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Lloyd George: From Peace to War 1912-1916

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The British political world at the outbreak of the First World War was populated with remarkable personalities: Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, economist John Maynard Keynes, and of course, above and beyond anyone else, Winston Churchill. First among equal in the cabinet, "a team of ministers as gifted as any in British history" as John Grigg writes (p. 471), was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and future secretary of war and Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

The third volume of John Grigg's life of David Lloyd George, subtitled 'From Peace to War', begins with his pre war campaigns for agrarian reforms and labor settlements. By far the dullest parts of the book, the pre-war descriptions dwell upon what are by now utterly trivial political controversies. Here and later Grigg seems to assume his reader has read his previous volumes, or at least is very much familiar with the British political situation in the early 20th century. For this reader at least, this was not the case, and at times I felt at the dark.

Most interesting of the pre-war chapters is the one dedicated to Lloyd George's personal life and particularly to his affair with Frances Stevenson, his secretary, who was young enough to have been his daughter. Lloyd George, though he needed and was much in love with his mistress, was unwilling to risk his political career by marrying her, and even went to the length of considering marrying her to a young protégé of his (pp. 398-401). Stevenson agreed to the illicit relationship with Lloyd George, at least partly because, as his secretary, she had unique access to the political world. Thus, Grigg writes that the marriage scheme "designed to protect his [Lloyd George's] career" may have failed "partly because she [Stevenson] sensed it as a threat to hers" (p. 400).

As the Great War approached, heralding the end of the Victorian world, Lloyd George and John Grigg's narrative rose to the top of their game. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George was already intimately involved in the production of munitions, and he would soon become Minister of Munitions, making an invaluable contribution to the war effort. As a military strategist, Lloyd George was an "Easterner" rather than a "Westerner"; he believed in making a strong engagement in the Balkans rather than throwing away manpower and resources in pointless offences such as the Somme. Upon becoming Secretary of War, Lloyd George found himself as something of a figurehead in a department ran by the generals, pursuing a course he considered ill-advised, and hardly able to do much about it.

Besides his Ministerial duties, Lloyd George also played a central role in the government's temperance campaign, (although like most of the Cabinet but unlike the King, he refused to lead by example abstention pp. 230-233), in the campaign for better labor relations, and in the political maneuverings, resulting first in a coalition government, and later in the fall of Asquith's government.

John Grigg clearly admires Lloyd George, but he can be scathing in his criticism of his subject's failures, petty hypoacidity and various misjudgments. He is particularly critical of Lloyd George's abandonment of a settlement reached with the Irish leadership following the 1915 Easter Uprising. The agreement, which would have granted home rule to Ireland, was killed by Conservative MPs; thus passed what Grigg judges to have been the last chance for a British Ireland.

Some biographers use their subject for wide range commentary on the character's time and world (Fehrenbacher's brilliant book on Lincoln in the 1850s is a prime example), but John Grigg does not. The focus is squarely on Lloyd George, and vital events are discussed only in so far as they affect him. Grigg hardly discusses the reason the war broke, or the reason the United Kingdom went into it. He writes that the UK didn't go to war for Belgium's sake, and that "her own survival" was at stake at the war (pp. 170-171). But what threat did Imperial Germany constitute to Britain, and was the threat grave enough to justify the millions of dead that the war entailed? Some historians (such as Niall Fergusson) answer in the negative, but Grigg hardly comes to grip with the question. Nor, it is worth pointing out, does his Lloyd George.

In 'A Peace to End All Peace' David Fromkin's brilliant narrative of the Middle East in the second decade of the century, a rather different Lloyd George emerges - a bona fide British Imperialist, not the semi "American business man" reflected in the interview with US Journalist Roy Howard (p. 429). That Lloyd George fought for the aggrandizement of the Empire - but it is hard to spot him in Grigg's account.

The book ends with the fall of the Asquith government and the formation of the Lloyd George administration. Asquith, though an extremely able politician, was ineffective as war leader. As the war lengthened and the slaughter brought no tangible results, demands for change intensified. Asquith rejected a compromise which would have given Lloyd George de facto control of the war effort, and thus was forced to resign. When he refused also to serve under Balfour or Andrew Bonar Law, Lloyd George's prime ministry was assured.

For all its flaws, John Grigg's biography tells the story of a great man in dire times, and his story is gripping. Although I have no wish to go back to the earlier volumes, I'm sure I will read Grigg's final volume, published posthumously: Lloyd George: War Leader, 1916-1918 (Penguin Biography).