Michael Bentley on Lloyd George
Lloyd George: Twelve Essays edited by A. J. P. Taylor (Hamish Hamilton £3.75) Accurate appraisal of Lloyd George has usually been confounded by the existence of two conflicting difficulties: the bewildering entwinement of man with myth and the un- availability of any solid body of evidence to aid those who seek to separate them. The first condition is probably an act of God destined to endure for ever. The second largely ceased to exist with the opening in 1967 of the Beaverbrook Library in St Bride Street, London. Housed there is the entire collection of Lloyd George papers purchased by Lord Beaverbrook in 1951, superbly catalogued and freely available to researchers. Just how much this availability might enrich the study of Lloyd George is now made clear by the publication, under the editorship of Mr A. J. P. Taylor, the Honorary Director, of an important collec- tion of twelve essays by young historians Who have recently made use of the archive.
Any compilation of essays tends to suffer from unevenness of quality; this is no excep- tion. Inclusion in the volume, Mr Taylor explains, was 'determined by the chance Whether a paper was available'. Chance seems to have brought about a bias in fav- our of domestic politics (perhaps to be remedied in a subsequent volume) and a rather unsightly hole between leaving Lloyd George nursing electoral disaster in 1924 and picking him up again in Appeasement days. Yet most of the essays are thoroughly signi- ficant contributions. Lloyd George's not-so- Radical position on foreign policy before 1914 is clearly revealed by Mr Dockrill; Dr Cook puts a welcome kink in the sine curves of the determinists in his study of 1923-4; Messrs Aster and Addison make important incursions into the often ignored final years. In his cleanly, persuasive prose, Dr Kenneth Morgan offers a defence of the Coalition Liberals. The real value of the collection as a whole, however, lies in the degree to which unpublished sources have been used to re- view traditional interpretations. No one, after all, really knows what Lloyd George looked like in the sunlight; everlasting bio- graphies, acid and pious, have pulled the Clouds across or held them back only by such herculean effort as to make the light unnatural.
What 'revisionism' will achieve will depend on the degree of intelligence with which it is carried out. Facile attempts to assimilate Lloyd George's intentions to his rhetoric Will get the fate they deserve. Even if he did not want to oust Asquith in 1916, even if he Was still 'a Liberal pure and simple' after doing so, Lloyd George possessed a greater fund of political deviousness than any two of his contemporaries. The fact can be accepted without the throwing-up of hands practised by horrified Asquithians steeped in the bad wine that comes from sour grapes. Moral squeamishness is irrelevant to histori- cal explanation. So, it must be said, is much Of the searching for 'Lloyd George the Man', Which produces little more than antiquarian trivia or bizarre accounts of sexual and filial relationships. Lloyd George's personality be- comes important only where it casts some light on the actions of the compound of 'Wesley and Rousseau' who came to West- minster in 1890.
Lloyd George's was a mind that was abra-
sively masculine, constantly tetchy, ulti- mately philistine. It was born in Wales and stayed ineradicably Welsh with a 'curious element of brutality' which Smuts noticed. With his homeland Lloyd George established possibly the only metaphysical relationship of his life; he was Wales not merely at the level of the household word but at the ethical level of the bedtime story. (If you wanted Sunday crossed out', asked the young Emlyn Williams, 'who would you write to?' Lloyd George. Now off with your singlet.') Except among the Welsh, however—and Dr Cook shows that even they were courting heresy by the 1920s—Lloyd George never amassed a coherent body of electoral support. Al- though as Prime Minister he was weak in terms of House of Commons support, he persisted in neglecting the vital work in the constituencies. He was content to rely on the swirling rhetoric of the impassioned preacher addressing a moralised ccllectivity, 'the people'. Throughout his career Lloyd George retained his instinctive genius for swaying a crowd with the spoken word and the power of presence. But during his years of greatest political significance, say 1908 to 1931, he thought, as any great politician must, of the palace as much as the cottage. When Laski described Lloyd George as 'Machiavelli's Prince turned bourgeois solici- tor' he stood the process on its head. The 'top' of politics was the arena in which Lloyd George worked and calculated while demos offered the chance to use first-class rhetoric on a second-order problem.
