William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook PC, ONB (25 May 1879 – 9 June 1964), was a Canadian-British newspaper publisher and backstage politician who was an influential figure in British media and politics of the first half of the 20th century.

Beaverbrook supported the governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain throughout the 1930s and was persuaded by another long-standing political friend, Winston Churchill, to serve as his Minister of Aircraft Production from May 1940.

Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social and ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States.

[24] Beaverbrook purchased The Vineyard, Fulham, a "tiny Tudor house in Hurlingham Road" where ... "far from the centre of London I was relieved of casual callers and comparatively free of long-winded visitors.

"[25] Powerful friends and acquaintances such as Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill, Frederick Edwin Smith, Philip Sassoon, Diana and Duff Cooper, Balfour and Tim Healy were guests at both Cherkley and the Vineyard.

[27] He was disliked by his employees as a demanding boss who had telephones installed in every room of his house so that he could always call his newspapers editors to give his orders about what story was interesting him at the moment without having to wait.

[29] For example, on 6 September 1919, Beaverbrook ran on the front page of The Daily Express a banner headline, "ARCHANGEL SCANDAL EXPOSED: FAMOUS VC APPEALS TO THE NATION" above an article attacking the intervention as pointless and singled Churchill as the author of an expedition that had gone horribly wrong.

In the 1924 election, he used the Daily Express to associate the Labour Party with the Soviet Union, writing in a leader: "We are not fighting Mr. Ramsay MacDonald in his saner moments, but the Russian Bolshevists and the shade of Lenin."

[41] In 1925, Beaverbrook via the Daily Express was strongly opposed to the Treaty of Locarno under which Britain "guaranteed" the current borders of France, Belgium, and Germany along with the permanent demilitarized status of the Rhineland as involvement in European conflicts where no British interests were at stake.

In February 1931, Empire Free Trade lost the Islington East by-election and by splitting the vote with the Conservatives allowed Labour to hold a seat they had been expected to lose.

[6][48] On 17 March 1931, during the St George's Westminster by-election, Stanley Baldwin described the media barons who owned British newspapers as having "Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

[53] During the crisis caused by the Italian aggression against Ethiopia, Beaverbrook was opposed to the policy of imposing sanctions on Italy under the banner of the League of Nations as he argued that the Italo-Ethiopian war did not concern Britain.

[55] Beaverbrook maintained good relations with Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, writing to him in 1936 about his "...friendly attitude towards your Great Leader" and he was "determined that nothing shall be said or done by any newspaper controlled by me which is likely to disturb your tenure in office".

[57] In 1936, at the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the new German ambassador to the Court of St. James, Beaverbrook attended the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but quickly became bored with the Third Reich and soon returned to Britain.

Beaverbrook himself gave evidence before the inquiry and vehemently denied the allegations; Express Newspapers general manager E. J. Robertson denied that Robeson had been blacklisted, but did admit that Coward had been "boycotted" because he had enraged Beaverbrook with his film In Which We Serve, for in the opening sequence Coward included an ironic shot showing a copy of the Daily Express floating in the dockside rubbish bearing the headline "No War This Year".

[57] Beaverbrook told Maisky: "I want the empire to remain intact, but I don't understand why for the sake of this we must wage a three-year war to crush "Hitlerism"...Poland, Czechoslovakia?

[69] Churchill's viewpoint that if France were occupied, it would shorten the flying time of the Luftwaffe to bomb Britain from hours to minutes and allow the Kriegsmarine to use the French Atlantic ports to attack shipping in the Western Approaches made no impression on Beaverbrook.

He increased production targets by 15% across the board, took control of aircraft repairs and RAF storage units, replaced the management of plants that were underperforming, and released German Jewish engineers from internment to work in the factories.

[73] The Royal Marine General Leslie Hollis who worked as the Senior Assistant Secretary to the War Cabinet recalled in an interview: "For all Beaverbrook's tremendous achievement in producing aeroplanes, there was little to praise in the way he rode roughshod over everyone.

"[76] Beaverbrook increasingly came into conflict with Ernest Bevin over a number of issues such as whose ministry would be responsible for safety training in aircraft factories, and the two ministers spent much time feuding.

[14][81] Beaverbrook was one of the few close associates to Churchill to be present at his meetings with President Roosevelt on board HMS Prince of Wales and USS Augusta in the North Atlantic off the coast of Newfoundland over the period from 9 to 12 August 1941.

"[citation needed] In addition to his ministerial roles, Beaverbrook headed the Anglo-American Combined Raw Materials Board from 1942 to 1945 and accompanied Churchill to several wartime meetings with President Roosevelt.

[87] It was only after the Berlin blockade began in 1948 that Beaverbrook had the Daily Express take an anti-Soviet line, but even then he continued to hold out hopes that the Cold War would not be permanent and it might be possible to revive the "Big Three" alliance.

[87] Beaverbrook had Wilfred Burchett, an Australian journalist of extreme left-wing views based in East Berlin to run a column in The Daily Express entitled "The Russian Window" starting in October 1948.

[88] When Beaverbrook asked the editor of the Daily Express, Arthur Christiansen about Burchett after reading several of his "Russian Window" columns, he was told: "He is, I think, a fellow traveler, but nevertheless an able chap".

[88] Even after the "Russian Window" column was terminated, Burchett continued to work as a free-lancer for The Daily Express based in Budapest, where he denied in one article that Cardinal József Mindszenty had confessed at his show trial under the influence of "truth drugs".

Ascherson noted: "His life became a progress like a medieval king's, cruising on Atlantic liners and luxurious yachts with a great retinue of servants, cronies, henchmen, useful politicians and pretty women.

[109] When The Decline and Fall of Lloyd George was published in 1963, favourable reviewers included Clement Attlee, Roy Jenkins, Robert Blake, Lord Longford, Sir C. P. Snow, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, Richard Crossman and Denis Brogan.

[113] He had recently attended a birthday banquet organized by fellow Canadian press baron, Lord Thomson of Fleet, where he was determined to be seen on his usual good form, despite suffering from cancer.

"[citation needed] Beaverbrook was one of eight notable Britons cited in Bjørge Lillelien's famous "Your boys took a hell of a beating" commentary at the end of an English football team defeat to Norway in 1981, mentioned alongside British Prime Ministers Churchill, Thatcher and Attlee.