Lloyd was the leader at the Foreign Ministers' conference in Geneva in June 1959 (with Christian Herter, Maurice Couve de Murville and Andrei Gromyko) and kept it going, allowing Eisenhower to issue his invitation to Khrushchev to visit Washington in August. Whilst the conference had been in progress a false story had appeared in ""The Times"", fanned by Randolph Churchill and to Macmillan's apparent annoyance, that Lloyd was to be moved from the Foreign Office. The conference ended on 11 August.