BOOKS
Death of a Liberal
By DAVID REES
To this day it is very easy to see why Lloyd George was a charismatic figure to many of his contemporaries. The shoemaker's foster- son from Llanystumdwy not only ruled in Downing Street for six legendary years, but turned the whole existing pattern of British politics upside-down. Most of us would accept, 1 think, the view of the constitutional historian, John P. Mackintosh, who, in his recent study of the Cabinet, has shown that Lloyd George was the true originator, for better or for worse, of 'Prime Ministerial Government' in Britain. But about the sources of his power and the nature of his political objectives, let alone his character, there is far less unanimity. While those super-bureaucrats, Lord Hankey and Tom Jones, see him primarily as the master-manipu- lator of the government machine, Frank Owen, in his great slag-heap of a biography, asks us to approve the tempestuous journey of one who was always a Jacksonian tribune of the people.
On the other hand, Lord Beaverbrook's last brilliant volume has drawn a picture of one who., once the war was over, became a virtual megalo- maniac immersed in 'extraordinary intrigues' with the sole end of remaining in power. A generation ago Keynes saw him as a sorcerer from the Celtic mists, possessing an 'almost Medium-like sensibility' to all who crossed his Path. The eldest son's brief study of his father shows how the man who throughout his life drew his basic political support from the Welsh Bible belt possessed, appropriately enough, Patriarchal virility, fornicating in the Cabinet room itself once matters of State were dealt with. Here is surely a Protean character, whose 'rose- bud' still really remains undiscovered.
As yet the definitive biography remains un- written—in any case, restrictions still remain on his private papers. But with a new monograph by Mr. Kenneth 0. Morgan,* written to com- memorate the centenary of his birth, we have fresh and particularly interesting insight into "is life and ideas, one which at times gets pretty near to the truth. The theme of the essay is to assess Lloyd George's place in British politics With special relevance to his Welsh background. In a larger sense the writer attempts to rehabili- tate the lost leader of British radicalism from recent hostile comment and to show that his achievements were not only significant but bene- ficent. Of course, most studies have drawn a sketch of the young country solicitor, scourge of landlord and vicar, who graduated to West- minster through the Liberal Party machine. what is especially interesting about Mr. Mor- an s essay is his analysis of how Lloyd George wales able to create a stable political base in 'ales during the crucial first stage of his career and how the ideas of agrarian populism which !a,e. represented were ones which influenced him oaroughout his life * yDAVID LLOYD GEORGE: WELSH RADICAL AS C1RLD STATESMAN. By Kenneth 0. Morgan. (Uni- ersitv of Wales Press, 5s.)
Thus we see how from his earliest years in Parliament he was able to manceuvre with that same facility which characterised his later career. While drawing much of his support from the forces of Welsh nationalism, he was yet able to trim enough so that 'he bent his efforts to national equality rather than national independence for his native land.' Unlike the Irish, he was deter- mined to combine the appeal of nationalism with an equally strong conviction that he must work within the British political system.
Yet even in these earliest years there are hints of difficulties to come. He was unimpressed by the rising power of Labour in South Wales, and while he commanded total allegiance from the small-town radicals of north and central Wales, his anti-capitalist rhetoric with its undertones of xenophobia and anti-Semitism never really captured the three large ports of the south, where a cosmopolitan mercantile Liberalism was in the ascendant. Indeed, years later, he once confided to Balfour that he feared the 'glorified grocers' of Liberalism more than the established land- owners. As one who never drew his support from the two dominant philosophies of our age, he was from the beginning one to whom 'a philosophy of movement' was a means and an end.
With this impregnable regional base behind him, he was able to emerge after 1906, not With- out some justice, as the great social reformer, responsible not only for the famous Budget of 1909, a classic of anti-landlordism, but the In- surance Bill of 1911. These measures not only gave him a particularly strong position in Asquith's Cabinet, but also a great insight into our society at that time, for there can be little doubt that when war came he saw before anyone else in authority that it would be total and revolutionary war in which victory would be won by the side which most efficiently mobilised its resources. It was this conviction that took him to the Premiership in that terrible month of December, 1916. And yet, with all his sup- port from the people and to a lesser extent from the politicians, he was never able completely to master the generals—here was one Establish- ment that could not be reduced.
But once the war was over we can see that he was finished, despite the extraordinary, vic- torious demagogy of the 'coupon election.' With the Coalition Liberals nothing but a group of placemen, he was unable to create in the still essentially hierarchic society of Britain the populist support that had first given him power in Wales and then taken him into the Cabinet.
