Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [30]
Lloyd George had on his hands a country ill prepared for the peace, where the end of the war had brought huge, and irrational, expectations: that making peace would be easy; that wages and benefits would go up and taxes down; that there would be social harmony, or, depending on your point of view, social upheaval. The public mood was unpredictable: at moments vengeful, at others escapist. The most popular book of 1919 was The Young Visiters, a comic novel written by a child. While he was in Paris, Lloyd George had to take time out for labor unrest, parliamentary revolts and the festering sore of Ireland. Yet he entered into the negotiations in Paris as though he had little else on his mind.
If anyone was like Napoleon it was not the poor deluded Northcliffe but the man he hated. Napoleon once said of himself, “Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head as in a cupboard. When I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. Do I wish to sleep? I simply close all the drawers and there I am—asleep.” Lloyd George had those powers of concentration and recuperation, that energy and that fondness for the attack. “The Englishman,” he told a Welsh friend, “never respects any fellow unless that fellow beats him; then he becomes particularly affable towards him.”3
Like Napoleon, Lloyd George had an uncanny ability to sense what other people were thinking. He told Frances Stevenson that he loved staying in hotels: “I am always interested in people—wondering who they are—what they are thinking about—what their lives are like—whether they are enjoying life or finding it a bore.” Although he was a wonderful conversationalist, he was also a very good listener. From the powerful to the humble, adults to children, everyone who met him was made to feel that he or she had something important to say. “One of the most admirable traits in Mr. Lloyd George’s character,” in Churchill’s view, “was his complete freedom at the height of his power, responsibility and good fortune from any thing in the nature of pomposity or superior airs. He was always natural and simple. He was always exactly the same to those who knew him well: ready to argue any point, to listen to disagreeable facts even when controversially presented.” His famous charm was rooted in this combination of curiosity and attention.4
Lloyd George was also a great orator. Where Clemenceau drove home his points with devastating clarity and sarcasm, and Wilson preached, Lloyd George’s speeches, which he prepared so carefully and which sounded so spontaneous, were at once moving and witty, inspiring and intimate. Like a great actor, he was a skillful manipulator of his audience. “I pause,” he once told someone who asked him about his technique, “I reach out my hand to the people and draw them to me. Like children they seem then. Like little children.”5
John Maynard Keynes, who went to Paris as the Treasury’s representative and did so much to create myths about the Peace Conference, wove a special one for Lloyd George. “How can I convey to the reader,” the great economist asked, “any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity?” There spoke the voice both of intellectually superior Cambridge and of stolid John Bull, but it spoke romantic nonsense. The real Wales in which Lloyd George grew up was a modest sober little land, with slate mines and shipbuilding, fishermen and farmers.6
Lloyd George liked to talk of his origins in a humble cottage, but in fact he came from the educated artisan class. His father, who died when he was very young, was a schoolmaster; the uncle who brought