Sir Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook, secara lengkap Sir William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook dari Beaverbrook dan dari Cherkley, 1st Baronet, (lahir 25 Mei 1879, Maple, Ont., Can. — meninggal 9 Jun 1964, berhampiran Leatherhead, Surrey, Eng.), Pemodal di Kanada, ahli politik dan pemilik surat khabar di Great Britain, salah satu dari tiga orang (yang lain adalah Winston Churchill dan John Simon) untuk duduk di kabinet Britain semasa kedua-dua Perang Dunia. Seorang wartawan yang idiosinkratik dan berjaya, dia tidak pernah sepenuhnya mencapai kekuatan politik yang dicarinya.
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Sebagai broker saham di Montreal, Aitken memperoleh banyak kekayaan dengan menggabungkan seluruh industri simen Kanada. Dia kemudian pindah ke England dan terpilih ke Dewan Rakyat pada tahun 1910. Sebagai setiausaha peribadi Andrew Bonar Law (juga kelahiran Kanada), dia membantunya memenangkan kepemimpinan Parti Konservatif pada tahun 1911. Dia juga bekerja dengan Undang-undang untuk menyingkirkan Liberal HH Asquith sebagai perdana menteri yang memihak kepada Liberal David Lloyd George pada bulan Disember 1916. Pada bulan yang sama, Aitken membeli kepentingan majoriti di London Daily Express. Selepas itu, dia menubuhkan London Sunday Express dan memperoleh London Evening Standard (yang kemudian menyerap kertas Liberal yang terkenal, Pall Mall Gazette) dan Glasgow Evening Citizen.
After failing to receive government office from Lloyd George in 1916, Aitken accepted a baronetcy in that year and a peerage as Baron Beaverbrook the following year. In 1918 he served in the cabinet as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and minister of information. He aided in breaking up Lloyd George’s postwar coalition in 1922, and in 1930–31 he tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Stanley Baldwin as Conservative leader. During the 1930s he was notable as one of the “press lords” and as a leader of the United Empire Party. In 1938, after Neville Chamberlain made a peace deal with Germany, Aitken’s Express printed a headline that would haunt it for years, a lesson for journalists venturing into prediction: “Britain will not be involved in a European war this year or the next year either.” But the war did come, and Aitken became a member of Winston Churchill’s war cabinet as minister of aircraft production (1940–41) and minister of supply (1941–42). He also served as British lend-lease administrator in the United States (1942) and lord privy seal (1943–45).
In his newspapers Beaverbrook colourfully championed individual enterprise and British imperial interests. He also wrote several books about his political experiences, the most important being Politicians and the Press (1925) and Politicians and the War, 2 vol. (1928). He was caricatured in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop (1938).
