to seek an Anglo-Soviet alliance in May 1939, contrary to Chamberlain's and Butler's wishes, but Butler and Horace Wilson persuaded Chamberlain to hamstring the search for an agreement by including a requirement that Britain would not fight without League of Nations approval. Throughout the summer of 1939 Butler continued to lobby for closer Anglo-German relations and for Britain to lean on Poland to reach agreement with Germany. After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was announced on 23 August 1939, Butler advised against Britain honouring its guarantee to defend Poland against Germany but instead favoured Hitler's proposal to allow Germany to settle matters with Poland as it wished and, in return for concessions over her former colonies, to sign an Anglo-German alliance. Oliver Harvey recorded (27 August) that Butler and Horace Wilson were "working like beavers" for "another Munich", but the government eventually agreed to honour the guarantee to Poland. As late as early September 1939, with German invasion of Poland imminent, comments in Channon's diary suggest that Butler was sympathetic to last-minute Italian efforts to broker peace and that he and Butler were heartened by a delay in the British declaration of war on Germany. In fact, however, the delay in the issuing of the British ultimatum was caused by the lack of agreement with the French over timing. Foreign Office Minister: later views and Butler's memoirs Butler's close association with appeasement was often held against him later in his career. Although he later held many senior Cabinet positions, by the time of Suez in 1956, his past, coupled with his lack of personal military experience, damaged his reputation in the eyes of the younger generation of Conservative MPs, many of whom were Second World War veterans. At the time, Butler strongly supported reaching agreement with Hitler as necessary for peace, but in his memoirs, The Art of the Possible (1971), he defended the Munich Agreement as essential to buy time to rearm and gain public support for war in Britain and the Dominions, and he also claimed that he had little input into the direction of foreign policy. Later commentators argue that the suggestion given in his memoirs that Butler supported Halifax in leading the drive away from appeasement after Prague is "wholly false". His own papers suggest that he went to "greater lengths to meet Hitler's demands than any other figure in the British government" in 1939. His efforts to