also taking into account the objections of the anti-Zionists in the cabinet such as Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu.

[33] A number of former and current Colonial Office officials such as Frederick Lugard and Ormsby-Gore opposed the proposed Dominion as they preferred, as a cost-saving measure, "indirect rule" via traditional African elites.

Amery carried out a policy of "constructive Zionism": building infrastructure such as paved roads, public sanitation and a hydroelectric grid, intended to encourage Jewish immigration.

On 5 February 1936, Amery was involved in a heated debate on the floor of the House of Commons with the former prime minister David Lloyd George who suggested that Britain and the Dominions return the former German colonies, saying that it was crucial for the peace of the world.

[42] Amery attacked Lloyd George, saying that the Reich lost its colonies as a result of a war that it had caused in 1914, and if Germany needed an "economic zone" to dominate, it should look to the "great markets of Central Europe", not Africa.

[42] At a conference of the Conservative and Unionist Party's local constituency associations in June 1936, Amery spoke very strongly against returning any of the German colonies currently held as League of Nations mandates by Great Britain or the Dominions.

[45] During the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, Amery moved away somewhat from his anti-Soviet views as he stated it was a "fundamental mistake" by Chamberlain to treat the Soviet offer of help for Czechoslovakia as a joke, saying that it was a major blunder by the prime minister "to refuse take Russia into his confidence".

[49] In 1939, Amery joined Churchill, Lloyd George, Harold Macmillan, Brendan Bracken, Victor Cazalet and most of the Labour Party in voting against the White Paper introduced by the Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald that sharply limited Jewish immigration to the Palestine Mandate.

[52] After a string of military and naval disasters had been announced, Amery attacked Chamberlain's government in a devastating speech, finishing by quoting Oliver Cromwell's words dismissing the Rump Parliament: "You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing.

[60] Later in February 1942, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek and his charismatic English-speaking wife Soong Mei-ling visited India on a well received visit, offering the message that the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere was a sham and warning starkly that the when Japan invaded India the Imperial Japanese Army would treat the Indian people just as badly as it had treated the Chinese, repeating atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking.

In March 1942, the cabinet dispatched Stafford Cripps, a prominent left-wing politician (currently expelled from the Labour Party), on a mission to India to offer Dominion status for India after the war in exchange for Indian support for the British war effort, but with the additional condition that Britain would concede the demand of Muhammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League for a separate nation for Indian Muslims to be called Pakistan.

[68] For their part, Amery along with other British officials, believed that Gandhi was extremely naïve in thinking that peaceful "soul force" would be all that would be needed to stop the Japanese invasion, the apparently imminent.

[74] Much to Amery's relief, the Indian Army, which was called out as an aid to civil power as the police forces were overwhelmed by the Quit India protests, stayed loyal to the Raj.

[87] In 1944, the British cabinet learned of an unusual offer from the Reichsfūhrer SS, Heinrich Himmler, that he was willing to suspend the deportation of the Jews of Hungary to the Auschwitz death camp in exchange for 10,000 lorries for the Wehrmacht to be used on the Eastern Front.

Amery told the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann about the "monstrous German blackmailing offer to release a million Jews in return for ten thousand lorries and other equipment, failing which bargain they proposed to exterminate them".

[93] Amery himself advanced a similar plan thought he felt Wavell's efforts along these lines were too crude and blunt reflecting his background as a soldier and that he as a politician he was better suited for this task.

[95] Amery often wrote in his diary that Churchill's belief that no political solution was possible nor desirable and that the Indians could simply be repressed into being docile subjects of the Raj was as impractical as it was amoral.

[97] Amery intended his memo to be a parody meant to show how impractical Churchill's views were as the immense number of policemen and soldiers that would be needed to enforce permanent martial law in India would seriously strain the British budget at a time when Britain was financially dependent on the United States while the suggestion of the "excellent Russian precedent" was meant to show that Churchill would have to use methods similar to Joseph Stalin's in the Soviet Union to achieve his vision of India as a permanent British colony.

[98] As late as 1947 in a letter to Churchill just after Attlee announced the end of the Raj Amery expressed the viewpoint that "we can only hope, that somehow or other, the Britannic orbit will remain a reality in this parlous world even if, to assume the worst, Indian politicians are unwise enough to break the formal link".

He also supported the gradual evolution of the colonies, particularly India, to the same status, unlike Churchill, a free trader, who was less interested in the Empire as such and more in Britain itself as a great power [citation needed] .

Amery's hopes were partially vindicated when the Attlee government, under intense American pressure, insisted upon the continuation of Imperial/Commonwealth Preference but conceded its more limited scope and promised against further expansion.

[100][101] The playwright Ronald Harwood, who explored the relationship between Leo and John Amery in his play An English Tragedy (2008), considered it significant to the son's story that the father had apparently concealed his partly-Jewish ancestry.