
âPrinciples mean nothing to him â never have. His mind doesnât work that way.
âItâs both his strength and his weaknessâ.
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 âabsolute contempt for detailâ but a strange capacity to improvise and âpick up the essential details of a question by conversationâ.
A biographer described him as âalways in a hurryâ. He would âturn his mind to a subject only when there were urgent decisions to be taken, imminent advantage to be gained or pressing danger to be avertedâ.
Lenin saw Lloyd George as a âfirst-class bourgeois manipulator, an astute politician, a popular orator who will deliver any speeches you like even r-r-revolutionary ones, to a labour audienceâ. âThis hardened politician, this lackey of the money-bags... Liberal charlatanâŠâ
If Boris Johnson has been trying to act as a poundshop Mussolini, he is also a poundshop Lloyd George. What Johnson looks like trying to do with the Tory party echoes what Lloyd George tried to do with the Liberal Party after 1916.
Johnsonâs effort may well turn out to be only a caricature of Lloyd George. Lloyd George, the quick-witted stepson of a village cobbler who made himself a small-town lawyer, was more skilled at popular demagogy and opportunist improvisation than the relatively routine Eton-and-Oxford Johnson is ever likely to be.
World War 1 started with Britain under the Liberal prime minister H H Asquith. In May 1915, discredited by the Gallipoli fiasco and the governmentâs failure to organise sufficient munitions production, Asquith was forced to form a coalition with the Tories (and one Labour minister).
Asquith, with his languid, patrician manner (âMr Asquith, do you take an interest in the war?â asked his sarcastic friend Helen Beerbohm Tree), and his heavy drinking, became further discredited. In the Battle of the Somme in July-November 1916 there was huge bloodshed, and almost no movement in front lines.
Lloyd George had been the Chancellor of the âPeopleâs Budgetâ of 1909, old-age pensions, and the beginnings of ânational insuranceâ for the unemployed or sick. He was an energetic and effective Minister of Munitions in 1915-16. He allied with Tories to force Asquith to resign, and became prime minister at the head of a new coalition.
Now, oddly, the prime minister (Lloyd George) and the Leader of the Opposition (Asquith) were both members of the same party.
Lloyd George used the crisis to remake the machinery of government, and to try to employ that government machinery, the press, and businessmen brought into central government posts, to remake politics.
That is what we can see echoed in Johnsonâs moves to create a new political centre round his section of the Tory party, non-Tory âVote Leaveâ people like Dominic Cummings, and the Brexiter press like the Sun, Mail, and Express. The parallel will become closer if Johnson can do a deal with Farage.
All Cabinets had previously been ramshackle affairs, with no secretariat and no minutes of meetings.
Lloyd George instituted a War Cabinet of only five members, meeting almost every day, and a Cabinet Secretariat.
In his War Cabinet he had Bonar Law, the Tory leader who had threatened civil war (over Irish Home Rule) in 1912-14 against the Liberal government in which Lloyd George was Chancellor. He had Lord Milner, a Tory arch-imperialist (Lloyd George, though always broadly pro-imperialist, had opposed the Boer War of 1899-1902). The Tory Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India. And a captive Labour nominee, Arthur Henderson.
Behind the scenes, Max Aitken, owner of the Daily Express, later Lord Beaverbook, had been central in the ousting of Asquith, and soon became a minister. Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail, also helped oust Asquith and took a government position, though his relations with Lloyd George were more erratic.
Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, added system and attention to detail. Maundy Gregory, later, sold official honours, building up a âLloyd George Fundâ for politics.
Eric Geddes, a railway boss, one of the businessmen whom Lloyd George brought into government, became a close associate and from August 1921 author of the âGeddes Axeâ of post-war social cuts.
Lloyd George, however, had not just become a Tory. The Tories had come to recognise that some bureaucratic social reform was necessary: âa slice of Bismarckismâ, as Winston Churchill, then a Liberal and an erratic ally of Lloyd George, put it.
Lloyd George and the Liberals round him were happy to postpone the Liberal-legislated Home Rule for Ireland and to go some way towards the Tories on tariff preferences for the Empire in place of traditional Liberal Free Trade.
