Too long a liberal
Alan Watkins
A RADICAL LIFE by Mervyn Jones Hutchinson, f18.99, pp. 340 The biography of Megan Lloyd George was to have been written by John Morgan, who knew her slightly. But he fell ill with the cancer which killed him, and left a syn- opsis only. Mr Jones took over the work before John's death, and has made an excellent job of it. He himself is half- Welsh. His father was Ernest Jones, biogra- pher, interpreter and disciple of Sigmund Freud. Ernest came from Gorseinon but did not like to be reminded of it. Mervyn is a fine journalist and a notable novelist. This is, I think, his first essay in political biography. It could scarcely have been bettered. It is a model of its kind.
In a sense, however, it is wrong to call it a political biography at all, as the phrase has come to be understood. Unlike most biographers, Mr Jones makes no extrava- gant claims for his subject. Megan's politic- al achievement was modest. She is chiefly remembered as a pioneer of lively political broadcasting — and as the winner of the Carmarthen by-election of 1957, after she had joined the Labour Party. Indeed, it is arguable that Mr Jones is over-severe with her. He tells us that she was 'lazy'.
This is a charge which for some reason is often levelled at Welsh politicians, from Aneurin Bevan to Lord Jenkins. Bevan hated paperwork, while Lord Jenkins (like the subject of one of his own biographies, H. H. Asquith) prefers to work with a pen. David Lloyd George was more of the Bevan school, though his war memoirs, which were largely his own work, were at least as well-written as those of his contem- poraries. Another Welshman, Mr Michael Heseltine, prefers to have information con- veyed to him orally or by means of a small piece of paper. He has never been called lazy, though he has been called many other things. Megan was, like him, of the word- of-mouth persuasion. She was also rather unorganised: forgetting appointments, turning up late, mislaying things, missing trains. And yet, why should we (or Mr Jones) censure in her those failings which in Mrs Shirley Williams we are prepared to indulge?
Megan's trouble was not that she was lazy but that she had the misfortune to be both a woman and, until her late move, a Liberal. Her brother Gwilym was a solid citizen but had less charm and was not in the same class as a speaker. However, he possessed the good sense to join the Con- servatives. He ended up as Lord Tenby and, before that, as Home Secretary from 1954 to 1957, in which capacity he sent Ruth Ellis to the gallows' on the ground that by her imprudent actions she had endangered the lives of innocent drinkers in the vicinity of her unfortunate victim. If Megan had been sensible and joined the Labour Party before or after the war (she was 43 in 1945), she would probably have been given office by C. R. Attlee, who always had a soft spot for the old girl.
Instead, she had an affair with a Labour MP, Philip Noel-Baker. He was a noted peacemonger who went on to win the Nobel Prize and, in extreme old age, to deliver the same speech — it was, needless to say, on the subject of peace — to the Labour conference, year after year. He would do so irrespective of the resolution under debate, without hindrance from the chairman, and to loud and prolonged applause. The Noel-Baker oration was one of the comic events of the political year. Some of us looked forward to it keenly.
`Next week Pop Larkin visits Twin Peaks.' Megan's letters to him have not survived, but his to her have, and Mr Jones makes good use of them.
It cannot be said that he emerges in a very heroic light: au contraire, as George Brown used to say when he was at the For- eign Office. He strung Megan along for decades, though she was a willing even if dissatisfied partner — she was, after all, a grown woman. But then he refused to marry her when his wife died. Not only Mr Jones but several of his reviewers have con- demned this behaviour, some of them going so far as to call it that of a cad, a bounder even. But it is a commonplace of life that relationships of this nature tend to founder when a spouse dies or when the pattern of illicit love (often involving sever- al people) is disturbed through some other cause. It would have been more surprising if Noel-Baker had married Megan. He cuts a poor figure more because he is self-pity- ing and self-serving as her lover than because he neglects to become her hus- band. The moral is that love-letters should be destroyed or not be written at all.
The other love story is that of Megan's father and her governess, Frances Steven- son, who was once described by Lord Beaverbrook as 'a woman for the cold nights'. Mr Jones says that she discovered the relationship when she would have been 18 or 19. She was mortified and angered, and remained so for the rest of her life, not least because she had admired Miss Stevenson and regarded her as a friend. Miss Stevenson's feelings for the young Megan had perhaps been less warm. She had early noted a disinclination to concen- trate and a certain spoilt quality. But she would have been prepared to be friends with her former pupil. It was Megan who was implacable. After Lloyd George's death, Mr Jones tells us,
Clough Williams-Ellis designed a surround for the grave in local stone. When it was completed, there was a short family ceremo- ny of dedication. Frances was not invited, but she went to the grave afterwards [she was by this time Lloyd George's widow and Count- ess of Dwyfor] and left a bouquet of red roses. Walking there on the following day with Ursula Thorpe [Jeremy's mother, and a close friend], Megan picked up the bouquet and silently threw it over the hedge into the road.
Two years before the 1964 election Megan discovered that she had cancer. She fought and won the election, which was courageous. In 1966 she fought in absentia and won again, which was selfish. Her death almost immediately afterwards caused resentment among the Carmarthen voters and in the local party. They thought she had made fools of them. It was one of the factors that led to Mr Gwynfor Evans's success in the ensuing by-election. Miss Stevenson was more charitable. She turned up at the funeral but placed herself at an appropriate distance, while the floral trib- utes remained undisturbed.
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