Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [31]
He was fortunate in his uncle, who gave him unstinting devotion and support. When, as a boy, he discovered that he had lost his belief in God, the lay preacher forgave him. When he decided to go into the law, his uncle worked through a French grammar book one step ahead of him so that he could get the language qualification that he required. And when he decided to go into politics, a huge gamble for someone without money or connections, his uncle again supported him. The old man lived just long enough to see his nephew become prime minister.8
Lloyd George was made for politics. From the hard work in the committee rooms to the great campaigns, he loved it all. While he enjoyed the cut and thrust of debate, he was essentially good-natured. Unlike Wilson and Clemenceau, he did not hate his opponents. Nor was he an intellectual in politics. Although he read widely, he preferred to pick the brains of experts. On his feet there was no one quicker: he invariably conveyed a mastery of his subject. Once during the Peace Conference Keynes and a colleague realized that they had given him the wrong briefing on the Adriatic. They hastily put a revised position on a sheet of paper and rushed to the meeting, where they found Lloyd George already launched on his subject. As Keynes passed over the paper, Lloyd George glanced at it and, without a pause, gradually modified his arguments until he ended up with the opposite position to the one he had started out with.9
He made his mark early on as a leading radical politician. Where Wilson attacked the big banks and Clemenceau attacked the church, Lloyd George’s favorite targets were the landowners and aristocracy. He rather liked businessmen, especially self-made ones. (He also frequently liked their wives.) As chancellor of the exchequer, he pushed through radical budgets, introducing an income tax for the rich along with benefits for the poor, but he was not a socialist. Like Wilson and Clemenceau, he disliked collectivism, but he was always prepared to work with moderate socialists just as he was prepared to work with Conservatives. 10
Over the course of his career he became a superb, if unconventional, administrator. He shook established procedures by bringing in talented and skilled men from outside the civil service to run government departments, and he ensured the success of his bills by inviting all the interested parties to comment on them. He settled labor disputes by inviting both sides to sit down with him, normal enough procedure today but highly unusual then. “He plays upon men round a table like the chords of a musical instrument,” said a witness to his settlement of a railway dispute, “now pleading, now persuasive, stern, playful and minatory in quick succession.” 11
Naturally optimistic, he was always sure that solutions could be found to even the most difficult problems. “To Lloyd George,” said a friend of his children, “every morning was not a new day, but a new life and a new chance.”12 Sometimes the chances he took were risky, and he engaged in some dubious transactions—a mine in Argentina or the purchase of shares where he had inside knowledge—but he seems to have been motivated more by the desire for financial independence than by greed. He was equally careless in his private life. Where Clemenceau’s affairs with women enhanced his reputation, Lloyd George came close to disaster on more than one occasion when angry husbands threatened to name him in divorce actions. His wife, a strong-willed woman, stuck by him, but the couple grew apart. She preferred to stay in north Wales