was distracting Roosevelt from concentrating on the war effort. For his part Roosevelt seems to have enjoyed the distraction. Later life Beaverbrook devoted himself to Churchill's 1945 general election campaign, but a Daily Express headline warning that a Labour victory would amount to the 'Gestapo in Britain' (adapted from a passage in a radio election speech by Churchill on 4 June) was a huge mistake and completely misjudged the public mood. Beaverbrook renounced his British citizenship and left the Conservative Party in 1951, but remained an Empire loyalist throughout his life. In 1947, Beaverbrook was vehemently opposed to the plans to end the Raj with the colony of India to be granted independence and partitioned into the new nations of India and Pakistan. Through the decision to end the Raj was taken by the Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, Beaverbrook directed his ire against the last Viceroy, Admiral Louis Mountbatten, who Beaverbrook believed could have somehow defied the government and not granted independence if he had wanted to. In a leader, the Daily Express wrote that "in all the world we have few more dangerous enemies" than Mountbatten and Jawaharlal Nehru. Beaverbrook never forgave Mountbatten and for the rest of his life used the Daily Express to blacken his reputation and always presented Mountbatten in the worse possible light. Beaverbrook took a typically idiosyncratic line with regard to the Cold War, holding out hopes in the editorial line of the Daily Express until 1948 that the wartime "Big Three" alliance of the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom should continue after the war. 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 continue to hold out hopes that the Cold War would not be permanent and it might be possible to revive the "Big Three" alliance. 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. The nature of Burchett's "Russian Window" reports about life behind the Iron Curtain such as his claims that there was a surplus of luxury goods on sale in shops in Moscow led to accusations that he was engaged in propaganda for the Soviet Union, a nation that Burchett clearly admired. When Beaverbrook asked the editor