While in Europe, he demonstrated an early interest in social democracy and met with a range of left-wing figures, including Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, and Alexandre Millerand.

[1] An anti-Semite and a Germanophobe, in an editorial conference of The Times on 31 July 1914, Steed labelled efforts to stop the impending war as "a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality".

The British Ambassador to Italy claimed in a diplomatic dispatch that Steed's fondness for the Yugoslav concept derived from a relationship that he maintained for a number of years "filially I believe rather maritally" with a Slavic woman from the Balkans.

[4] In 1920, Steed endorsed as genuine a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, writing in an editorial in The Times in which he blamed the Jews for World War I and the Bolshevik regime and called them the greatest threat to the British Empire.

[6] The British government was sufficiently alarmed to start stockpiling vaccines[7] although a retrospective analysis by the epidemiologist Martin Hugh-Jones has suggested that Steed's evidence could not have amounted to much.

Steed, played by actor Andrew Keir, appears in the 1974 miniseries Fall of Eagles, bringing a rumour of the impending Bosnian crisis to the attention of King Edward VII, Georges Clemenceau, and Alexander Izvolsky.