Miles Wedderburn Lampson, 1st Baron Killearn, GCMG, CB, MVO, PC (24 August 1880 – 18 September 1964) was a British diplomat.

Miles Lampson was the son of Norman Lampson, and grandson of Sir Curtis Lampson, 1st Baronet. His mother was Helen, daughter of Peter Blackburn, MP for Stirlingshire. He was educated at Eton.

Lampson entered the Foreign Office in 1903. He served as Secretary to Garter Mission, Japan, in 1906, as 2nd Secretary at Tokyo, Japan, between 1908 and 1910, as 2nd Secretary at Sofia, Bulgaria in 1911, as 1st Secretary at Peking in 1916, as Acting British High Commissioner in Siberia in 1920 and as British Minister to China between 1926 and 1933.

Lampson had a low opinion of the Great Northern Expedition of 1926–1927, which saw a joint Kuomintang-Communist force marched north from Canton to defeat several coalitions of warlords before the Communists and the Kuomintang fell out after their victories and start fighting each other in a civil war that was to last on and off until 1949. About the Great Northern Expedition, Lampson wrote in a report to London: "the victories of the southern armies over their northern opponents were as much due to bribery, extortion, and other typical forms of Chinese corruption as to any real form of military superiority". Lampson personally disliked Chiang Kai-shek, but found him preferable to Mao Zedong. Initially, Lampson expressed much distrust of Chiang out of the account of his alliance with the Communists and that several Soviet officials such as Mikhail Borodin and Vasily Blyukher held prominent roles in his regime. After the outbreak of the civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang, Lampson admitted that Chiang's newly founded sense of anti-Communism seemed sincere and that a China ruled by the Kuomintang was preferable to one ruled by the Communist. On 21 July 1927, Lampson attended a reception in Beijing where all of the minister-plenipotentiaries greeted Chiang Kai-shek, which marked the beginning of international recognition of the new regime in China. Immediately after the dinner, Chiang announced that Beijing was no longer China's capital and he was moving the capital south to Nanjing. As such, all of the foreign legations along with the attached diplomatic staffs were forced to follow Chiang south to the new capital.

Shortly afterwards, Lampson hosted a dinner for Chiang, which given that China and Britain had close to war several times was seen as a sign of improved relations. An Anglo-Chinese agreement was soon reached where in exchange for diplomatic recognition, Chiang apologised for the Nanking Incident (through in his apology he blamed the Chinese Communists for the violence and merely limited his responsibility for a failure of his forces to keep order) and agreed to pay compensation to the families of the British subjects killed in Nanjing. Starting with a Sino-American agreement in 1927, the new government signed a series of treaties that won back China tariff autonomy, allowing China the power to set its own tariffs. The only nation that refused to give China tariff autonomy was Japan, which let Chiang to mark sharply that the Europeans and the Americans were most reasonable on the questions of tariffs than his fellow Asians. During his time in China, Lampson worked closely with Nelson T. Johnson, the American minister-plenipotentiary, in creating a joint front. Johnson later recalled: "The evidence of cooperation between the two countries which we able to present was very gratifying to us, for we are both committed to the feeling that the United States and Great Britain can and should be together in the work of stabilizing world conditions....So far as Great Britain's representative in China was concerned, he and I worked together very intimately and closely throughout all this difficulty...There is in England a body of conservative opinion which has and still regrets the end of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. There is no doubt in my mind that the British government had to carry water between that camp and the other camp which had been playing the game with us". Chiang Kai-shek did not speak any language other than his native Mandarin, but his third wife, the American-educated Soong Mei-ling spoke fluent English. She attempted to teach her husband English, but the lessons stopped after Chiang greeted Lampson one morning. Instead of saying 'good morning Lampson", Chiang greeted Lampson by saying "kiss me Lampson" much to Lampson's amusement. After that incident, Chiang stopped trying to speak English and let Soong serve as his translator.

On 13 May 1930, Lampson met with the British writer, journalist and adventurer Bertram Lenox Simpson to ask him not go through with his plans to seize the Customs House in Tianjin. At the time, China was in the middle of a civil war with a coalition of northern warlords led by General Feng Yuxiang, the "Christian General" and General Yan Xishan, the "Model Governor" having risen in rebellion against Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Lampson personally sympathised with the northern coalition of warlords, writing in a report to London that both Feng and Yan were more "reasonable" than Chiang. On a more cynical note, Lampson was admandently against ending the treaty ports or any of the other special British rights in China, which led to difficult relations with the Kuomintang regime, which had wanted the end of all the special rights held by foreign powers in China. As long as China did not have a government as was the case when the country collapsed into anarchy in 1916 following the death of President Yuan Shikai with various warlords fighting each other for supremacy, it could be argued that there was no Chinese government for Britain to negotiate with about ending the extraterritorial rights. After the Great Northern Expedition, the Kuomintang had established control over much of China and was internationally recognised as the government of China. As Lampson noted at the time, if the northern coalition could defeat the Kuomintang regime, it was probable that the victorious warlords would turn on each other as the warlords and China would follow into anarchy, which would thereby mean there was no Chinese government to negotiate about ending the British special rights in China. Chinese warlord politics were extremely treacherous and whenever one coalition of warlords defeated another, almost invariably the victors would follow out and start fighting each other. The Dutch historian Hans van de Ven noted that many aspects of British diplomacy during the Tianjin crisis seemed to favor the northern coalition as Lionel Giles, the British consul in Tianjin, arranged for meetings between Colonel Hayley Bell, the Customs Commissioner and General Yan's agent Su Tiren. However, Lampson wrote that"it is most undesirable that a British subject should thus thrust himself or be thrust into the forefront of this affair, especially a man of the type of Simpson". On 16 June 1930, Simpson seized the control of the Customs House in Tianjin on behalf of General Yan and appointed himself the Chief Customs Commissioner of Tianjin. Sir Frederick Maze, the Inspector-General of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, met with Lampson to ask for help in removing Simpson whose actions had caused a major crisis. Lampson was notably unwilling to do anything to help Maze, writing in his diary that he felt the crisis to be most "amusing" and took a sadistic pleasure at Maze's predicament in being trapped between Simpson serving as a rouge Chief Customs Commissioner vs. Chiang's demand that Simpson be removed at once.

