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Friday 5 December 2008

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

Goats and donkeys

Sam Leith on the new book from Ffion Hague

The longest was of course with Frances Stevenson, 25-odd years his junior. First his daughter Megan’s governess, then his private secretary, and for her whole adult life his mistress, she finally became Mrs Lloyd George two years after Dame Margaret’s death.

His powers of concealment and conciliation were breathtaking — notwithstanding that one wife spent more time in Wales and the other in London. Frances frequently slept under the same roof as Maggie and was a close confidante to Megan. Even when, far down the line, the true nature of their relationship emerged, somehow the Welsh Wizard kept all his plates spinning. Frances gave birth to a daughter, Jennifer, whose paternity remains in question (Frances was engaged in her only other known love affair at the time); yet scandal and ruin, always threatened, never erupted.

Ffion Hague’s title offers a tempting opportunity for misreading. Frances and Margaret — who was the pain and who was the privilege? By the end of the book, it’s hard to escape the impression that bitchy and neurotic Frances was by and large the former, and the admirably clever and generous-spirited Margaret by and large the latter; but Ffion Hague’s sympathies are subtler and more capacious than that. And, of course, Mrs Hague actually means by her title — here perhaps she is rather too easy on the cheating old humbug — that the pain of being deceived balanced out the privilege of being a woman in this great man’s life.

Lloyd George doesn’t seem to have been the sort of philanderer who hates women; he loved them and needed them and was, after his fashion, kind. But he didn’t love them enough — even the two he really cared about for a long time — to honour them as equals. And he did, with some ruthlessness, cause or allow them pain when it suited his own purpose.

Hague more than once cautions against judging Lloyd George’s infidelity by the standards of our own more idealistic age: everyone except for Winston Churchill was at it, back then. But he was extraordinarily selfish in many respects. When he was offered the Liberal candidacy in the seat he was to represent for 55 years, Maggie begged him not to accept, ‘arguing that it was impractical for him to take on an unpaid job in London when they were expecting a baby, and did not even have a house of their own’. Lloyd George ignored her. He had been raised, says Hague, ‘to go as far as he could as early as he could’.

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