Here one must part company with Mr. Morgan, for he sees the failure of his hero as resulting solely from his inability to build a new left-wing alliance in British politics. But why did Lloyd George find it impossible to do this? Surely the truth is that his fantastic manoeuvres to stay in office after 1919, alienating both the Right and the Left, meant that he was excluded from public life for ever at his fall. As Lord Beaverbrook has written, 'He did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the driver's seat.' How else can one explain the contradictions, unless as pragmatism gone berserk : the enemy of the Bolsheviks, yet their conciliator; friend of Labour, yet the virtual supporter of the mine-owners; keeper of the nonconformist conscience, yet the master- mind of the 'honours for sale' episode; Glad- stonian friend of small nations, yet the unleasher of the Black and Tan terror. (It is just not true to say, as Mr. Morgan does, that 'the final anxious [Irish Treaty] negotiations owed much to the Celtic sympathy felt for each other by the negotiators.' Michael Collins's comment in his notebook on Lloyd George during the nego- tiations was that 'he would sell his nearest and dearest for prestige.') And lastly, the Chanak crisis, when war itself was seriously considered as a means of keeping the Premier in office.
To the end of his days Lloyd George never varied from the opportunism of the later years in Downing Street. He flirted with Keynes, and was impressed by the alliance of rural populists and urban progressives which Roosevelt had created, the great coalition that might have kept him in office in other circumstances. Then as late as 1936-37 he was adoring Hitler, for was not here another politician who was 'a dynamic force,' rejecting the values of the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois world? He attacked Munich, was in at the kill of Chamberlain, but no sooner had the war started than he was advocating a new conference with the dictators—a super-Munich. When Britain stood alone in 1940-41 he thought the position was hopeless and that he might be called back into power to wind up the war on the terms of the Axis, the British Main. Thus the road back to Downing Street would be through national defeat, the reverse of 1916 when the way to supreme power had been through an unrivalled belief in victory. 'At Criccieth or Churt,' Frank Owen has written, `Lloyd George . . . spent his mornings and even- ings with the voice of . . William Joyce. . .
One must mention these later, rather un- pleasant episodes because they are relevant to showing that Lloyd George had no fixed con- victions. Whilst one may agree with Mr. Mor- gan's assessment of his achievements as an Edwardian social reformer or as a war adminis- trator, one must also remember that the events of 1919-22, over which he presided, contributed much to the chaos of the inter-war years. The legend of the Carthaginian peace of Versailles was created, and the origins of the British class-war which raged throughout the later 1920s and 1930s can be dated back to 1921—the worst year for stoppages in British industrial history. More- over, to justify Lloyd George's career with almost blanket approval, as Mr. Morgan does in his summing-up, on the grounds that he was the decisive catalyst in the transition of Vic- torian Britain to the new society of the twen- tieth century, is really a historicist argument, as is his contention, which is by no means true anyway, that through Lloyd George the indus- trialised, provincialised masses of the north and west were asserted against the domination of the metropolitan south and east. But how did the liberals of Lloyd George's own time, whose expectations had been aroused by his radical promises, react to the phase of his career which began with the 'coupon election'? They re- garded it as nothing short of an infamous betrayal, marking the death of the great Liberal. The voice is John Middleton Murry's on the election campaign of 1918:
When weak honesty had been replaced by organised dishonesty and manifest corruption, the wells became poisoned . . . [the intelli- gentsia] . . hoped . . desperately against hope, and against their better knowledge of Mr. Lloyd George, that some impulse of his youth might win a late triumph, but they hoped, as they knew, in vain. From the steps of his showman's car, striped with buff and blue and wreathed in Union Jacks, they heard as in a dream the triumphant demagogue shouting at them that they were reactionaries, that they were the vested prejudices the enemies of the people, while the vested interests (incorporated in the fat impresarios beside him on the steps) were the people's friends . . . the temptation to blaspheme against democracy is well-nigh irresistible. . .
For surely the lesson of this astonishing career is plain. It is that any politician who bases his programme on the ambivalent values of rural populism alone is unusually likely to become an opportunist or a scoundrel. After all, William Jennings Bryan, who represented much the same sort of society and values as Lloyd George, be- came an imperialist, ending his life as the prose- cutor of Darwinism. The same State that backed the La Follettes just as strongly supported Joe McCarthy. The enduring socio-political pre- occupation of those parts of rural Wales which most strongly supported Lloyd George is to prevent licensed premises from opening on Sun- day. Although Lloyd George was the greatest populist politician in British history, at the end of his career in high office, like many another Messiah of the underprivileged, he represented no one but himself.
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