Lloyd George: From Peace to War, 1912-16

The third volume of John Grigg's highly praised biography begins at a moment when Lloyd George is at a pinnacle of success and achievement. Yet the next two years see a crisis in his personal and political life. Almost at once his career s threatened by a financial scandal which nearly destroys it, and his personal life undergoes a significant change when he falls in love with Frances Stevenson, a woman half his age who becomes his secretary, mistress and (many years later) his wife. At the same time he is trying to recover for the Liberals the momentum of social reform that his 1909 budget and health insurance scheme earlier provided. The issue of Home Rule for Ireland comes to the fore again, and Lloyd George becomes involved in his first attempt to negotiate an Irish settlement.Then the whole course of his own and the country's life is changed by the outbreak of European War, and by Britain's decision, which he reluctantly but firmly supports, to intervene in it. Within weeks he is transformed from a great but controversial peace minister into one whom even his former enemies hail as a great war minister. He swiftly grasps the need to mobilize the nation's resources on a scale never before contemplated, and to use the power of the State in a way repugnant to traditional English, and more especially Liberal values. As Minister of Munitions he carries through what is almost another industrial revolution -- and a social one as well. At the same time his imaginative views on strategy bring him into conflict with the professional warlords, and his advocacy of conscription outrages many of his Liberal colleagues. Eventually his dissatisfaction with the higher direction of the war leads him to an act of revolt which brings the Asquith government down and results in his own appointment as Prime Minister.John Grigg describes this momentous phase of his life dramatically, and with an abundance of vivid detail. The story is told with sympathy but by no means uncritically. As in the two previous volumes, the author's aim is to present Lloyd George as he really was, both as a politician and man, The treatment therefore is entirely candid, and while Lloyd George's astonishing talents and merits are clearly exhibited, no attempt is made to disguise his faults. The book ends with the formation in December 1916 of his government, whose many novel and unorthodox features make it a landmark in British constitutional history.