Goats and donkeys

The Goat, they called him; and goatish he certainly was. He was stubborn, self-willed, exceptionally adept at climbing upward over rocky ground — and then there was the other thing, the thing that gives rise to this book. If there was a single force in his life to rival David Lloyd George’s ambition it was his sex drive.

From the very outset of his political career, and from the very outset of his marriage, the former was the hostage of the latter. (How little, Spectator readers, things change!) Yet, miraculously, the roof never came down. After his second marriage to his mistress of three decades was saluted in the press, his principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester recorded in his diary: ‘He has lived a life of duplicity. He has got clean away with it.’

This well written and intelligent book, though sometimes more solid than sparky, tells an involving, multifarious and often poignant tale. It describes to a tee in the process a particular type of man — egomaniacal, brilliant, sexually unscrupulous and crazily risk-taking — frequently found in politics. As Lloyd George’s son Dick remarked, ‘with an attractive woman he was as much to be trusted as a Bengal tiger with a gazelle’.

David Lloyd George’s childhood in rural North Wales is very well described: the fierce hold of nonconformist religion; the class inequality and sectarian clannishness; the social role of the chapel; the speed and importance of rumour.

It was with characteristic ingenuity and determination of will that Lloyd George wooed and won Margaret Owen, against her parents’ strong opposition and already in the teeth of gossip that he was ‘fast’. Their courtship consisted of a succession of dead-letter drops, strolls in the rain and roadside ambushes. They were married with scant ceremony as Lloyd George — a provincial solicitor with political ambitions — embarked on his spectacular career.