The great little Welsh conjuror

Charles Kennedy

LLOYD GEORGE: WAR LEADER by John Grigg

Allen Lane, £25, pp. 669. ISBN 071399343X

It is a discomforting thought that, had the present fashion for kiss-and-tell memoirs, or the intense media scrutiny of politicians' private lives, been in place a century ago, David Lloyd George might never have become prime minister. Yet, as this masterly fourth volume in John Grigg's biography proves, he was a towering figure in exceptional times.

Grigg picks up his story with Lloyd George's arrival in office ih December 1916. Things were at a very low ebb in the war the troops mired in Flanders, the Somme a dreadful and present memory, and Britain's very existence threatened by the submarine war being launched by Germany to cut our oceanic life-lines.

Politically, Lloyd George was leading a coalition, but his own Liberal party was split, with the Asquithians refusing to serve under him and his main support coming from the Conservatives, In the event that gave him surprisingly little trouble — the opposition remained patriotically quiet until May 1918, when the war was drawing to a close. But, as I sit in the House of Commons pondering the contribution of a predecessor — with the 2002 Conservative party conference flickering beside me on the TV — it's a potent reminder that politics is a fickle business. Today it's the Liberal Democrats who are united while the Tories tear themselves apart and 1 can't quite banish the consoling thought that it's they who may be now embarking on decades in the wilderness.

While, inevitably, much of this meticulous study details the historical minutiae of the conduct of the war, it is the character of the central figure which dominates. And John Grigg has no hesitation in naming Lloyd George's many flaws. Yet as he caustically observes:

Many who have only a slight awareness of [his] true importance in history think of him above all as a man of unbridled sexual appetites. or as one who corrupted the honours system.

Grigg adopts a lofty historian's perspective, observing that 'the first view of him is much exaggerated and anyway of doubtful relevance to his value as a political leader'. But even by modern, prurient standards Lloyd George's behaviour was, to say the least, unorthodox.

Aside from a number of liaisons which are only briefly touched upon, Lloyd George had a wife, Margaret, and a mistress, Frances Stevenson, who was young enough to be his daughter. They called each other by their nick-names 'Pussy' and 'Tom Cat', which speak volumes. They had a child together and possibly two others were aborted. But perhaps the most bizarre episode is when Lloyd George, troubled by the progress of the war and with mortality weighing upon him, seeks her agreement to what amounts to a suicide pact: that if he should die first, she would join him,

Happily, Miss Stevenson did not honour this and outlived him by 27 years. But even his biographer's sympathy is stretched at this point. Intriguingly, Grigg attributes the pact to the selfish side of Lloyd George's

nature, for he had been 'spoilt since childhood, and retained much of the character of a spoilt child'.

The accusation of selling honours is more easily rebutted. While Lloyd George did not reform the system, he probably did not abuse it much more than prime ministers before or since. Grigg argues that it has always been inherently corrupt, 'for the obvious reason that it has been controlled by the rulers of the state, to whose power it has served as a useful adjunct'.

He ascribes the scandal particularly to a Times leader (probably written by the legendary editor Geoffrey Dawson) which was actually attacking the PM, not for making the system corrupt, but for missing a historic opportunity to purge it of corruption. Lloyd George's response was that it was a

far cleaner method of filling the party chest than the methods used in the United States or the Socialist Party ... The worst of it is you cannot defend it in public, but it keeps poli tics far cleaner than any other method of raising funds.

Reading this, almost a century later, what has changed? No prime minister has successfully tackled the inherent problem that where party donations go sleaze follows. How many more centuries will pass before the logic of state funding is finally accepted?

But the broad sweep of the man is what matters. As Grigg observes:

He was less of a humbug than most success ful public figures humorous, unpompous, although a high moral tone occasionally crept into his speeches.

He attracted great admirers and made great enemies. He never got on with Earl Haig, and sometimes his conduct of the war was stymied because of it. That was partly because he was a greater admirer of Foch.

He also fell foul of the formidable Beatrice Webb, who wrote of the low standard of intellect and conduct of the little Welsh conjuror'. She thought him unscrupulous and opportunistic, a man who merely used people for his own ends, (Grigg speculates that, while repelled by him politically, Webb was also attracted to him sexually.) And others were dazzled by him. The Conservative leader Arthur Balfour is described in a late-night chat with Andrew Bonar Law as finding Lloyd George 'a very attractive character'. Law responds, 'When he is keen on anything, he sweeps you along with him and imagines you are in agreement with him when you are probably not!' Balfour replies, 'Even when he is wrong, he is usually wrong in a more interesting way than other people.'

It's a passage which deserves closer reading by those who are cynical about politics today, fed up with the yah-boo nonsense which is the daily conduct of the House of Commons.

What we have here is Balfour, as leader of the Conservative party with a majority in the Commons, praising his rival while propping him up against his own Asquith Liberals. But where is the plotting and the tension? Where is the inter-party hostility? Imagine the spluttering on the Today programme and the op-ed pages of the Times, if this were 'leaked' today. How Balfour would be pilloried for a paucity of ambition and leadership skills.

Lloyd George himself said of this period that his — manufactured — majority in the House rested upon the approval of the general public and an 'almost mystical relationship with the nation, If history is to be our guide. there are surely several lessons here.

First, we in 21st-century politics must refind that 'mystical relationship' — convince the voters that we are here to serve the common good rather than our own selfinterest, pace Balfour who had subsumed his party's needs in the fight against a national enemy. But flowing from that is the central point. It is my belief, after nearly 20 years in the Commons, that the majority of MPs are motivated by more honourable intentions than they are ever given credit for. Yet it is the peculiarity and sadness of our age that it is not politic to say so. Put your head above the parapet and say, 'I did it because it was clearly right!' and you invite a torrent of abuse 'Naive', 'smug', 'goody-goody' would be some of the kinder epithets. That cynicism does great damage to the standing of our parliament and parliamentarians. Perhaps we should look back to Balfour, Lloyd George and the like and rekindle the qualities of public-spiritedness which they valued.

The greatest encomium of Lloyd George comes from Winston Churchill, who in The World Crisis wrote: This was in the spring of 1918 when the Ludendorff offensive appeared to threaten the entire course of the war. It was a desperate moment, but Lloyd George rose to it. And as Grigg notes, Churchill not only learnt from Lloyd George's mistakes, he also 'saw an example of how to lead a government and nation at a time of supreme crisis'.

On that reading, it's fair to conclude that what the younger man learnt from the leader means that Lloyd George may have made almost as significant a contribution to saving Britain from destruction in the 1940s as he had in 1916-18.

John Grigg worked on this formidable biography until a few weeks before his death in December 2001. When he realised that he would not complete it, he indicated that he would be happy for Margaret Macmillan (who, appropriately, is the great-granddaughter of Lloyd George) to write an afterword from the point at which his own text stopped.

It is a sadness that this fine biographer did not see his work completed. It is also salutary to consider that, returning to a point I made at the beginning, while politics and character can never be wholly separated, the requirements that make up a great leader and the requirements of an admirable personality may not always be allied; and had the modern media been at hand, Lloyd George might not have stayed in office long enough to furnish John Grigg with his fascinating material.

One of the great qualities of Mr Lloyd George was his power of obliterating the past and concentrating his whole being on meeti na the new situation.