Liberal vision: Ronan McGreevy on David Lloyd George

There once was a British prime minister who was renowned as the greatest campaigner of his age. He was charismatic, visionary and popular with the public.

He was also amoral and immoral, a lothario who recklessly pursued women, often the wives of colleagues, as he pursued policies that were not thought through.

“I can understand that the enthusiasm he has so often created is due to his dynamic temperament in a lazy sleepy world: to his jolly-good-fellowship, and high spirits,” wrote a contemporary, Helena Swanwick.

Against that was the prime minister’s “indifference to the truth; his love of plotting and wire-pulling and manoeuvring the press, his use of human tools of more than doubtful cleanliness; his terrifying indiscretions and scurrility; especially in the field of foreign affairs.”

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David Lloyd George was the first victim of the world’s most famous political club, the 1922 Committee, which did for him as they did for Boris Johnson a century later.

Lloyd George was one of the most consequential British prime ministers of all time. As chancellor of the cxchequer he had brought in the “people’s budget” in 1909 which provided old-age pensions and social supports for the first time into the UK, which included Ireland.

As minister for munitions in the first World War, he cajoled and bullied the British armaments industry into rising to the challenge of the greatest war in human history to that date before taking over from Herbert Asquith as prime minister in December 1916. He was one of the men who won the war. He hoped the Treaty of Versailles, of which he was one of the chief negotiators, would bring a permanent peace to Europe. He sanctioned partition and granted independence to a new Irish state.

In the famous December 1918 general election, in which Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 seats available in Ireland, the wartime coalition government of Tories, Liberals and Unionists won a landslide in Great Britain, but it was an odd result for Lloyd George.

His ruthless usurpation of the prime ministerial role from Asquith split his Liberal Party. A majority followed Lloyd George; a significant minority Asquith. Both wings of the party faced off against each other in the election. In Britain’s first past the post system it allowed the Conservative party under Andrew Bonar Law to win a majority of 25 seats, despite getting less than 40 per cent of the vote.

The Tories could have formed a government on their own, but they believed their best result could be achieved as standing as a coalition while capitalising on the immense personal popularity of Lloyd George.

Lloyd George was famously a “prime minister without a party” and that made his position weaker than it seemed at the time. The partition of Ireland, which he was sceptical about, was done primarily at the behest of the Conservative and Unionist party.

A lot of Conservatives were not enamoured of Lloyd George. They regarded him as a class warrior and a grifter. They were snobby about his relatively humble upbringing.

In late 1922, a new general election was looming. The Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain wanted the party to stand as a coalition again, but MPs were having none of it.

For Conservative MPs their opposition to Lloyd George was both political and personal. British troops occupied the area across from the Dardanelles where the British and French had been slaughtered at Gallipoli during the first World War.

Turkish nationalists threatened to overwhelm the British presence. Lloyd George wanted war with Turkey, but Conservative backbench MPs were horrified and the erstwhile loyal dominion of Canada demonstrated its independence by refusing to back the British prime minister.

Many right-wing Conservative MPs, known as the “die-hards”, were sickened by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which they regarded as an appeasement of the “murder gang”. The assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP, an Ulster Unionist MP, in June 1922 by Irish republicans confirmed them in that view.

It was also personal. Lloyd George held the British honours system in contempt and openly sold knighthoods, baronetcies and peerages to fund his party. Other political parties in the past and, indeed in the future, would sell cash for honours, but none as brazenly as Lloyd George.

It all came to head at the Carlton Club on October 19th. The decisive intervention came from Chamberlain’s predecessor Andrew Bonar Law, who had stepped back for health reasons, but was still regarded as the effective leader of the party. He did not want to stand on a joint platform in the forthcoming election.

Neither did the majority of the Conservative Party. By 185 votes to 88, a motion was passed that the Tory Party stand on a separate platform in the forthcoming general election. Chamberlain resigned as party leader.

Lloyd George understood it too as a personal defeat. He decided to dissolve the government that evening and call a new general election. Few at the time believed that this colossus of British politics would never hold high office again, but he didn’t and neither did the Liberal Party. Less than a month later, the Conservatives under Bonar Law won an overall majority.

The 1922 Committee was not founded until April 1923, but it took its name from the events of the previous year. The events of the Carlton Club emboldened Tory backbench MPs to hold their leader in check. They have been doing that ever since, as generations of Tory leaders have found to their cost.