Why do historians keep trying to save Lloyd George’s reputation?
David Lloyd George, painted by William Orpen in 1927 – Alamy
Why do we need another book on David Lloyd George? It takes a persistently charitable – or wilfully blind – interpreter of his life and career to find something convincingly appealing to say about him. Damian Collins tries, but one senses he has written this book for his own satisfaction rather than to add to the sum of knowledge of his disagreeable subject.
Collins writes about Lloyd George’s premiership from 1916 to 1922, how he achieved and lost it. He has done some archival work, but the book is mostly based on secondary sources, explored exhaustively. The author’s main mistake is to treat Lloyd George’s War Memoirs as an honest and reliable account: they are often a work of fiction. Much of the material is familiar. This might not matter if Collins had penetrating insights, but he hasn’t: it’s the same old Lloyd George, lovable rogue and impersonator of a man of action, so familiar from almost every other indulgent book about him.
Collins does quote various disobliging opinions about the last Liberal prime minister, so any novice will be under no illusions about his slipperiness, dishonesty, lack of attention to detail and moral cowardice. But the author expresses no judgment: to him, Lloyd George appears to remain an obstinately romantic figure, the “Welsh wizard” and, apparently (in the title of a chapter in the book), “the man who won the war”. The phrase is lifted from the 1918 “coupon election” campaign, and was as mendacious then as it is now; I had rather hoped Collins was using the phrase ironically, but he wasn’t.
Lloyd George was not the man who won the war; he nearly lost it. His judgment on military matters was no better than Asquith’s, whom he removed in a coup d’état in 1916. He swore after the Somme (for which he was not responsible) that there would be no more butchering of British soldiery. He then, because of his misjudgment of the French general Robert Nivelle, sanctioned the offensive that bore his name and caused the slaughter of the Battle of Arras in April 1917. Lloyd George correctly judged Douglas Haig to be a dismal general, but nonetheless allowed him to launch the disaster of Passchendaele three months later.
Haig deserved blame for that catastrophe, but Lloyd George did so equally for allowing him to launch it – however he always, in war and peace, had someone else to blame (something Collins seems not to notice). By the spring of 1918 Lloyd George had had enough of Haig. Unable to remove him partly because of there being no suitable replacement, and partly because of Haig’s private back channel to King George V, Lloyd George refused to send reinforcements to the Western Front when intelligence warned of a coming offensive. This was the great German push of March 21 1918; and a failing of Collins’s book is his understatement of the sheer panic in London when that was launched, using troops from the former Eastern Front. Nor does he emphasise how rapidly Lloyd George looked, as always, for someone else to blame. This was when he almost lost the war, for he had no-one to blame for the British Army’s weakness but himself.
The author also holds back moral judgment on Lloyd George’s disgraceful response to the accusations (entirely truthful) by Major-General Frederick Maurice, that the prime minister had lied about troop numbers in France. Collins is a Conservative MP and, perhaps having experienced the Johnson regime at close hand, finds the lying and blame-shifting by Lloyd George par for the course. It is, by contrast, a serious scar on an increasingly battered historical reputation. The author lets Lloyd George off lightly for the lies of 1918 election campaign, the making of promises that simply could not be kept, and the scapegoating of the decent and misguided Christopher Addison in 1921 for utter failure of the building of the “homes fit for heroes”. A responsible leader would have scaled down the promise in the first place, and would have blamed himself.
Lloyd George was not an estimable leader: he was an ambitious charlatan who established a template for the politics to come. Collins could have found a more deserving, and enlightening, subject for his talents.
Simon Heffer’s books include Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars.
Rivals in the Storm: How Lloyd George Seized Power, Won the War and Lost his Government is published by Bloomsbury at £25. To order your copy for £18.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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