Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
Few British political careers have had more ups and downs than that of David Lloyd George.
Bursting onto the national scene as a 27-year-old rural solicitor on 10th April 1890 at the Caernarfon Boroughs constituency by-election, Lloyd George’s victory at the polls (taking the seat from the Conservatives) signalled the start of an odyssey destined to last 55 years.
The young Lloyd George, who before 1886 was a devotee of Joseph Chamberlain’s “unauthorised programme”, was a specifically Welsh-orientated Radical. In the by-election, he campaigned for Welsh Home Rule, disestablishment of the Welsh Anglican Church, Nonconformist rights (mostly to bury their dead in parish graveyards), equality for tenant farmers and proposed extensive Georgist Land Reform across the Principality.
Land reform, along the lines proposed by American political economist Henry George (no relation) in his bestselling polemic Progress and Poverty (1879), became a Liberal Party obsession in the late nineteen century. George argued that taxing land value was the most just form of taxation because the quantity of available land in any country was fixed and public service improvements would be paid for by taxation based upon land values.
Like Labour singing The Red Flag and the Conservatives singing Land of Hope and Glory, up until the late 1970s the annual Liberal Party Assembly concluded with participants bellowing out a song entitled The Land. Sung to the tune of the American Civil War Anthem When We Go Marching Through Georgia, the chorus exemplifies the passion that Liberals had for this issue:
“The Land! The Land!
‘Twas God who gave the Land!
The Land! The Land!
The ground on which we stand!
Why should we be beggars, with the ballot in our hand?
God gave the Land to the People!”
Lloyd George’s Radicalism continued with his opposition to the Second Boer War and his battle against the 1902 Education Act.
Regarding the latter, he denounced as “priestcraft” the proposal that Anglican and Roman Catholic schools, now enjoying local authority funding, could employ or sack teachers on religious grounds. When Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal Government came to power, Lloyd George became President of the Board of Trade and served as Asquith’s Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1908. Despite the controversies of both the 1909 People’s Budget and the subsequent House of Lords Crisis, Lloyd George remained the dominant figure in Liberal politics.
After the start of the Great War, he proved himself in the office of Minister of Munitions as the “Welsh Wizard” who solved the Shell Crisis of 1915. A year later, he was appointed Secretary of State for War and within months, with strong Conservative support, ousted Asquith to become Prime Minster. Whatever one thinks of Lloyd George’s politics and personal morality, there can be few who doubt that he, unlike Asquith, was an effective war leader.
His career’s high watermark came in the post-war Coupon Election of December 1918, where he not only secured an impressive majority, but the Conservatives also decided to remain in coalition with their former Radical opponent.
If Lloyd George had died a few days after the General Election, he would be remembered as one of the Greatest Britons.
Unfortunately, he spent the next twenty years destroying his reputation in his countrymen’s eyes. This process began with the sale of titles and honours through the agency of the ghastly Maundy Gregory in 1922 and culminated in his support for Adolf Hitler. Lloyd George’s sympathy with Nazi Germany is rarely mentioned today. It is, however, in this age of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, something that provides insight into how those from western democracies can change into dictators’ poodles. It is worth considering how his relationship with the German nation evolved after Versailles, as it gives an insight into broader 1930’s appeasement-thinking.
At Versailles, Lloyd George vocally supported Germany paying financial reparations to Britain and France. However, he opposed placing ethnic German minorities under the rule of new nations. He argued that this would breed resentment and increase demands for redress. After 1919, Lloyd George maintained his view on German minorities living in foreign states, and eventually started to oppose the continuation of reparations, stating that the lack of prosperity that it brought resulted in Germany buying fewer British consumer goods.
When the French, in a bid to force Germany to continue paying reparations, occupied the Ruhr in early 1923, Lloyd George denounced their “aggression”, saying that the invasion was designed to humiliate Germany. Afterwards, he travelled to America and lobbied President Coolidge to become involved in reparations renegotiations. This in turn led to the Dawes Plan and America refloating the German economy, which had become crippled by hyper-inflation. In the second half of the 1920s, Lloyd George campaigned for Britain and France to rapidly increase military disarmament and for remaining Allied troops to vacate their Rhineland bases.
At an international conference in Lausanne in 1932, the main powers agreed that Germany would pay one final reparation sum and then cease further payments. Lloyd George had fulfilled his dearest wish, but still he denounced the British government for dragging their feet on international disarmament.
Adolf Hitler’s accession as German Chancellor on 30th January 1933 did not make Lloyd George hesitate from continuing to denounce the “abominable treatment of Germany by the Allies”. In his view, whatever went wrong in Germany was the fault of Britain and France. Meanwhile, the Nazis started using Lloyd George’s statements in their own propaganda to justify their policies. Likewise, his remarks increased French suspicions and distrust of their British ally.
When the Wehrmacht marched into the former de-militarised Rhineland zone in 1936, Lloyd George announced that he was not unduly concerned.
Six months later, the former British Prime Minister personally visited Hitler at his Berchtesgaden retreat and was fed the regime’s propaganda. When Ribbentrop denounced Czech repression of Sudeten Germans, Lloyd George publicly remarked that he did not trust Edvard Benes, the Czech President, “in his sight, let alone out of it”. Hitler was delighted with Lloyd George’s support and stated that he was “one of the very few people in England today who has shown any real appreciation of my task”.
Lloyd George became increasingly besotted with the dictator and went so far as to describe Hitler as “the greatest German of the age”. He told his private secretary, A.J. Sylvester, that the British had got the Fuhrer all wrong, as he was “not in favour either or rearmament or conscription.” Instead, he was more interested in “roads, agriculture and productive measures generally”. Upon his return from his German pilgrimage, Lloyd George wrote an article for the Daily Express on the 17th September 1936, where he stated:
“The idea of a Germany intimidating Europe with a threat that its irresistible army might marching across frontiers forms no part of the new vision…the establishment of a German hegemony in Europe, which was the aim and dream of the old militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism.”
Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937. He and Lloyd George had loathed each other for years, and this might have led to his brief criticism of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement during the Sudetenland Crisis of 1938. For a while, Lloyd George supported a coalition with Stalin against German expansion, but he opposed Britain issuing a guarantee to Poland following the invasion of Prague in March 1939.
Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. Initially, Lloyd George gave Poland tacit support, but he soon slid into denigrating the Polish leaders and argued that Britain should consider making peace with Hitler. He said that Hitler was “a reasonable man”, and Britain should offer to return Germany’s former African colonies. Chamberlain fell from power in May 1940, and was succeeded by Lloyd George’s one-time protégée, Winston Churchill.
Churchill was determined to bring representatives of each political party, interest group or faction into his new broad coalition government. He succeeded with only one exception: Lloyd George refused to join the Cabinet twice and turned down the American Ambassadorship. He made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with the wartime British government. His second wife, Frances Stevenson, tried to persuade him to change his mind, but Lloyd George was blunt with her and said that he didn’t expect Churchill to be successful, and when he failed it would fall upon him to negotiate peace with Hitler.
Lloyd George sat out the remaining years of his life in exile in North Wales, before dying at the age of 82 in March 1945.
Lloyd George hugely damaged his reputation by expressing sympathy with the Nazi regime. Worse still, his standing aloof from Churchill’s wartime government led to speculation that he was lining himself up to play the role of a British Marshall Petain if Operation Sealion was successful. Lloyd George stands today as an example of a politician who allowed a dictator to flatter him to the point of abandoning judgement.
As was the case with the 1913 Marconi scandal, the sale of honours and his constant philandering, Lloyd George remained his own worse enemy.
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