praise his conduct of government". In 1936, at the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the new German ambassador 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." In the 1930s, while personally attempting to dissuade King Edward VIII from continuing his affair with American divorcee, Wallis Simpson, Beaverbrook's newspapers published every titbit of the affair, especially allegations about pro-Nazi sympathies. Reflecting his "empire isolationism", Beaverbrook used the Daily Express to promote British neutrality as he wrote a leader which compared supporting the Spanish Republic as alike to supporting the Whites in the Russian civil war as he declared that British intervention in the Russian civil war "cost us some thousands of British soldiers' lives, £100, 000, 000 in cash, and the bitter enmity of the Russian government for the next ten years...and the intervention failed anyway. Britain had backed a loser. It is the mark of a mug to go on backing the same loser". In 1936, the Daily Express published an opinion piece by Lloyd George who just returned from meeting Hitler at the Nuremberg Party Rally in which he called der Führer "the George Washington of Germany". Beaverbrook published the piece, but told Lloyd George that he was embarrassed by it as he stated disliked "the regimentation of opinion" in Germany. In regards to the Sino-Japanese war, Beaverbrook was entirely concerned about a possible Japanese threat to the British empire and used the Daily Express to sound his fears that the Japanese might try to seize the British colonies in Asia. In a 1938 leader, Beaverbrook warned: "Too many people would be interested in checking Japan if that country really MEANT trouble against white people...The British public seem to have sensed what the British ministers have not-that Japan is dynamiting her way not only through the Chinese empire, but dangerously near other empires. Get out your map!" Along the leader was a map that showed the proximity of Japanese troops to Hong Kong. Beaverbrook supported the Munich Agreement and hoped the newly named Duke of Windsor would seek a peace deal with Germany. Testifying before a Parliamentary inquiry in 1947, former Express employee and future MP Michael Foot alleged that Beaverbrook kept a blacklist of notable public figures who were to be denied any publicity in his papers because of