The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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СКАЧАТЬ he is alleged to have exclaimed: ‘I have them now.’ But the comparatively small majority of 124 at the first election of 1910 was almost equivalent to a defeat, for the Liberals had lost 115 seats, or 230 votes.

      Leaders’ Conference

      This election had a profound effect on his future. Perhaps it was now that he was converted to coalition. At any rate, it was he who, after the death of King Edward vii, made the first suggestion of the conference of party leaders that followed. It is known that Lloyd George and Balfour were in agreement at the conference, and, had their views been accepted, something like the party truce that was concluded in 1914 would have been concluded at the end of 1910. Among the terms of the concordat it is believed that Lloyd George was willing to withdraw his opposition to McKenna’s shipbuilding programme, and even to consent to some form of compulsory service. During the General Election at the end of 1910 (the second of the year) Lloyd George had the throat trouble which impaired the early beauty and flexibility of his voice.

      In the next year he introduced and carried his Insurance Bill. There could be no doubt of the genuineness of his sympathy with the trials of poverty; and he was astonished at the strength of the opposition aroused. It remains, however, the most important of his legislative achievements. He proposed in the next years to attack the problem of the reform of land tenure, but his studies were interrupted by the shadows of the coming war with Germany and of the Marconi scandal. This last was the worst trouble of his political life, but no one imputed worse to him than carelessness and an imperfect sense of what was expected from one holding his high office.

      Foreign Policy

      It remains to gather up the threads of Lloyd George’s views on foreign policy before war came. He entered the Liberal Government in 1906 with a violent prejudice against the Liberal League and all its works, and with some good personal reason, for it had been founded as a check on the Liberal Left, of which he was the leader. He belonged to the Campbell-Bannerman wing of the party and adopted without questioning the old Liberal objections to expenditure on armaments, and pleaded for its diversion to social reform.

      On this as on other matters the conference of 1910 seems to have induced a certain change of opinion. At any rate, in 1911, after the dispatch of the Panther to Agadir, he made at the Guildhall banquet a remarkable speech, in the course of which he declared that if Germany were to treat this country as of no account in the comity of nations then peace at such a price would be an intolerable humiliation for our great country. But he remained fundamentally unconvinced of the German menace. As late as January 1, 1914, in a newspaper interview, the authenticity of which was never denied, he said that he felt convinced that if Germany ever had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it out of her head. He said that our relations with her were more friendly than they had been for years, and he looked forward to the spread of a revolt against militarism all over western Europe.

      When the crisis began in July Lloyd George was the leader of the peace party, which was in an actual majority as late as July 31. By August 2, after (and doubtless in consequence of) the letter from the Conservative Party leaders, the Cabinet had agreed to a limited intervention in case the German fleet came into the Channel to conduct operations against the French coasts. It was to weaken this resolve that von Kühlmann issued his statement to the Press that if Great Britain remained neutral Germany would not conduct naval operations against the French coast, and this promise made some impression on Lloyd George. He told an interviewer that after such a guarantee ‘I would not have been a party to a declaration of war had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues.’ In his opinion, a poll of the electors on Saturday (August 1) would have shown 95 per cent against embroiling this country in hostilities, whereas by the Tuesday after a poll would have resulted in a vote of 99 per cent in favour of war. Equally logical and equally consistent with his reluctance to enter the war was his determination that once in the war we could not afford to come out of it except as unequivocal victors.

      He soon emerged as the most ardent war spirit in the Government. His early war speeches lacked Asquith’s fine mastery of phrase, but were more stirring, and two speeches, one at the Queen’s Hall in September and another at the City Temple in November, are fit to be included in any anthology of militant British oratory. Lloyd George was a member of a committee formed in October to advise the War Office on the best means of providing the guns and ammunition that were required. All countries, including Germany, had under-estimated the expenditure of shells, and, though progress was made in increasing the supplies, it fell far short of our requirements, particularly after trench war had begun. Lloyd George was at first disposed to put the blame on the ‘lure of drink’. We were fighting, he said on March 17, Germany, Austria, and drink, and the greatest enemy was drink. The final result of the offensive against this antagonist was the appointment of the Liquor Control Board.

      Munitions for the Troops; Policy for Ministry

      But it was evident that, however hard men worked, the output of guns and shells could only be assured by relaxation of union restrictions. ‘This is an engineers’ war,’ said Lloyd George on February 28, and on March 17 he urged a conference of trade union leaders to accept certain proposals for the dilution of labour, including the admission of women to workshops. Thus early was outlined the policy which three months later led to the formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the Munitions Act.

      His energy was so much valued by the Army that when French decided in May to appeal to Caesar for a better supply of munitions, and in particular of high explosives, he sent copies of his correspondence with the Government through Captain Guest, one of his adcs and formerly a Junior Whip in the Government, to Lloyd George, and also to Bonar Law and Balfour. Colonel Repington, then Military Correspondent of The Times, was the vehicle of the appeal to the nation as a whole. It is almost forgotten that Lloyd George in a speech to the House of Commons on April 21 said much the same about our manufacture of war munitions as Asquith in his much-criticized speech at Newcastle the day before, but French’s reason for choosing Lloyd George was a just one. He had, as he said, shown by his special interest in this subject that he grasped the military nature of our necessities. There may have been other reasons, too, for the choice, for Lloyd George, a coalitionist at heart since 1910, very early in the war began to doubt whether a party Government could do everything that was required for victory.

      Coalition Formed

      Lloyd George, who from the South African War days took a very keen interest in military campaigns, was one of the first to shed the facile optimism which was fashionable in the first year of the war, and the likelihood that conscription and grinding taxation would be necessary soon began to oppress him. How could a party Government propose such measures? Was it not necessary to form a coalition of parties if the Government was to have the requisite moral authority? This new crisis matured about the same time as the failure, attributed to lack of munitions, of the attack on the Aubers Ridge. On May 12, 1915, Mr Handel Booth – whose relations with Lloyd George had been fairly close – suggested that the time had come when leaders of the other two parties should be admitted to the Government; three days later Lord Fisher resigned, and on May 17 Asquith, in a letter to Bonar Law, consented to the formation of a Coalition Government. There can be little doubt that Lloyd George inspired this change, which was both necessary for the successful prosecution of the war and accorded with Lloyd George’s political views, and it was certainly he who quelled the Liberal opposition. In the new Ministry, completed by the end of the first week in June, Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions, and a year later we had definitely established an ascendancy over Germany in the manufacture of munitions.

      The formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the substitution of a Coalition for a Liberal Government did not exhaust Lloyd George’s energies in this wonderful first year of the war. He also had views on strategy. He saw the incipient weakness of Russia, and was one of the few who appreciated the magnitude of Hindenburg’s victories over Russia at Tannenberg and СКАЧАТЬ