The huge National Liberal Club, only a few steps from Parliament, built in 1887 and much grander than any central building the Tory or Labour parties have ever had, is visible evidence of the weight of the Liberal Party in those days.
The Liberals were no longer the chief party of the landed aristocracy, as the old Whigs had been. Most industrial and commercial capitalists had, in the second half of the 19th century, gone over to the Tories. As Engels put it in 1892, âthe Liberals derive their strength now from the non-conformist petty and middle-bourgeoisieâ. But they were still a great force.
Local Liberal Associations continued to operate round the country, uneasily divided between Lloyd George and Asquith supporters.
At the end of the war, Lloyd George called a snap election, soon enough that rejoicing at Britainâs victory and his own (undeserved) prestige as âThe Man Who Won The Warâ were still strong.
He got the Liberal Chief Whip and a leading Tory official to share out the constituencies, some to âCoalition Liberalâ candidates, some to Conservatives, a few to Labour renegades (âCoalition Labourâ or âNational Democratâ).
His coalition swept the board in that âcouponâ or âkhakiâ election, winning 523 seats out of 707. Labour had broken from the coalition and won 57 seats; Asquithâs wing of the Liberals, only 42.
The renewed coalition survived until October 1922. It promised âa land fit for heroesâ, and at the start doled out some social reforms, before resorting to the âGeddes Axeâ as economic crisis developed.
It battled against Irelandâs war of independence, and forced a botched settlement in Lloyd Georgeâs typical manner, with an ambiguous formula which both Irish nationalists and Unionist die-hards could interpret as favourable.
Lloyd George spent much of 1919 in Paris, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, âbrutal and despicableâ as Lenin called it.
As working-class anger mounted, the coalition dealt with great industrial disputes, sometimes by Lloyd Georgeâs method of ambiguous promises, sometimes by directly facing them down.
Lloyd George became convinced that working-class revolution was an imminent danger. He pushed for the creation of a new party bringing together elements from Liberals and Tories, under his leadership, an idea he had already toyed with in wartime.
As Lenin commented: âLloyd George argued that a coalition â and a close coalition at that â between the Liberals and the Conservatives was essential, otherwise there might be a victory for the Labour Party, which Lloyd George prefers to call âSocialistâ⊠âCivilisation is in jeopardyâ... and consequently Liberals and Conservatives must uniteâŠâ
The idea didnât come off. The Tories withdrew support from Lloyd George in October 1922. Lloyd George reunited his faction with the Liberals under Asquithâs leadership for the December 1923 general election. From October 1924, when Asquith lost his seat in another general election, Lloyd George became parliamentary leader of the Liberal Party.
In October 1926 Asquith retired and Lloyd George became overall Liberal Party leader. The âLloyd George Fundâ, acquired through the sale of honours, had been an important factor.
He had still not lost his capacity for leftish gestures. In 1929 he wrote a pamphlet advocating âKeynesianâ (public works programmes) measures against unemployment. He had the help of Keynes himself, though Keynes had loudly denounced Lloyd Georgeâs role in the Treaty of Versailles. Lloyd George was quicker than the cautious Labour Party leaders to reject âeconomic orthodoxyâ.
Lloyd George was offered a place in the World War 2 coalition government by Churchill. He remained an MP until 1945. The Liberal Party never recovered much strength, mostly because the Labour Party had scooped up the more left-wing and working-class element of its vote.
Johnsonâs efforts now also have parallels with what Trump has done with, or is trying to do with, the Republican party in the USA.
Theresa May, of all people, in 2002, coined a phrase to describe the axis around which Boris Johnson is trying to reconstruct Tory politics: âthe nasty partyâ. âSome Tories have tried to make political capital by demonising minorities instead of showing confidence in all the citizens of our countryâ.
David Cameron in 2006 took up Mayâs idea. âWhile parents worried about childcare, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life â we were banging on about Europe⊠We obsessed about a handful more grammar schools... We put our faith in opt-outs for a fewâ.
Cameron failed to reshape the Tories into smoother, more Blairite shape. There is a good chance that Johnson will fail. But for sure labour movement people who give credence or semi-support to Johnsonâs hard Brexit âcommandismâ will play as harmful a role as those Labour people, back in the day, who gave credence to Lloyd Georgeâs âsocialâ imperialism.