During his visit to Nazi Germany he nearly secured an interview with Adolf Hitler before admitting to the Foreign Press Bureau chief Ernst Hanfstaengl that he was an MP for the Liberal Party led by the British Jewish politician Sir Herbert Samuel.

It may also have been connected with the tragic death of his mother Lillian, who, after a long period of depressive illness and voluntary residence in nursing homes, was found dead in the River Thames just before Christmas 1935.

[10] (A coroner's inquest recorded an open verdict on Mrs Bernays, but suicide must have been suspected, at a time when the stigma attached to it could still be seriously damaging to any relative of the victim who was a public figure in Britain.)

[11] When Neville Chamberlain replaced Stanley Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937, Bernays was appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health in the National Government, serving under Sir Kingsley Wood.

)[15] He was also, especially after their ten-week trip to East Africa Protectorate in early 1937 as members of a governmental commission on colonial education, a very close friend of the writer and National Labour MP Harold Nicolson, in whose celebrated diaries he is frequently mentioned.

This, along with remarks in Bernays's own diaries and letters (such as "I suppose that what I really want in a woman is that kind of mental affinity which I get from someone like H[arold] N[icolson]" and "he is very fond of me as I am of him",[16] has led to suggestions that they were actually involved in a discreet homosexual relationship.

[21] After he died in a plane crash in the Adriatic Sea in January 1945, while flying from Italy to Greece as part of a parliamentary delegation to visit British troops, no by-election was called, and the Bristol North seat remained vacant until the 1945 general election, when it was won by the Labour candidate William Coldrick.