Welsh wizardry and venom

Paul Johnson reviews Roy Hattersley’s life of David Lloyd George

No politician’s life is so difficult to write as Lloyd George’s. All who have tried have failed, and wise heavyweight historians have steered clear. I applaud Roy Hattersley’s courage in tackling this rebarbative subject and congratulate him on his success in making sense of Lloyd George’s early life up to his emergence as a major figure in parliament. Thereafter, however, he tends to lose his way in the trackless jungle of endless political crises during Lloyd George’s 16 years in office, festooned as they are with the undergrowth of his financial fecundity and the florid canopy of his love affairs. Hattersley emerges from this rainforest exhausted, to be faced with the remaining 23 years of Lloyd George’s life, for he was only 59 when he fell irrevocably from power in 1922, and thereafter nothing important happened.

One problem is Welsh. Hard to get inside the man without a knowledge of the language, and of Welsh culture, based on land-hunger. He barely believed in God, and the Irish leaders who negotiated with him claimed he lacked a soul, certainly a conscience. But he was a fine judge of sermons and loved to sing hymns. Tom Jones, a Welsh speaker, scored here, and his slim volume, written in 1951, is still probably the best biography, when supplemented by the three tomes of Cabinet diaries, based on verbatim notes. He and Lloyd George often conversed in Welsh to baffled colleagues and eavesdroppers. Lloyd George was a Celt. He had no fundamental beliefs or principles, but could be captured by ideas, especially if they verged on the poetic.

Keynes, who observed him closely during the Versailles negotiations of 1919, wrote:

He is rooted in nothing; he is void and without content; he lives and feeds on his immediate surroundings; he is an instrument and a player at the same time, which plays on the company and is played on them too; he is a prism .