his resignation was forced upon him by the Labour Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson in 1929. Lloyd's views and experience formed the background of a self-justifying two-volume book, Egypt Since Cromer (published 1933–1934). Lobbying In 1930, Lloyd became president of the Navy League, which lobbied the government for to spend more money on the Royal Navy, and he was a member of the India Defence League, which lobbied the government not to grant home rule to India. During the 1930s, he was one of the most prominent opponents of proposals to grant Indian Home Rule, working alongside Winston Churchill against the National Government. From 1931 to 1935, Lloyd employed James Lees-Milne as one of his male secretaries. Lloyd was suspicious of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement, which he saw as a threat to Britain. He agitated for rearmament against Germany as early as 1930, before Churchill did so. British Council From July 1937 onward, he was chairman of the British Council in which he oversaw an increase in lectureships and made cultural tours of neutral capitals to maintain sympathy for Britain's cause during the early months of the Second World War. The council was a purportedly-independent group meant to engage in cultural propaganda promoting the British way of life to the rest of the world that was in fact under the control of the Foreign Office. As head of the British Council, Lloyd ran his own private intelligence network that employed as one his spies the journalist Ian Colvin, who served as the Berlin correspondent of The News Chronicle. Unusually, Lloyd enjoyed a privileged access to the secret reports of MI6, the British intelligence service. The British historian D.C. Watt called Lloyd "one of those uncontrollable lusi naturae the British elite throws up from time to time". In November 1937,Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden instructed Lloyd that the British Council was to concentrate especially on improving Britain's image in Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland. Regarding the Middle East, especially Egypt, as a crucial area of control for Britain, Lloyd regarded the approaches to the Near East as equally crucial, which led him to become obsessed with the Balkans, which called the "eastern approaches", independently of Eden's instructions. In April 1938, he suggested in a memo sent to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that Britain needed to become more economically involved in the Balkans, which were