Near the end of the first world war Foch sent Lloyd George a signed photograph with the inscription: To Prime Minister Lloyd George who banished the clouds from a very stormy sky.' For the war years this is reason- able comment but it is as well to remember Lloyd George's more usual role as witch- doctor creating his own clouds. The image of the Welsh Radical thwarted in his schemes of reform by the tempests of fate was his own invention and simply will not do. Storms there were; but often they were merely tem- pestuous teacups thrown on Lloyd George's own wheel. (This is more than tawdry cynicism. Lloyd George must be studied in his own terms; at naIvetd his spirit will giggle as it always did.) Granted that assumption, the new thinking about Lloyd George might reveal a sad syn- drome of which he himself was all too con- scious. Everything he said, and some of the things he did, suggest that Lloyd George wanted to be not so much a politician as a statesman. Action, vitality, the practice of doing the job—these seem to have been at the root of his political aspiration. The most fermented Asquithian would not argue that he wanted the trappings and regalia of office. 'I did not want to be Prime Minister', he told Lord Riddell in 1918, 'I only wanted to run the war.' No conflict between these objectives occurred to a mind that never associated ulti- mate power with its traditional accoutre- ments. Party labels he treated as public conveniences: they were at best a vital flavouring for the rhetorical recipe, at worst petty bric-i-brac which obscured the talk of higher things. When Lloyd George talked of higher things he talked about energy, effi- ciency and reconstruction, with democracy a poor fourth. He wanted always to be at the vortex where political currents con- verged; all he demanded of his colleagues was ability and conviviality of power sufficient to need neither. He loved coalitions. He hated traditions. He did not understand eco- nomics; and he thought himself the better for his ignorance.
His 'genius for statesmanship' had no real opportunity to flourish until his arrival at Downing Street in December 1916. From that date till his fall in October 1922, Lloyd George established a personal command of the premiership to a degree which has never been seen since. He never held office again. Between 1922 and his death in 1945 he was a statesman waiting for, or scheming to induce, the call to lead coalitions—against Labour in 1925, against Conservatism in 1926 and against disaster in 1931. In retrospect, he seems to have been what he wanted to be. He has been credited with the founding of the welfare state, with winning the First World War, with tempering the more savage elements at Versailles, with settling the Irish question and, despite being blinded by the charisma of Hitler, with perceiving the im- portance of involving the Soviet Union in European diplomacy in the 1930s.
The other half of the syndrome is sug- gested by the direction of the applause. For it is from the historians that Lloyd George gains most of his credits for statesmanship and not, save for a few sycophants, from his contemporaries. Most of his own party and almost everyone else saw in Lloyd George 'a long-haired political neurotic'— unprincipled, untrustworthy, forever machin- ating. Where a Liberal statesman should have combined the qualities of Gladstone, Bright and Campbell-Bannerman (as well as resembling Sir Edward Grey—a statesman almost universally trusted among the 'saner' and more 'decent' elements in political life) Lloyd George was a man 'constitutionally in- capable of understanding that straightfor- wardness is essential and "cleverness" fatal to success in the long run'. About the long run Lloyd George thought little—a fact which is as patent as it was defensible, given the con- text in which he was often obliged to operate. But it was with clear and moral displeasure that even H. A. L. Fisher, a Liberal Minister and a great admirer, described his domestic and foreign policy as 'a series of deals'.
This sort of mud first stuck and then dried hard. Chipping away the crust, a task pio- neered by Messrs Morgan and Hazlehurst, is a process that will be hastened by this collection of essays. What it suggests is that Lloyd George stands in great danger of being revealed as a man of this world who always played the game and who, unlike his weaker colleagues, usually made sure that he won.
Michael Bentley is writing about the his- tory of Liberalism between 1914 and 1929
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