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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

At the very end of the interview, Frances was asked a seemingly innocent question: had she regretted not having a child? As Jennifer sat in her neighbour’s house [watching the television], she heard her mother deny her very existence, saying: ‘Lloyd George was my child’.

Hague’s emphasis on the distress this caused Jennifer seems slightly off-beam: on the same page we’re told that it was at her own insistence that Frances’s 1967 memoirs included no mention of her. Rather, I think it was a truth: Lloyd George, spoiled and pampered from childhood, remained childlike in many respects.

He threw jealous fits when Frances showed any sign of leaving his orbit and finding happiness elsewhere. He was a hypochondriac — ‘dismissive of others’ ailments as he was over-anxious about his own’. He had ‘a childlike fascination with parcels and could not resist poking around in them’. He once wrote home to his brother to boast that he had succeeded in boiling a kettle all by himself. He found certain door-handles challenging, and if shut in the dining room at Number 10 would have to await a rescue party.

That he was ‘to the end of his life ... never able to tie his own shoelaces’ seems scarcely believable; mere curiosity, surely, would have supplied the lack at some point. Yet there it is. He was also one of the great statesmen of our history.

Lloyd George went to his rest having sown half a lifetime of bitterness between his two families — his youngest daughter Megan, perhaps because she had spent so long so close to her, loathed Frances to her dying day.

But he himself, as A. J. said, got away with it. ‘There is so much satisfaction in “doing” the world!” he wrote to Frances in 1915. ‘I have defied it for 25 years — treated it with contempt, spat upon its tinsel robes, and I have won through.'

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