Churchill accused Hoare of having, with the aid of the Earl of Derby, breached parliamentary privilege by improperly influencing the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to drop its opposition.

On 13 June 1934, Leo Amery spoke, arguing that Churchill's true aim was to bring down the government under the cover of the doctrine fiat justicia ruat caelum ("may justice be done, though the heavens fall").

Hoare had to answer 15,000 questions and make 600 speeches and completely dominated the committee stage of the bill, just as he had during the Round Table Conferences, by his mastery of detail and his skill at dealing tactfully with deputations.

[36] Butler, who, as Under-Secretary, had helped to steer the bill through the Commons, later wrote of Hoare that he saw life as "a chapter in a great Napoleonic biography" and added "I was amazed by his ambition; I admired his imagination; I shared his ideals; I stood in awe of his intellectual capacity.

[31] Hoare expressed much distrust of the Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov, who under the guise of collective security via the League of Nations, had been attempting to build up a bloc against aggression.

[31] On 19 June 1935, Hoare suggested to the cabinet in a prototype of the Hoare-Laval pact that the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie be offered the port city of Zeila in the colony of British Somaliland (modern northern Somalia) in exchange for him ceding most of his empire to Italy.

For purely self-interested reasons, Baldwin-a prime minister not noted for his interest in foreign affairs-decided to make support for the League of Nations and its policy of collective security the centerpiece of the coming general election.

[32] The Labour Party had a platform that somewhat contradictorily called for both disarmament and support for collective security, and Baldwin intended to win the general election by quite ruthlessly exposing that contradiction.

Hence as the Abyssinia crisis gathered steam, both Baldwin and Hoare gave speeches stressing that Britain was committed to a policy of collective security via the League of Nations up to and including war.

[47] Hoare was gratified that Laval was not committed to an all-out anti-German foreign policy, and he wanted an alliance with Italy to improve France's bargaining power in his talks with Adolf Hitler for a Franco-German settlement.

[48] In the House of Commons, Hugh Dalton, the Labour shadow foreign secretary, called the Hoare-Laval Pact an attempt to "reward the declared aggressor at the expense of the victim, destroy collective security and conflict with the expressed will of the country and the Covenant".

[42] Faced with massive criticism both outside Parliament and from within as a group of Conservative backbenchers led by Austen Chamberlain denounced the Hoare-Laval Pact, Baldwin decided to sacrifice Hoare.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, wrote to Lady Hoare to assure her that her husband would soon back into the cabinet and "in a short time his reputation will begin to rise again".

[45] Dutton wrote that much of the anger and abuse directed at Hoare was because of the contrast between a Foreign Secretary who promised to stop aggression in his speech in September 1935 versus the plan he devised with Laval in December 1935.

[53] Hoare tended to share Chatfield's dislike of the Spanish Republic, writing: "For the present it seems clear that we should continue our existing policy of neutrality-When I speak of 'neutrality' I mean strict neutrality, that is to say a situation in which the Russians neither officially nor unofficially give help to the Communists.

[57] Hoare engaged in a thought experiment, asking what happen if Japan went to war and there was no British fleet in Singapore, leading him to answer his question that the result would be a Japanese invasion of Australia backed by the "full strength of her naval and her naval air forces",[58] Hoare went on to say: "I am convinced that, if this act of aggression took place, no Army and no Air Force which the Commonwealth of Australia could conceivably maintain could save her from invasion and defeat at the hands of the Japanese.

[59] The French ambassador Charles Corbin stated in his reports to Paris that British politics in the late 1930s were dominated by a "big four" that consisted of Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Sir John Simon and Hoare, whom he described as being the most powerful men in the cabinet and all of whom he clearly disliked.

In late October 1938, Hoare made an extended trip to the English countryside with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador, for informal talks about an Anglo-German settlement.

These five men, working together in Europe and blessed in their efforts by the President of the United States of America, might make themselves eternal benefactors of the human race.In a speech given on 10 March 1939 to his local Conservative constituency association in his seat in Chelsea, Hoare predicated a coming "golden age" as he foresaw a bright future full of peace and prosperity for all about to dawn.

[51] In 1939, Hoare almost carried the most comprehensive Criminal Justice Reform Bill in British history: he had intended to abolish corporal punishment in prisons and had been keen to work towards the abolition of the death penalty of whose risks he was very aware.

[70] During the Danzig crisis, Hoare spoke several times in the cabinet about the advantages of having the Soviet Union join a "peace front" meant to deter Germany from invading Poland.

[51] In cabinet debates Hoare along with Halifax, Chatfield (now serving as minister for the co-ordination of defence) and the War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha favoured broadening the "peace front" to include the Soviet Union as all expressed serious doubts about the ability of Poland to stand alone against Germany in opposition to Chamberlain and Simon.

[73] In addition, the Chiefs of Staff stated that the submarines of the Soviet Baltic fleet could cut the shipping lanes that linked Sweden to Germany and in this way supplied the Reich with the high-grade iron used to make steel in the blast furnaces of the Ruhr.

[74] The Chiefs of Staff predicated if war broke out in Europe, it was almost certain that Japan would try to take advantage of the conflict to seize Britain's Asian colonies and the Japanese would almost certainly invade Australia if they took Singapore.

On 5 April 1940, Hoare briefly returned to the Air Ministry, swapping places with Sir Kingsley Wood, and later that month came under fire during the Norway Debate which brought down the Chamberlain government.

[48] The decision to appoint Hoare as ambassador to Spain was widely seen as an insult, likened by Dutton to being "made a manager of a Siberian power station" (the demeaning job given to former Soviet leader Georgy Malenkov in the late 1950s).

His fluent memoir of the period, Ambassador on Special Mission, is an excellent insight into the day-to-day life of a demanding diplomatic job, his primary challenges being to dissuade Franco from his preferred drift to the Axis powers and to prevent the Allies from reacting with undue haste to repeated Spanish provocations.

Hoare's memoir is not completely frank about his deployment of an array of bluff, leaks, bribery and subterfuge to disrupt unfriendly elements in Franco's regime and the operations of the German embassy, but those methods were remembered fondly by his team.

[83] In addition to those awarded for his services in the First World War, he held the following foreign honours:[8] He died aged 79 of a heart attack, at his home, 12a Eaton Mansions, Chelsea, London, on 7 May 1959.

The Apple TV streaming miniseries The New Look also depicts Hoare's time in Spain, featuring him meeting Coco Chanel during the latter's attempt to serve as an intermediary between Germany and the United Kingdom.