Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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was always basically a ministerialist and not a man for to-the-sword oppos-

ition, which he felt would be inappropriate. He did not want to do any-

thing that might look like threatening national unity. But those behind

him found the absence of a strong lead frustrating. He kept up only ‘a mod-

erate level of political activity’, speaking now and then in parliament and

in the country, and coming out in favour of votes for women (which he

had opposed before 1914), proportional representation and a League of

Nations.

This stance was never going to cause Lloyd George any sleepless

nights.

On a number of occasions (May 1917; May, September and November

1918) Lloyd George tried to lure Asquith back into government, despite

some doubts in his close circle (‘it would be fatal to take Asquith back in

any position’, thought Frances Stevenson) and Lloyd George’s own sense

that Asquith was ‘sterile’ when it came to policy ideas. Various posts were

dangled in front of him – Foreign Secretary, Chancellor, Lord Chancellor

(with a tempting £10,000 salary and a £5,000 pension) – but Asquith

turned them all down. He told one intermediary that under no conditions

would he serve in a government under Lloyd George, whom he mistrusted

profoundly and who had ‘incurable defects, both of intellect and charac-

ter’.

At the end of the war Asquith indicated he would like to serve on the

British delegation to the peace conference but met with a veto from Lloyd

George.

On the only occasion when Asquith tried to turn the heat up on Lloyd

George during the war it backﬁred on him. In May 1918 he led calls for

a select committee to inquire into whether Lloyd George had misled par-

liament about troop levels available to the generals on the western front.

Lloyd George responded with an impassioned ﬁghting speech, while Asquith

underwhelmed with his. Asquith’s motion was then defeated by 108 votes

to 295 (71 Liberal MPs voting with the government). The vote underlined

the party split and was later regarded as a loyalty test by Lloyd George, dis-

tinguishing those Liberals who would be on the coalition ticket in the

November 1918 general election (given what Asquith mocked as a ‘coupon’)

from others who would face Conservative challengers.

The 1918 election was a disaster for Asquith. The Liberal machine had

been neglected during the war. He had little in the way of a positive pro-

gramme to offer and largely ended up simply warning against giving Lloyd

George a ‘blank cheque’. His heart was not in it and he expected to lose,

but the outcome was worse than he had thought likely. The coalition swept

the board with 478 seats (including 133 Lloyd George Liberals) while Asquith’s

Liberals won only 28 being overtaken by Labour with 57. Even more humil-

iatingly, Asquith himself lost badly in the East Fife seat he had held for

32 years.

It might have been a good moment to bow out quietly. But with no

obvious successor Asquith chose to soldier on as Liberal leader (Sir Donald

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Maclean was made acting chairman of the beleaguered Asquithites in the

Commons until their chief could ﬁnd another seat). He was described at

this time as ‘stoical to the point of indifference’ and was really in a sort of

political limbo. In the ﬁrst half of 1919 he received not one invitation to

speak from any Liberal association in the country.

Taking on the job that

year of chairing a Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge univers-

ities was hardly the sort of assignment to bring him back to the centre of

the political stage.

In February 1920 Asquith returned to parliament through a by-election

in Paisley. His fastidious and ambiguous attitude towards taking up the

political cudgel again came out in private comments about not ‘look[ing]

forward to the adventure, which however has to be faced’ and not being

‘very fond of going back to Scotland’. However, he campaigned strongly

against the government, criticising it over the Versailles Treaty and puni-

tive German reparations (not a ‘clean peace’), and on Ireland (where his

call for dominion status was denounced as ‘lunacy’ by Lloyd George but

later more or less accepted in the 1921 treaty).

Cheering crowds accom-

panied Asquith back to the Palace of Westminster but he met with a frigid

reception in the Commons and it was all soon downhill again.

