A poundshop Lloyd George?
“Principles mean nothing to him — never have. His mind doesn’t work that way. “It’s both his strength and his weakness”. That was how the Tory politician Arthur Balfour described David Lloyd George, prime minister 1916-22, a leading government minister 1906-16, and a dominant figure in Liberal Party politics for most of the first half of the 20th century. A minister who worked with Lloyd George saw him as having an “absolute contempt for detail” but a strange capacity to improvise and “pick up the essential details of a question by conversation”. A biographer described him as “always in a...