BOOKS OF THE DAY
A Pedestrian Portrait
David Lloyd George, The Official Biography. By Malcolm Thom- son with the collaboration of Frances, Countess Lloyd George of Dwyfor. (Hutchinson. 25s.)
IT used to be a Tory-grievance that the Whigs had all the historians. Nowadays the Liberals might complain with hardly less justice that the Tories have all the biographers. Moneypenny and Buckle's Disraeli and Mr. Winston Churchill's study of his father are two of the most readable books in the English language. By contrast, Morley's Gladstone is heavy going, and even Mr. J. A. Spender has hardly done full justice to the commanding personality of Lord Oiford. But Lloyd George has suffered worst of all. Last year We had Mr. A. J. Sylvester's The Real Lloyd George. And now Mr. Malcolm Thomson has produced four hundred and seventy pages of fluent journalese which are presented to the public as the Official Biography of David Lloyd George. One is reminded of Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors which, as a distinguished judge said at the time of their publication, added a new terror to death.
It is all a great pity. Mr. Thomson worked with Lloyd George for fifteen years and regards him with deep and affectionate admiration. He has made a close study of Lloyd George's papers. He has had the collaboration of the Countess Lloyd George, who was for nearly thirty years Lloyd George's confidential secretary and who con- tributes a preface to this book. The result should have been, -in the words of the publisher's blurb, "an immensely important page of history." It might have lit up several episodes in Lloyd George's career which are still shrouded in semi-darkness. It might have conveyed, by appropriate examples, his amazing gift of pictorial eloquence, which enabled his hearers to visualise the scenes he was describing (which might be anything from a mountain range to a race meeting) as clearly as if they had been thrown upon a screen. It might have explained, as distinct from merely recording, the unconquerable distrust with which he was regarded by politicians of a more frigid type, from McKenna to Neville Chamberlain.
Mr. Thomson has scarcely attempted any of these things. • Instead he has produced a chronicle, by no means complete, of events already tolerably well known. The book is full of small inaccuracies. We are informed that in 1918 "Asquith . . . was defeated in the soundly Liberal constituency of Paisley." In fact, as every school- boy, and certainly Mr. Thomson, ought to know, he lost his seat at East Fife in that year and returned to the House of Commons via Paisley two years later. However, the balance is redressed eighty pages further-on, when Mr. Asquith's rejection by Paisley in 1924 is attributed to East Fife. Then there is the statement that McKenna " turned Tory in 1923 and accepted Baldwin's invitation to become his Chancellor of the Exchequer." In fact the invitation, which was accepted subject to the unfulfilled condition that a seat
should be found in the City of London, came not from Baldwin but from Boner Law.
More serious are the omissions. One of the conspicuous features of Lloyd George's career was the number and quality of his collaborators. He had a genius for using other men's brains. Perhaps the outstanding case was that of Charles Masterman. The idea of national insurance originated with Lloyd George. But it was Masterman no less than' Lloyd George who piloted the scheme through the House of Commons and afterwards, as chairman of the Insurance Commission, brought it into operation. Mrs. Masterman has recorded in her diary how, through the almost interminable committee stage, Lloyd George never failed to ask her husband's advice on each successive amendment and almost invariably took it. Beyond question this was one of the most success- ful partnerships in the Parliamentary history of our time. It is really rather staggering that, in the four pages which Mr. Thomson devotes to the passage of the Insurance Bill, Masterman's name is not mentioned at all. And this is not the only such omission. Later in the book there are only the most perfunctory references to the help which Lloyd George obtained from such men as Philip Kerr, Maynard Keynes and Hubert Henderson.
In dealing with the period of the second Labour Government Mr. Thomson tells us that, in the spring of 1931, "Bore-Belisha set to work to draw together under Simon's aegis as many as he could of the dissatisfied Liberals in the Commons " and that " Lloyd George was well aware of this intrigue." He does not, however, record that Hore-Belisha and his friends seized the opportunity offered by the annual conference of the Liberal Party in May to challenge Lloyd George's leadership and his whole policy of working with the MacDonald administration. This, too, is a pity, because he might have described the speech in which Lloyd George dealt with the rebels :
" There are people who say it was your business to go straight on whatever happens ; never mind, take the consequences." (A voice: " Hear, hear.") " My friend, there was before the war a great disaster somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. A great liner, full of precious lives, was going full speed ahead on a defined course. A wire came through the ether that there were icebergs on the course. The captain went straight ahead on the same course and qne of the most terrible catastrophes that ever occurred in history was the result. Let me say this here and now. I am opposed to Titanic seamanship in politics. If the National Liberal Federation decides this afternoon to take another course I would advise my friends to put on their lifebelts, plant their deckchairs near to the boats—unless, of course, any of them have already made arrangements to be picked up."
It is quite true, as Mr. Thomson points out, that after 1931 there ensued a period of marked coolness between Lloyd George and the official Liberal leaders. But here again the record is incomplete. What the reader is not told is that, after the General Election of 1935 and the defeat of Sir Herbert Samuel, Lloyd George attended the first meeting of the Liberal Parliamentary Party and himself proposed the election as leader of Sir Archibald Sinclair. From that time until the outbreak of the war he, Megan and Gwilym accepted the Liberal Whip and worked in almost unbroken harmony with the other members of the Liberal Opposition.
The golden rule in biographies of this character is as far as possible to let the subject speak for himself. That is precisely what Mr. Thomson will not do. Even the memorandum in which Lloyd George proposed a coalition in 1910 is paraphrased. Why not give the original text? And, most regrettable of all, there is scarcely any attempt to reproduce Lloyd George's private judgements on men and events. There was, for instance, his comment when he heard of Curzon's defection at the time of the Carlton Club meeting. " The pro-consul has ratted." Or his description of his first encounter with Neville Chamberlain, "I was appalled. The man had the smallest head I had ever seen. Never trust a man with a small head." Mr. Thomson must have heard many hundreds of these commentaries, but hardly one of them does he reproduce.
One day someone will write a life of Lloyd George.
DINGLE FOOT.
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