The odds were stacked against a great political come back. He was the

leader of a small and unhappy parliamentary force. His own political pos-

ition was ambiguous, as he was rightly seen as a ‘whiggish’ ﬁgure but was

the leader of the more radical part of the divided Liberal Party. Lloyd

George’s supporters were soon gloating that Asquith was ‘ﬁnished … he has

no ﬁght left in him’, while his own followers complained about ‘leaders

who refused to lead’. Graham Stewart has put his ﬁnger on ‘Asquith’s

inability to inject new thinking into Liberalism. He offered nothing to

suggest he had adjusted to a changed environment, but nor would he step

aside for someone who might carry forward the party into the post-war

world.’ ‘Asquith cuts no ice’, protested his old ally Edward Grey. ‘He is

using the machine of a great political brain to re-arrange old ideas.’

Attempts he pursued for a while in 1921 to create a new centre-left group,

bringing together Liberals, ‘moderate Labour’ and even some Tories, did

not get far. ‘Asquith devoted to bridge and small talk, doing no real work,

and leaving the party leaderless’, was one insider’s impression. ‘They all

want him to go’, it was said, but could not see how to shift him. ‘It was

extremely difﬁcult’, another Liberal said, ‘to dispossess an ex-Prime

Minister from the leadership of a party except w[ith] his own good-will

which at present appeared in A.’s case to be not forthcoming.’

Like a general ﬁghting the wrong battle Asquith took pleasure from the

fact that in the 1922 general election his wing of the Liberal Party did

slightly better (winning 60 seats) than Lloyd George’s (53 seats), though

more signiﬁcant was that Labour’s advance continued (to 142 seats, though

only marginally ahead of the Liberals in vote-share). In 1923 the two

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Liberal factions were brought together by Baldwin’s move towards pro-

tection but the unity was superﬁcial and half-hearted. Asquith remained

formally party leader but Lloyd George controlled substantial independent

funds and provided the real dynamism and ideas. Tensions and bitter mis-

trust continued. After the December 1923 election the Conservatives had

258 seats, the Liberals 158 and Labour 191. Asquith was the ‘kingmaker’,

rejecting the idea of a coalition and opting to put in a minority and

inexperienced Labour government which he judged would not last long

and the failure of which would he hoped beneﬁt the Liberals. It was a

major miscalculation, for when Labour fell from ofﬁce in October 1924 and

another general election was held, which the Conservatives won, the

real casualties were the Liberals, whose vote share fell from 29 per cent

to 17 per cent and who lost three-quarters of their seats, being reduced to

40 MPs. Asquith was again unhorsed, losing Paisley.

Again unable and unwilling to see it was all up, he accepted a peerage

(becoming the Earl of Oxford and Asquith) and the Garter, but remained

overall party leader, while Lloyd George led in the Commons. This arrange-

ment was unstable, and an uneasy partnership that could never last long.

Things came to a head in May 1926 when they fell out over how to res-

pond to the General Strike (Asquith backing the government). The next

month Asquith, now 74, had a stroke and was incapacitated for three

months, after which he resigned the leadership in October 1926. His post-

premiership had been a painful and protracted anti-climax and polit-

ical decline: ‘he had stayed too long in an impossible situation’, Jenkins

concluded, his reasons for hanging on largely negative, and offering the

declining Liberal Party little that was positive.

Outside politics, Asquith’s experience as an ex-prime minister was not

rewarding. He told a parliamentary committee that premiers were under-

paid and he had left ofﬁce ‘much poorer’ than when he entered it, though

he said he was not in favour of pensions for prime ministers. Privately, the

Asquiths did think the country ought to provide for them in some way,

looking enviously at the big lump sums given to many of the top generals

after the war.

Money seemed to run through the Asquiths’ ﬁngers and

they were forced to move from their large house in Cavendish Square to a

more modest address in Bedford Square. Asquith’s ﬁnancial position

became so bad that some of his friends organised an appeal through

The Times for a fund to pay his debts and give him a private pension for the

last few years of his life; he left only £9,345 on his death (about £300,000

in today’s money).

He wrote several impersonal and unrevealing volumes of reminiscences

and memoirs, which did not sell as well as Margot Asquith’s more colourful

and indiscreet autobiography and other writings. The problem was ‘he had

no desire to tell the world what really happened’, as Roy Jenkins noted,

‘and he was insufﬁciently interested in himself.’ He did not enjoy the

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House of Lords, thinking that the quality of speaking and debating there

was ‘deplorably low’.

Six previous prime ministers had been Chancellors

of Oxford University, but when Asquith ran for the post in 1925 the

university electorate chose to snub one of the most distinguished living

Oxonians.

Asquith was a fairly heavy drinker for the last ten to 15 years of his life,

but he experienced good general health until the last two years before the

end when it deteriorated rapidly and he had several strokes and suffered

from hardening of the arteries, making him sometimes confused, before he

died, aged 75, on 15 February 1928.

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Lloyd George to Chamberlain

David Lloyd George (resigned 19 October 1922)

We are now familiar with the televised exit from Number 10 of the resign-

ing or defeated prime minister – the brief farewell remarks, the posing in

front of the cameras with spouse and family, and the brave waves before

the ofﬁcial car speeds them out of Downing Street for the last time. Lloyd

George’s fall and exit from power in October 1922 was the ﬁrst to be cap-

tured on ﬁlm in this way. A short silent newsreel ﬁlm shows Conservative

MPs spilling out of the Carlton Club meeting after the dramatic party

debate and vote there which triggered his resignation, there is stilted

footage of other top politicians of the time and the King, and – with the

caption ‘I am no longer Prime Minister’ – a top-hatted and smartly-dressed

Lloyd George, with his wife and daughter, stepping out of Number 10,

being saluted by the police constable on duty, and pausing for the camera-

men. The ﬁlm ends with a caption ‘In the Wilderness but with one faithful

friend at least’, showing a relaxed former prime minister, in the country

with his dog, about to go for a walk.

The precise timing and the way in which Lloyd George was overthrown

may have been unexpected, but the insecurity of his position, the decay

of his political authority, the growing strength of his enemies, and the

unravelling of his coalition had been apparent for some time. He may

well have ‘retained wide public support to the end’, as Kenneth O. Morgan

argues,

but strains and unrest within the ranks of the Conservative Party

in parliament were crucial in bringing down a prime minister who had no

secure party base of his own in Westminster and Whitehall.

Lloyd George had probably seen it coming, particularly after the failure

of his efforts in 1920–21 to realign the party system and create a new

Centre Party around himself. By 1922 he was tired after six years as prime

minister and after having been in ministerial harness for nearly 17 consec-

utive years, including four years of war. He had talked privately of his

desire to retire, to allow a Conservative to lead the coalition, to have some

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rest and to ‘write his book’. In the summer of 1922, when the press baron

Lord Northcliffe became insane and died, Lloyd George wondered whether

a group of his rich friends should buy The Times so he could then retire as

prime minister and become the newspaper’s editor. Even while still prime

minister he had begun to prepare for life after Number 10. He bought some

land and built a new house for himself at Churt in Surrey, where he

planned to farm. He signed a contract and started to write his war memoirs

(he showed 15,000 words to a friend) but the announcement (in August

1922) that his publishers were paying him the-then all-time record sum of

£90,000 provoked such a storm of controversy he felt compelled to say that

all proﬁts would go to war charities before deciding to drop the project and

(after acrimonious exchanges and legal threats) repay the advance he had

been given. Like other long-serving prime ministers, however, he could not

bring himself voluntarily to give up ofﬁce and power. He had to be pushed

out by his erstwhile Conservative supporters who decided they no longer

needed him and would be better off without him.

Within a few hours of the Carlton Club meeting on 19 October 1922,

Lloyd George had seen the King and submitted his resignation as prime

minister. He stayed in Number 10 for a few more days, while his successor

Bonar Law was formally elected Conservative leader, and moved out on

23 October. He was not downcast – in fact the reverse. ‘Rhyddid!’ (Welsh

for ‘Freedom!’), he declared to one adviser, and other Number 10 and civil-

service staff reported him to be cheerful, light-hearted, joking, relieved the

end had ﬁnally come, and showing no signs of regret at leaving ofﬁce. No

one believed, when the famous front door closed after him, that he would

be out forever. The King, political allies and enemies, advisers, friends and

family members, and Lloyd George himself – all expected he would return

to power, and soon. One of Lloyd George’s private secretaries, Sir Edward

Grigg, loaned him his house in Westminster as a temporary London base,

but Dame Margaret Lloyd George seemed to think it would not be too

long before they were back living in Number 10 (later, they had houses in

Chelsea and then Kensington).

Lloyd George was only 59 years old, world

famous, and still at the height of his powers. No one suspected that, in the

22 more years he would live, he would never be in government again.

Lloyd George had a complicated and tangled private life, and he set

up an extraordinary arrangement after leaving the premiership. He has

been described as a ‘serial adulterer’ and was effectively (if not in the strict

legal sense) bigamous. His wife, Dame Margaret, preferred to live mainly in

North Wales, in Criccieth, where she was a well-known public ﬁgure and

did much work representing Lloyd George in his Caernarvon constituency,

which he now seldom visited. The house at Churt (Bron-y-de) was largely

the domain of his secretary-mistress, Frances Stevenson. She became legally

his second wife in 1943, when he was 80 years old and she was 55, but the

two had been in what was virtually a parallel marriage for 30 years before

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then. This relationship was kept secret from the public and out of the

newspapers but produced considerable tension in the Lloyd George family

circle. In 1929 Frances Stevenson gave birth to a daughter, though she was

presented to the world as an adopted child. While it is not certain Lloyd

George was the girl’s father (Miss Stevenson had also been having an affair

with Thomas Tweed, a Lloyd George aide and Liberal Party organiser), he

doted on her, took a great deal of interest in her upbringing and allowed

her to call him ‘Taid’ (the Welsh for ‘grandfather’). In his own self-centred

way Lloyd George loved and needed both women. But he was not faithful

to either of them – a notorious womaniser, there were many stories of

him chasing after young secretaries, maids, and farm girls long into old

age. In scenes straight from an Alan Ayckbourn play, a French farce or

a soap opera, Lloyd George’s daily life and holiday arrangements after he

left Number 10 often involved frantic comings and goings, with one ‘wife’

coming in at the frontdoor while the other left by the backdoor.

There are many photographs of the ex-prime minister walking the

grounds, tending his fruit trees and inspecting his pigs on his farm in the

1920s and 1930s. After leaving ofﬁce he preferred to live mostly at Churt

with Frances Stevenson. He eventually built up an estate of about 750 acres,

pouring a large amount of money into reclaiming, irrigating and cultivat-

ing poor land, running a poultry farm, keeping bees and selling honey,

opening a farm shop. He was particularly successful with his orchards and

fruit, winning prizes and developing a new strain of raspberry that was

named after him. He was an interfering employer, and his farm managers

often did not last long, some complaining it was run more as a ‘hobby’ than

a proper ‘business’.

Lloyd George left public life substantially wealthier than when he entered

it. He had after 1922 an expensive and afﬂuent lifestyle, with his estate, a

large personal staff of secretaries, researchers and assistants, and a liking

for long foreign holidays. He turned down offers of City directorships, how-

ever. He received an annuity of £2,000 a year from the American tycoon

Andrew Carnegie and made serious money from his writing and journal-

ism, being paid £1 per word by the Hearst Press of America for thousand-

word articles on contemporary political and international issues which

were given world syndication. He has been described as ‘the highest paid

political journalist of his time’, and one estimate is he made £30,000 in this

way in his ﬁrst year out of ofﬁce (equivalent to nearly a million pounds

today). He once admitted that in his ﬁrst four years out of ofﬁce his jour-

nalistic income was ‘much greater’ than the aggregate of his ministerial

salaries during 17 years in government. In the ﬁve years from 1937 he

made a total of £43,000 from his journalism. The advances, royalties and

newspaper-serialisation earnings from his War Memoirs in the 1930s added

up to something like £65,000 (equivalent to £2.4 million today). Lloyd

George was not personally corrupt but he realised and exploited the fact

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that, as an ex-prime minister, he was ‘a valuable commercial property’, as

Kenneth O. Morgan says. In his ﬁrst year out of ofﬁce (1923) he was able to

cash in on his reputation as a world statesman in a triumphant ﬁve-week

lecture tour of America, where he was the most popular and fêted visit-

ing celebrity since Charles Dickens, 80 years previously. He controlled

substantial political funds of his own (totalling several million pounds)

– controversially built up from honours sales and the purchase and then

proﬁtable re-sale of the Daily Chronicle newspaper – used for organisation,

campaigning and propaganda, and to support his energetic ideas-mongering

(funding teams of advisers and experts).

