Lloyd George, the son of a farmer, was brought up as a Welsh-speaker and ardent chapelgoer. It was there, as much as in the London courts he attended as a solicitor, that he learned the rhetorical tricks that established him as the greatest orator of the age. He acquired the skill of presenting complex issues as clear-cut struggles between right and wrong. He could be lofty and lyrical or pointed and precise, according to the character or mood of his audience, which made him equally persuasive in a tête-à-tête in the Commons’ smoking room, in a cabinet meeting or in front of an audience of thousands.
Lloyd George did not attend university but educated himself, reading widely in literature and political theory. He was drawn to the question of land ownership, since his links were with rural Wales. Though the landscape of his political imagination was pre-industrial, he had no arguments with industrialists, businessmen or with the accumulation of capital, and no interest in socialism. In his youth he had been attracted to Liberalism by Joseph Chamberlain’s programme of social reform. ‘Our Joe’ was an inspiration and a kindred spirit, yet the young Welshman would soon identify Chamberlain’s fatal flaws – the monomania and dogmatism that manifested themselves in his obsessive opposition to Irish Home Rule. When Chamberlain left Gladstone’s Liberal party over its Irish policy, Lloyd George remained on Gladstone’s side. It would not be the last time that his pragmatism overcame his principles.
In the Commons, Lloyd George came to public notice as the most eloquent opponent of the Boer War, attacking the ‘racial arrogance’ that sustained imperialism. It was not that he wished to disband the empire, rather that he wanted to refashion it as a federation of autonomous states. He demonstrated an affinity with C-B, who, on assuming office, rewarded his disciple by appointing him to the Board of Trade. Lloyd George’s greatest achievement in that capacity was averting a national railway strike. Drawing on all his charm and verbal dexterity, he had brokered a deal between the unions and the railway companies, who had previously been irreconcilable adversaries. Even the Daily Mail had been impressed by Lloyd George’s ministerial record, and welcomed the radical MP’s appointment as chancellor: ‘he has proved in office that he possesses in exceptional measure … practical business capacity … initiative, and large open-mindedness’. This irrepressible man of action, an eloquent Machiavelli with no establishment allegiances, would dominate Westminster politics for the next fifteen years.
Conservative journalists were not so enthusiastic about Churchill’s elevation to the presidency of the Board of Trade. A few years previously he had abandoned the Tory party, his natural political home, crossing the floor in protest against growing support for protectionism within the Unionist Alliance. According to the National Review, Churchill’s act of ‘treachery’ was typical of ‘a soldier of fortune who has never pretended to be animated by any motive beyond a desire for his own advancement’. The accusation of egotism would be repeated throughout Churchill’s career, along with the related charges of political grandstanding and of an addiction to power. Civil servants complained that Churchill was unpunctual, prey to sudden enthusiasms, and enthralled by extravagant ideas and fine phrases. He was a free and fiery spirit who inspired admiration and mistrust in equal measure. Allies hailed him as a genius, while his enemies regarded him as unbalanced and unscrupulous.
Although the Tory press highlighted Churchill’s pragmatism, he was not without principles. He was genuinely committed to social reform, just as his father, Lord Randolph, had been. He had found Balfour’s party reactionary and inhospitable; the Liberals welcomed him as one who could help them improve the conditions of the working classes. It was a shared commitment to social reform – as well as shared ambition – that brought Lloyd George and Churchill together inside Asquith’s government. The pair understood that a new period of political history had opened, in which the ‘condition of the people’ was the dominant issue. Both men were convinced that extensive reform was the context for future progress and social stability. Both also believed that domestic legislation offered the Liberals the opportunity of outmanoeuvring the Labour party and checking the spread of socialism.
‘The Terrible Twins’, as the Tory press dubbed them, were responsible for introducing a slew of social legislation and significantly increasing the portion of government expenditure devoted to social services. Churchill was instrumental in passing the Trade Boards Bill, which set down minimum wage criteria, and in setting up the labour exchanges that increased labour mobility. Lloyd George, meanwhile, was the driving force behind the 1908 Children Act, which protected minors from dangerous trades and abuse, and the Old Age Pensions Act (1908), which awarded non-contributory pensions to men over seventy who earned less than £31 a year. The 1910 Education Act, which aimed to provide youths with a choice of employment, was also Lloyd George’s proposal, as was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which moved the mentally ill from poorhouses and prisons to specialized institutions. Finally, and most famously, Lloyd George introduced the National Insurance Act of 1911, the first ever piece of health and unemployment insurance legislation.
When the first groups of elderly men came to collect their pensions, one post office worker recalled that ‘tears of joy would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say … “God Bless that Lord (sic) George”’. The popular elevation of the proudly plebeian chancellor to the status of a lord suggests that the Victorian spirit of deference was not yet dead, but the new legislation represented a twentiethrather than a nineteenth-century response to England’s social ills. Promoted by politicians and civil servants with professional rather than patrician backgrounds, it laid the foundation for the future welfare state by guaranteeing minimum standards for a portion of the population. It thereby granted people their rights as citizens, and welcomed them, in the contemporary phrase, ‘to the common table of the nation’. It is hardly surprising that the programme was described as a form of socialistic ‘New Liberalism’, or that it inspired enthusiasm among students and the young intelligentsia. The rising generation believed that Lloyd George and Churchill had gone some way to satisfying their demand for social justice.
Lloyd George and Churchill probably went as far as the Tory-dominated House of Lords and the laissez-faire ideology of many Liberals would allow them. There was also Asquith’s caution to overcome. While the prime minister assented to most of their policies, he prided himself on never being ‘pushed along against [my] will … by energetic colleagues’. Whenever he regarded a proposal as too risky, Asquith’s conservative instincts prompted him to apply ‘the brake’. In private, Lloyd George complained to Churchill about his ‘aimlessness’.
Yet it was also possible that danger could come from activity. That was one of the lessons that Asquith might have drawn from the controversy provoked by the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. Lloyd George’s budget was informed by the principle of the redistribution of wealth, a radical notion that had been alien to most Victorians. It aimed to fund the government’s extensive social welfare programmes with a graduated tax on high incomes and by taxing land through various measures, including a 20 per cent tax on any unearned increment of land values. The chancellor justified these unprecedented peacetime demands on wealth by calling it ‘a war budget … for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’. The proposed taxes would not affect middle-class salary earners or the majority of industrialists, whom Lloyd George identified as the Liberals’ natural constituency. Once again the chancellor was trying to quell social unrest and outflank Labour, whose MPs could only applaud him. If the price was to alienate the landed gentry, it was one Lloyd George was happy to pay.