Friends, rivals and countrymen
William Rees-Mogg
DAVID AND WINSTON by Robert Lloyd George John Murray, £20, pp. 303, ISBN 0719565847 ✆ £18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 This is an ideal John Murray book, dealing with historic personalities, with a narrative reinforced by family papers and an understanding deepened by family connection. Robert Lloyd George, the author, is the great-grandson of David Lloyd George, the prime minister. I hope it will be a bestseller, and can imagine it being unwrapped, with real pleasure, from parcels beneath half the Christmas trees of Old England.
What is surprising is that a book on this friendship has never been written before. David Lloyd George was the prime minister who won the first world war; Winston Churchill was the prime minister who won the second. They served together in the Asquith government before 1914, which, along with the Attlee and Thatcher administrations, can claim to be one of the three great peacetime governments of 20thcentury Britain. That Liberal government created the first welfare state.
They were close personal friends, a relationship which survived for more than 40 years. Winston Churchill is the greater historic figure, but he learned a great deal, about the organisation of war as well as about politics, from David Lloyd George. Again and again their careers interacted. They saved each other; Churchill backed Lloyd George during the Marconi scandal; Lloyd George broke his word to the Tories to bring Churchill back in 1917. They changed history. The author has found, among the Lloyd George papers, the scraps of notes which were passed between them across the Cabinet table in August 1914. Lloyd George had been a ‘Pro-Boer’ during the Boer War; his first instinct was to resign rather than declare war on Germany. Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, thought that a declaration of war was unavoidable. On 3 August, Lloyd George’s view was still in doubt. Churchill’s note reads: ‘Please study the question before you make up your mind. There are all sorts of vital, and precise facts — which you cannot have at your fingers’ ends.’ On 4 August, war was declared, with Lloyd George’s full support.
The two men shared one rare political attribute: both had genius. They saw the issues of politics in the broadest terms. They were political fighters, highly ambitious, but also dominated by their beliefs. They came from different political traditions; each, in the course of their careers, worked with the opposite tradition. Lloyd George was a prime minister backed by a Conservative majority; Churchill was a Liberal minister. Each had the energy which enables a politician to dominate historic events.
Each, as Robert Lloyd George makes clear, had episodes of extremely bad judgment. Churchill was wrong about Gallipoli, wrong about gold, far too militant over the General Strike, wrong about India, and wrong about the abdication. Lloyd George had little grasp of military strategy, was wrong about Turkey, thought Hitler was ‘the George Washington of Germany’ and, like Churchill, was wrong about the abdication. Churchill’s judgment arguably got better as he got older; the opposite might be said of Lloyd George. It was, however, probably wise of Lloyd George not to join Churchill’s wartime government at the age of 77.
Political genius is rare. It has not been common for two men of genius to be competing on the same stage of English political history; Pitt the Younger and Fox are almost the only example. The friendship of two men of such genius is unique. History emerged from their rivalry, but even more from their collaboration.
On 26 March 1945, Winston Churchill as prime minister delivered the House of Commons eulogy on David Lloyd George. Many of the words he used could also have been applied to himself:
His dauntless courage, his untiring energy, his oratory, persuasive, provocative, now grave, now gay .... His eye ranged ahead of the obvious .... He imparted immediately a new surge of strength, of impulse, far stronger than anything that had been known up to that time.
This is a splendid book. I hope that all the contenders for the leadership of our two larger parties will read it. It will tell them what statesmanship is really about.
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