Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [32]
People often wrote Lloyd George off as a mere opportunist. Clemenceau once dismissed him as an English solicitor: “All arguments are good to him when he wishes to win a case and, if it is necessary, he uses the next day arguments which he had rejected or refuted the previous day.” Wilson, sharp-eyed where the failings of others were concerned, thought Lloyd George lacked principle: he wished that he had “a less slippery customer to deal with than L.G. for he is always temporizing and making concessions.” In fact, Lloyd George was a man of principle; but he was also intensely pragmatic. He did not waste his energies on quixotic crusades. He opposed the Boer War, when Britain waged war on the small South African republics, because he thought it was wrong and wasteful. His tenacious public opposition took courage and nearly cost him his life when an angry mob in Birmingham stormed the platform where he was speaking. But it paid off politically. As the British government blundered its way through to a hard-won peace, Lloyd George emerged as a national leader.13
When the Great War broke out, it was inevitable that he would play an important part in the British war effort. As Churchill, an increasingly close friend, wrote: “L.G. has more true insight and courage than anyone else. He really sticks at nothing—no measure too far-reaching, no expedient too novel.” He hated war, Lloyd George told a Labour delegation in 1916, but “once you are in it you have to go grimly through it, otherwise the causes which hang upon a successful issue will perish.” The wise old Conservative Arthur Balfour had seen leaders come and go. “He is impulsive,” he said of Lloyd George, “he had never given a thought before the War to military matters; he does not perhaps adequately gauge the depths of his own ignorance; and he has certain peculiarities which no doubt make him, now and then, difficult to work with.” But there was no one else, in Balfour’s opinion, who could successfully lead Britain. 14
Although Lloyd George had come a long way from his village in north Wales, he never became part of the English upper classes. Neither he nor his wife liked visiting the great country houses, and he positively disliked staying with the king and queen. When George V, as a mark of honor, invited him to carry the sword of state at the opening of Parliament, Lloyd George privately said, “I won’t be a flunkey,” and begged off. Most of his friends were, like him, self-made men. Balfour, who was a Cecil, from an old and famous family, was a rare exception. And Balfour, with his affable willingness to take second place, suited him very well as a foreign minister. 15
In Paris, Lloyd George ignored the Foreign Office wherever he could and used his own staff of bright young men. The bureaucrats particularly resented his private secretary, the high-minded, religious and arrogant Philip Kerr. Because Lloyd George hated reading memoranda, Kerr, who dealt with much of his correspondence, was the gatekeeper to the great man. Even Balfour was moved to mild reproof when he asked Kerr whether the prime minister had read a particular document and was told no, but that Kerr had. “Not quite the same thing, is it, Philip—yet?” The professional diplomats muttered among themselves, and Lord Curzon, who had been left behind in London to mind the shop while Balfour and Lloyd George were in Paris, was pained. The prime minister paid no attention.16
Was this a bad thing for Britain? He clearly did not have a grasp on foreign affairs equal to that of his predecessor, Lord Salisbury, or his later successor Churchill. His knowledge had great gaps. “Who are the Slovaks?” he asked in 1916. “I can’t seem to place them.” His