 When Neville Chamberlain replaced Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, Bernays was appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health in the National Government, serving under Sir Kingsley Wood.Wood was succeeded, upon being appointed Secretary of State for Air in May 1938, by Bernays's old friend and occasional political patron Walter Elliot.Personal loyalty to Elliot (the two had remained friendly even after Elliot, in 1934, had married Katharine Tennant, whom Bernays himself had courted in the early 1930s) may have helped to keep Bernays in his job after the Munich crisis that autumn, when Harold Nicolson and many of Bernays's other friends and associates thought he should have followed through on his earlier threats to resign because of the government's policy of appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis.