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The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George’s Life

Goats and donkeys

Ffion Hague
Harper Press, 608pp, £25,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 11th June 2008

Sam Leith on the new book from Ffion Hague

The Goat, they called him; and goatish he certainly was. He was stubborn, self-willed, exceptionally adept at climbing upward over rocky ground — and then there was the other thing, the thing that gives rise to this book. If there was a single force in his life to rival David Lloyd George’s ambition it was his sex drive.

From the very outset of his political career, and from the very outset of his marriage, the former was the hostage of the latter. (How little, Spectator readers, things change!) Yet, miraculously, the roof never came down. After his second marriage to his mistress of three decades was saluted in the press, his principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester recorded in his diary: ‘He has lived a life of duplicity. He has got clean away with it.’

This well written and intelligent book, though sometimes more solid than sparky, tells an involving, multifarious and often poignant tale. It describes to a tee in the process a particular type of man — egomaniacal, brilliant, sexually unscrupulous and crazily risk-taking — frequently found in politics. As Lloyd George’s son Dick remarked, ‘with an attractive woman he was as much to be trusted as a Bengal tiger with a gazelle’.

David Lloyd George’s childhood in rural North Wales is very well described: the fierce hold of nonconformist religion; the class inequality and sectarian clannishness; the social role of the chapel; the speed and importance of rumour.

It was with characteristic ingenuity and determination of will that Lloyd George wooed and won Margaret Owen, against her parents’ strong opposition and already in the teeth of gossip that he was ‘fast’. Their courtship consisted of a succession of dead-letter drops, strolls in the rain and roadside ambushes. They were married with scant ceremony as Lloyd George — a provincial solicitor with political ambitions — embarked on his spectacular career.

Stories of his fathering, and hushing up, an illegitimate child by a ‘Mrs J’ suggest that his marital fidelity lasted only a few months. He engaged, well into old age, in fleeting dalliances (he did drive women dotty, and could never resist encouraging them) — but he also formed stronger and deeper attachments. The first of these was with ‘Mrs Tim’, the wife of his friend Timothy Davies; an association that caused Margaret great anger and humiliation.

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Amanda Craig

June 13th, 2008 12:40pm

Rachel Johnson has her finger on the pulse of a certain kind of parent, but not, heaven forbid, all of us. Like her, I have observed the insect-like crawl of tiny children weighed down by cellos, whose every hour must be filled.However, what her article overlooks is that children have minds of their own, and by 11 tend to dig their heels in, preferring to play World of Warcraft or watch Absolutely Fabulous for the 300th time instead of learning Mandarin. Some even discover reading or, in the case of my children when faced with yet another au pair who couldn't cook, cooking. Many parents of the present generation can remember having relatively little time with their parents, being turned out of doors with sandwiches and left to their own devices for the rest of the day; these, as Francis Gilbert pointed out in The New School Rules, are among our most blissful memories of childhood. The big problem our children face is not lack of parenting time but that they have no more freedom than battery hens.