Up to 1931 (and to a less extent after that) Lloyd George remained a

critical player and at the centre of British politics. He was one of the most

creative politicians of the period, brimming with ideas, plans and schemes.

Some of his impact was negative, in that he was a bogeyman to his rival

political leaders, haunting their minds and their political calculations as

they manoeuvred to thwart him and keep him out. Baldwin and MacDonald

‘get on together’, commented one insider in the late 1920s ‘because they

both hate and fear [Lloyd George]. He is rarely for long out of their minds.’

When MacDonald, the Labour leader, stayed at Chequers, the prime min-

ister’s ofﬁcial country residence, he would have Lloyd George’s photograph

taken down and put away in a cupboard. Baldwin defaced photographs of

him in his private photo album. Lloyd George had a low opinion of them,

and there was a strong mutual antipathy towards Neville Chamberlain too.

He may have been ‘the man who won the war’, but his political opponents

did their best to exploit the problems and broken promises of the years

after 1918. Much of the politics of the 1920s were a reaction against Lloyd

George – his methods, record, policies and personality.

Ideas about new coalitions or alliances, dividing or breaking up the estab-

lished parties, seemed never far from his thoughts. ‘I am working for a

break 2 or 3 years hence after we have formed a Centre Party with a strong

progressive bias’, he said soon after losing power. These dreams never mate-

rialised, but options were kept open and feelers put out to left and right at

various times, hoping to attract moderate Labour and progressive Con-

servatives, and he sought to exploit whatever opportunities came his way

as the tectonic plates of the party system groaned and shifted, with ﬁve

elections in nine years (1922–31) and two periods of minority Labour gov-

ernment (1924 and 1929–31). The underlying problem was that his polit-

ical space was more and more squeezed as the Liberals lost out to Labour and

the Conservatives and as two-party politics was restored. In the November

1922 election, while the Conservatives won 344 seats and Labour 142, the

Liberals were split, with the Asquithites winning 60 seats and Lloyd George

coming in fourth, with his followers winning 55 seats. In December 1923

the reunited Liberals made gains, but their 158 seats still put them in third

place, while the October 1924 election was a disaster, in which their national

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vote fell from 29 per cent to 17 per cent and they were reduced to only

40 seats. The revival in 1929, with 6 per cent more of the vote and 19 more

seats (making a total of 59), was the last high point before a complete col-

lapse in 1931. In 1924–29 and even more so after 1931, large government

majorities effectively sidelined him. ‘Ideas and experts were not enough’, as

Kenneth O. Morgan argued. ‘He needed also supporters, organisation, a

party base – above all, public trust. These were assets which Lloyd George,

however fertile in ideas and initiatives, conspicuously lacked.’

Lloyd George had not come to power in 1916 through any sort of ‘normal’

party route and, after 1922, he had little prospect of regaining power that

way either. Although he became Liberal Party leader 1926–31, at the same

time, as John Campbell points out, he ‘cultivated his Coalition image as a

man above party – a de Gaulle ﬁgure … the Man of Emergency, to be kept

in reserve for the ultimate crisis when his poor successors would be swept

away by events’. Such a stance appealed to the instincts of a politician who

always had a ‘presidential’ outlook and style and who was not a good team

player. It was hard to imagine him as easily ﬁtting into anything but the

number one position after having been prime minister: ‘I’ll serve under any

man you like’, as he once said, ‘but I pity the man I serve under.’ The

trouble was that while the role of a ‘permanent one-man opposition’

played to his strengths and was perhaps the only one circumstances permit-

ted, it was ultimately a cul-de-sac. He thought his independence was an asset,

as Campbell notes, but the absence of a strong party base left him isolated, cut

off from the real road to power and, eventually, in the wilderness.

