Goats and donkeys

Sam Leith

THE PAIN AND THE PRIVILEGE: THE WOMEN IN LLOYD GEORGE’S LIFE by Ffion Hague Harper Press, £25, pp. 608, ISBN 9780007219490 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The Goat, they called him; and goatish he certainly was. He was stubborn, self-willed, exceptionally adept at climbing upward over rocky ground — and then there was the other thing, the thing that gives rise to this book. If there was a single force in his life to rival David Lloyd George’s ambition it was his sex drive.

From the very outset of his political career, and from the very outset of his marriage, the former was the hostage of the latter. (How little, Spectator readers, things change!) Yet, miraculously, the roof never came down. After his second marriage to his mistress of three decades was saluted in the press, his principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester recorded in his diary: ‘He has lived a life of duplicity. He has got clean away with it.’ This well written and intelligent book, though sometimes more solid than sparky, tells an involving, multifarious and often poignant tale. It describes to a tee in the process a particular type of man — egomaniacal, brilliant, sexually unscrupulous and crazily risk-taking — frequently found in politics. As Lloyd George’s son Dick remarked, ‘with an attractive woman he was as much to be trusted as a Bengal tiger with a gazelle’.

David Lloyd George’s childhood in rural North Wales is very well described: the fierce hold of nonconformist religion; the class inequality and sectarian clannishness; the social role of the chapel; the speed and importance of rumour.

It was with characteristic ingenuity and determination of will that Lloyd George wooed and won Margaret Owen, against her parents’ strong opposition and already in the teeth of gossip that he was ‘fast’. Their courtship consisted of a succession of dead-letter drops, strolls in the rain and roadside ambushes. They were married with scant ceremony as Lloyd George — a provincial solicitor with political ambitions — embarked on his spectacular career.

Stories of his fathering, and hushing up, an illegitimate child by a ‘Mrs J’ suggest that his marital fidelity lasted only a few months. He engaged, well into old age, in fleeting dalliances (he did drive women dotty, and could never resist encouraging them) — but he also formed stronger and deeper attachments. The first of these was with ‘Mrs Tim’, the wife of his friend Timothy Davies; an association that caused Margaret great anger and humiliation.

The longest was of course with Frances Stevenson, 25-odd years his junior. First his daughter Megan’s governess, then his private secretary, and for her whole adult life his mistress, she finally became Mrs Lloyd George two years after Dame Margaret’s death. His powers of concealment and conciliation were breathtaking — notwithstanding that one wife spent more time in Wales and the other in London. Frances frequently slept under the same roof as Maggie and was a close confidante to Megan. Even when, far down the line, the true nature of their relationship emerged, somehow the Welsh Wizard kept all his plates spinning. Frances gave birth to a daughter, Jennifer, whose paternity remains in question (Frances was engaged in her only other known love affair at the time); yet scandal and ruin, always threatened, never erupted.

Ffion Hague’s title offers a tempting opportunity for misreading. Frances and Margaret — who was the pain and who was the privilege? By the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the impression that bitchy and neurotic Frances was by and large the former, and the admirably clever and generous-spirited Margaret by and large the latter; but Ffion Hague’s sympathies are subtler and more capacious than that. And, of course, Mrs Hague actually means by her title — here perhaps she is rather too easy on the cheating old humbug — that the pain of being deceived balanced out the privilege of being a woman in this great man’s life.

Lloyd George doesn’t seem to have been the sort of philanderer who hates women; he loved them and needed them and was, after his fashion, kind. But he didn’t love them enough — even the two he really cared about for a long time — to honour them as equals. And he did, with some ruthlessness, cause or allow them pain when it suited his own purpose.

Hague more than once cautions against judging Lloyd George’s infidelity by the standards of our own more idealistic age: everyone except for Winston Churchill was at it, back then. But he was extraordinarily selfish in many respects. When he was offered the Liberal candidacy in the seat he was to represent for 55 years, Maggie begged him not to accept, ‘arguing that it was impractical for him to take on an unpaid job in London when they were expecting a baby, and did not even have a house of their own’. Lloyd George ignored her. He had been raised, says Hague, ‘to go as far as he could as early as he could’.

He made this aspect of his character — with candour that would be admirable had it not an edge of bullying — plain to Maggie even during their courtship. ‘My supreme idea is to get on,’ he wrote to her. ‘To this idea I shall sacrifice everything — except I trust honesty. I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut, if it obstructs the way.’ Hague writes elsewhere: ‘Even in the first ardent throes of love, Lloyd George was adamant that no statesman had a right to sacrifice a great cause for his private happiness.’ Where the noble altruism of setting a ‘great cause’ over your private happiness shades into the selfishness of setting personal ambition over your duty to your family is a matter for debate. Hague inclines to the kinder interpretation.

It is clear that both Frances and Maggie were loved sincerely by Lloyd George, and that both served his ambition. But Hague’s book reflects what was evidently Lloyd George’s own outlook — that the women were merely planets circling a star. Truly bizarre, and indicative, was the suttee-style pact he struck with Frances, making her promise to kill herself when he died. (The pact was not reciprocal, naturally, and Frances fortunately thought better of it when it came to the crunch.) What was in it for these two women? They luxuriated in the megawatt beam of his charisma. They contributed to his extraordinary political achievements and both enjoyed considerable social recognition (one in Wales, one in London’s high society). They were both barraged with wonderfully affectionate correspondence — to Maggie at Criccieth: ‘Actually left the house at 9:30 — do you think that would have happened had my round little Margaret been by my side to tumble and towzle about?’ Then, more prosaic, there’s the always-lively A. J. Sylvester’s diary entry after seeing Lloyd George get out of the bath:

There he stood as naked as when he was born with the biggest organ I have ever seen. It resembles a donkey’s more than anything else. It must be a sight for the God’s [sic] — or the women — in erection! No wonder they are always after him; and he after them!

After Lloyd-George’s death, Frances gave a TV interview.

At the very end of the interview, Frances was asked a seemingly innocent question: had she regretted not having a child? As Jennifer sat in her neighbour’s house [watching the television], she heard her mother deny her very existence, saying: ‘Lloyd George was my child’.

Hague’s emphasis on the distress this caused Jennifer seems slightly off-beam: on the same page we’re told that it was at her own insistence that Frances’s 1967 memoirs included no mention of her. Rather, I think it was a truth: Lloyd George, spoiled and pampered from childhood, remained childlike in many respects.

He threw jealous fits when Frances showed any sign of leaving his orbit and finding happiness elsewhere. He was a hypochondriac — ‘dismissive of others’ ailments as he was over-anxious about his own’. He had ‘a childlike fascination with parcels and could not resist poking around in them’. He once wrote home to his brother to boast that he had succeeded in boiling a kettle all by himself. He found certain door-handles challenging, and if shut in the dining room at Number 10 would have to await a rescue party.

That he was ‘to the end of his life ... never able to tie his own shoelaces’ seems scarcely believable; mere curiosity, surely, would have supplied the lack at some point. Yet there it is. He was also one of the great statesmen of our history.

Lloyd George went to his rest having sown half a lifetime of bitterness between his two families — his youngest daughter Megan, perhaps because she had spent so long so close to her, loathed Frances to her dying day.

But he himself, as A. J. said, got away with it. ‘There is so much satisfaction in “doing” the world!” he wrote to Frances in 1915. ‘I have defied it for 25 years — treated it with contempt, spat upon its tinsel robes, and I have won through.’