Lampson welcomed the Mukden incident of 18 September 1931 which saw the Japanese Kwantung Army start the conquest of Manchuria. Under the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth in 1905, which had ended the Russian-Japanese war, Japan had been given various special rights in Manchuria, most notably the right to station the Kwantung Army in southern Manchuria. The Kwantung Army blew up a stretch of the railroad that belonged to the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad Company early on the morning of 18 September, which the Kwantung Army immediately blamed on the warlord Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" who ruled Manchuria. The incident was promptly used as a pretext for the Kwantung Army to start a general offensive against Zhang's forces later the same day. Lampson complained the Kuomintang efforts to end the British special rights had reached "the high mark in the summer of 1931", but the "fortuitous intervention of other events" as he called the invasion of Manchuria had put an end to the campaign. Lampson wrote that Japan's invasion and occupation of Manchuria gave Britain "a breathing space" as the war in Manchuria eclipsed everything else as there was massive outrage all over China at Japan's actions . In the aftermath of the conquest of Manchuria, the Chinese delegation at the League of Nations accused Japan of aggression under the grounds there was no evidence that Chinese forces had blown up the railroad tracks belong to the South Manchurian Railroad Company and even if they had, the Japanese reaction was wildly disproportionate to the alleged Chinese offense. In response, the League of Nations had appointed the Lytton Commission to examine the facts of the matter. The Lytton Commission was largely the work of the Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon, who was desperate to find some reason to not take action against Japan and he informed the commission's chairman, Lord Lytton to take his time with his work and to try to find some evidence that might support Japanese claims that the invasion of Manchuria was a defensive operation. Because of the Ten Year Rule with regards to defense spending established in 1919 that defense expenditure was to based on the assumption that there would be no major war in the next ten years, the British military was not capable of fighting a major war in 1931, which would been required as it was quite clear that the Japanese could only stopped in Manchuria via war. Moreover, the much vaulted Singapore strategy of sending the Royal Navy to its main Asian base in Singapore in the event of a war threatening in Asia was a sham in 1931 as construction started on the Singapore base in 1919 and was still not completed (the Singapore naval base was only completed in 1938). Lampson was in close contact with the Lord Lytton and in turn shared information from the commission with Johnson. Most notably, Lampson learned from Lytton that despite his best efforts he could find no evidence that supported the Japanese claims and that all the information indicated the Chinese claims of unprovoked aggression in Manchuria were true. For his part, Lampson expressed barely concealed joy at the "thrashing" the Kwantung Army gave the "unruly Chinese" as Zhang's army was defeated and driven out of Manchuria by early 1932. He tended to regard the Chinese with their endless demands to end the special rights enjoyed by foreign powers in China to be a difficult people. At the time, Lampson did not seem to see as others did, that the invasion of Manchuria was just the beginning of Japan's ambitions in Asia, and Japanese elites envisioned not just China, but all of Asia as being in their rightful sphere of influence. Most notably, the Japanese saw including the British colonies in Asia along with Australia and New Zealand as part of their sphere of influence. Lampson considered his time as a minister-plenipotentiary tp China as a success as the only concession that he had to make was giving China tariff autonomy, but the other British special rights such as extraterritoriality, control over the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, and the treaty ports were still retained when he left China.

In 1934 he was appointed High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan. In 1935 following demands from the Egyptian prime minister Mostafa el-Nahas for a new Anglo-Egyptian treaty, Lampson embarked on the talks. The increasingly aggressive claims by Italy that the entire Mediterranean and Red Sea areas were in the Italian sphere of influence led to Lampson being instructed that because of "the rise of Italy as a Mediterranean and North African Power "that the retention of a British garrison on the Suez Canal and at or in the vicinity of Alexandria is essential". Despite the apparently weaker hand of el-Nahas, the two were about equal as the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden advised Lampson: "Failure to negotiate a treaty with Egypt, followed by disturbances in that country, their suppression by British forces and the government of Egypt by His Majesty's Government by force and against the will of the Egyptian people, would be represented throughout the Arab Near East possibly as a sign of British bad faith, certainly as a proof of British imperialism pursued at the expense of a weaker Mohametan country." The threat that el-Nahas might instigate riots as he usually did when things did not go his way made the two sides about equal, through the fact that el-Nahas and the other Egyptian leaders were equally worried about Fascist Italy meant that the Egyptians wanted the British forces to stay in Egypt.