Liberal reunion after 1923 was always rather cosmetic, and Lloyd George’s

relations with Asquith, who remained the party leader until October 1926,

were edgy and uneasy. There was considerable suspicion towards, and mis-

trust of, the returning prodigal son, with bitter arguments over the Lloyd

George Political Fund. Lloyd George wanted to keep complete control over

his political war-chest and kept his own separate headquarters, while the

Asquithites and the main party machine badgered him with demands to

‘hand us your dirty money’, as he liked to put it (he did release large sums

for electioneering, but never as much as they wanted). When he and

Asquith differed over the 1926 General Strike (Asquith condemning it

outright; Lloyd George more sympathetic to the unions and calling for a

negotiated settlement), the party old guard tried to seize the chance

to force him out, but messages of support ﬂooding in showed Lloyd George

was more in touch with majority Liberal opinion. Instead Asquith was

routed, resigning a few months later. As John Campbell notes, in the

1920s Asquith hung on too long and ‘offered nothing but his past’, while

Lloyd George appeared to be the man with the political future, the energy

and the ideas. Had Lloyd George won control of the Liberal Party sooner,

he might have been better able to rescue its position and restore its

fortunes.

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‘When Lloyd George came back to the party, ideas came back to the

party’, one Liberal politician said. What Lloyd George tried to offer in the

1920s was a non-socialist radical alternative, a politics of creative ideas,

attractive to moderate and progressive opinion. ‘This weekend’, he once

boasted, ‘I have 14 professors at Churt!’

Economists (including Keynes),

social-policy researchers, and other experts were pulled in to form a ‘brain’s

trust’, and a series of policy reviews and plans – given catchy short-hand

titles: ‘The Green Book’, ‘The Yellow Book’, ‘The Orange Book’ – spelt

out bold and forward-looking proposals for tackling the problems of

agriculture, unemployment and industry through public works, state

investment, land nationalisation, and economic planning. It added up to

something like a British-style ‘New Deal’ programme and testiﬁed to the

ex-prime minister’s continuing dynamism, radicalism and openness to

fresh thinking and new ideas. In his late-sixties and in politics for nearly

40 years (he became Father of the House, the longest-serving MP, in 1929)

he had not been fossilised by the experience.

Younger radicals were enthused

while some more right-wing Liberals defected to the Conservatives. But though

the headlines were captured, and the contrast with Baldwin’s ‘Safety First’ and

MacDonald’s call for ‘no monkeying’ was marked, the electoral rewards (in

1929) were scanty.

Lloyd George and the Liberals were on a hiding-to-nothing in helping to

prop up a minority Labour government after 1929 but receiving little in

return. Divisions within the Liberal Party were deepening while Lloyd

George was casting about for some formula to escape from the tightening

third-party squeeze they were experiencing. He toyed fruitlessly with the

idea of a Centre Party, talking with mavericks like Mosley and Churchill

and with dissident young Tories like Macmillan. In February 1931 George

Lansbury on his own initiative wrote to Lloyd George urging him to join

the Labour Party, suggesting he could become its deputy leader and secure

Cabinet seats for other Liberals who went over with him. Lloyd George’s

reply that he was more interested in advancing his ideas and causes than in

holding ofﬁce was not convincing. It seems by July 1931 he was closer to

regaining ofﬁce and power than at any other time between 1922 and 1940.

The embattled MacDonald, it is suggested, was almost on the brink of

bringing Lloyd George and the Liberals into government, with secret talks

going on and rumours that Lloyd George would become Leader of the

House of Commons and either Chancellor or Foreign Secretary.

With cruel bad luck, Lloyd George was knocked out of action at one of

the crucial moments in inter-war British politics, falling seriously ill and

needing a prostate operation just as the Labour government collapsed in

the great political-ﬁnancial crisis of August 1931 and a ‘National’ Govern-

ment was formed. Other top Liberals (Samuel and Reading) joined the Cab-

inet and Lloyd George’s son Gwilym became a junior minister. ‘I may be of

some use later’, he told MacDonald on 30 August, and it was assumed he

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