BOOKS
The great opportunist
Robert Skidelsky
Lloyd George Peter Rowland (Barrie and4 Jenkins, £8.75)
No one has yet written a good biography of Lloyd George. For this there are many reasons. Lord Beaverbrook, who might have done it, commissioned instead a sub-standard life by Frank Owen which appeared in 1954. A. J. P. Taylor, who might have done it, instead wrote a life of Lord Beaverbrook. Latterly, the huge expansion of archives has posed a daunting challenge to any would-be biographer, though John Grigg has valiantly embarked on the journey. Also it seems that Americans are not interested in Lloyd George, which makes a biography an unattractive publishing proposition: such are the crazy economics of our publishing houses these days. But these explanations do not go to the root of the matter. The trouble is that Lloyd George's career has simply become too difficult to get into focus. He is too great to be ignored, too elusive to be understood. He foreshadows the future, but doesn't really fit either into what went before him, or what came after him. He is the puzzling product of a puzzling epoch — the age of war, revolution, and empire which opened in the 1880s and closed, perhaps, in 1950.
Peter Rowland, who works with the Greater London Council, has scarcely met the challenge posed by this "life and times". What he has written is perfectly respectable and fair as far as it goes. His main strength is a firm grasp of political detail. His main weaknesses are a lack of interest in personality and context, and a truly monumental inability to see the wood for the trees. He is not helped by a wretched production, though it would doubtless have been less wretched had the book been less than 872 pages and 450,000 words. In short, the book lacks class, which is a pity as its subject has so much.
David Lloyd George was born in Llanystumdwy, in 1863. Brought up by his adoring and indulgent Uncle Lloyd he soon developed a sense of destiny, a high belief in his own capacities, a determination to succeed in law and politics, and some standard Welsh grievances against Toryism, represented by English landlords, English brewers, and the Established Church. Although these may have had personal experience behind them, the motivating force in Lloyd George's life seems to have been the very natural desire of an outstanding young man to reach the commanding position to which he felt his talents entitled him, an ambition given a radical tinge by small artisan, rural, resentments against squire and parson (rents and tithes) and a nationalist, anti-English, tinge by the fact that these feudal remnants symbolised English occupation.
In the Liberal Party his hero was Jo Chamberlain, not Gladstone: the "unauthorised programme" plus federalism (which fitted Wales) was much more appetising than Home RUle plus nothing. It is hard to tell from Rowland's account whether it was Jo's betrayal of liberalism or his own emotional identification with small nations, which led Lloyd George, as MP for Caernarvon Boroughs, to take up such a bitter, populist, muck-raking, anti-Boer War line in 1899. At any rate, the parallels with Jo Chamberlain's career are so striking that it is tempting to see both of them, for all their differences — Jo's greater vision, Lloyd George's greater charm — as politicians of the same type: politicians of situation, rather than principle or class.
No assessment of Lloyd George's political personality can proceed far without confronting the deeply ambiguous concept of opportunism. To call a politician an opportunist is to suggest someone who sacrifices principles for the sake of political gain. But to call a footballer or tennis player an opportunist is to suggest rather someone with a flair for creative responses to chances and challenges. The converse of this kind of opportunism is not principle but rigidity. To confine the meaning of opportunism to the first case alone makes little sense in our century of accelerating change and enlarging government, which have forced on politicians prodigies of adaptation and manipulation which would have shocked their mid-nineteenth century predecessors.
Lloyd George was an opportunist in the second sense, one whose fluidity of principle made him a creative politician for a period of great unrest and danger. He was a manager, not an ideologist or class warrior: a manager of genius. "The difference between ordinary and extraordinary men," he told Lord Riddell, "is that when the extraordinary man is faced by a novel and difficult situation, he extricates himself by adopting a plan which is at once daring and unexpected." And the point of the man of action is to get things done when there is danger but no consensus. At no stage in his career was Lloyd George ever at a loss for a plan, a solution, a way out, however intractable the problem appeared. His method of action was instinctive, but a certain preferred pattern emerges: the summoning of the best brains to provide policies; the appointment of executive types, mainly from business, to carry them out; and the exercise of political leadership to generate the search for solutions and mobilise the necessary consent. With this approach Lloyd George could never be a good party man. If the party situation proved no obstacle to doing what the situation needed, all well and good. But like Joseph Chamberlain, he was prepared to break up parties, if necessary, to secure the required flexibility of response.
Lloyd George's creative opportunism is best seen in the situation which most required it: the first world war. The standard "selfish hypothesis" has him scheming non-stop to replace Asquith as prime minister. However, in three dense chapters, Rowland shows that Lloyd George's underlying commitment in all his jobs, including that of prime minister, was to create a machine capable of mobilising the nation's resources for war and of imposing the civilian will of the military. The elimination of Asquith was never part of this plan. It was Asquith's unwillingness to accept the reality of his decline and hence a more modest conception of his premiership, that brought Lloyd George in December 1916 to a position he had not coveted.
To his managerial view of politics Lloyd George brought outstanding skills. He had an uncanny feel for what the situation required. He was highly receptive to new ideas possibly because, unlike Ramsay MacDonald, he actually listened to what people said. As a persuader he was supreme — highly sensitive to atmosphere, incredibly charming in private, magnificent on a platform. To get things done, too, Lloyd George was prepared completely to set aside standard procedure. No leading British politician has had a greater disdain for the established conventions of public life, sexual as well as political. Of the Irish settlement of 1922 Rowland writes: "He had achieved it by typical Lloyd George methods — patient, conciliatory discussions, sudden storms of rage, truculence one moment and sweet reasonableness the next, pleadings, wooings, threats, frankness, generosity and guile."
But the Coalition elected in 1918 also illustrates the seamy counterpart of flexible response: the growth of a purely manipulative style of politics. Like Nixon, Lloyd George came to believe that everything could and should be fixed, managed, or bought. His court developed many of the same paranoias and vices, illustrating what a thin line divides creativity from corruption. By 1922, as Rowland writes, "everyone was on to Lloyd George. His slapdash methods, his blatant opportunism, his attempt to manipulate the Press, his network of spies and personal contacts ... and lastly ... the stench of the Honours Scandal, had given rise to widespread and very real repugnance."
Yet the collapse of Lloyd George's career in 1922 is linked to a more fundamental problem: the failure of managerialism to generate either large objectives or a solid social base. For all his temperamental radicalism, Lloyd George was a fixer and patcher. But while he was laying the foundation of the Welfare State in 1911 even while he was winning the war, the politics of ideology and class were creeping up, leaving him stranded. Essentially what both Chamberlain and Lloyd George tried to do was to preserve flexibility of response by breaking up the two party system. Lloyd George's plan in 1920 was for a Centre Party under his leadership, isolating the Left from the Right on either side. Instead after a period of further confusion, the political battle lines formed up on the basis of Conservative versus Labour, with the Liberals squeezed out. In retrospect it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise, or how Lloyd George could have altered the outcome. By the 'twenties, despite his brand new economic policy which hardly anyone understood, he already appeared as Rowland says, a "fascinating survivor from a vanished age". By the time he died in 1945, the politics of situation were on the point of obsolescence. Today I am not so sure. The ghost of Lloyd George may still have a message for us. It will surely rise up from the dead, eyes flashing angrily, white hair and cape flying, unless it soon gets a really good biography.
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