This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

David Lloyd George was the last Liberal prime minister. After his defenestration, the Liberal Party shrivelled into factional infighting, quixotic comeback schemes and ultimate irrelevance. So it is easy to imagine why the now former Conservative MP Damian Collins, currently reeling from an election which has demolished his own parliamentary party, might think the case instructive. Having seen a 2019 majority of over 20,000 handily overturned by Labour in his constituency of Folkestone and Hythe, Collins must now be wondering whether the Conservatives are destined for the same fate.

That this is not, in fact, the theme of his book makes it a bit of a missed opportunity. Governing political parties do not really die in Britain. Lloyd George is the only person ever to have killed one. It may be that he soon has a peer, in the shape of the Johnson/Truss/Sunak axis. Who better to reflect on the possible analogies than someone like Collins who has experienced these figures’ leadership (such as it was) from the inside?

With a little squinting, the Lloyd George that Collins gives us does contain a hint of each of his eventual successors. The womanising is eminently Johnsonian, and there is a rueful footnote gesturing towards the Partygate inquiry. Lloyd George’s paralysing fear in the face of public speaking engagements aligns him with Truss, though he was appreciably better at getting over it. His diminutive stature is pure Sunak. But which characteristic is it, in the end, that drives a political party into the ground? All the material is here for a bold new analysis.

Collins might reasonably complain that the task he has set himself is different. This is not a comprehensive biography; it is a study of Lloyd George between the start of the Great War and the end of his premiership in 1922. Why? What is the big idea? It is not easy to say. The book begins in medias res, with Lloyd George about to deliver his celebrated 1914 speech on the war at the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, and that is that. Perhaps the rationale is that the stolid English reading public still buys books about wars in reasonable numbers.

In practice, the volume is a “high political” narrative of transactions between ministers, aides, generals and other power-brokers in the four years of the war and the four years of the immediate aftermath. It is a skilful, lively, gossipy, upbeat approach to the story. 

Lloyd George is usually at the centre of things — because, unavoidably, he tended to be — but he regularly disappears from the proceedings for a time whilst others negotiate. There are lots of juicy long quotations. We never find out who precisely the titular “rivals in the storm” are.

Lloyd George is one of the most obviously fascinating figures in modern British political history, for three reasons. The first is his background. The Liberal Party, since its formal inception in 1859, had always responded to a touch of the purple. Lord Palmerston was a viscount; Lord John Russell was the son of a duke; William Gladstone was Eton and Christ Church; Lord Rosebery was Lord Rosebery; Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith at least went to Trinity, Cambridge and Balliol, Oxford respectively. 

Lloyd George was from nowhere. He grew up in Llanystumdwy, Caernarfonshire, where he lived in a compact cottage with his mother, uncle, and siblings, and was trained as a solicitor in Porthmadog. He rose to dominate British politics, and to direct the affairs of the most expansive empire the world had known, seeing off thousands of more privileged rivals, on the basis of truly exceptional native gifts, and without even speaking English as his first language. 

How he got into the position to direct World War I is one of the most remarkable personal trajectories in British history. Contemporaries everywhere saw it as an astonishing story, even in the most advanced democracies. As the New York Times asked when Lloyd George visited America in 1923, “Was there ever a more romantic rise from the humblest beginning than this?”

The second reason why Lloyd George is fascinating is his extraordinary command of words. Collins is good on this. The book is full of speeches that turn tides and smash competitors. Lloyd George could exercise an equally mesmeric command over both the Commons and mass audiences, typically rather different skills. Harold Macmillan called him “the best parliamentary debater of his, or perhaps any, day”.

Biblical references and Welsh valleys suffused his speeches. As another American journalist put it, when Lloyd George was speaking, “none approaches him in witchery of word or wealth of imagery,” with his “almost flawless phraseology” communicated through a voice “like a silver bell that vibrates with emotion”. Leading an imperial democracy through a global war demanded rhetorical powers of the rarest kind. Asquith lacked them. That, amongst other reasons, is why Lloyd George was able to shunt him aside.

The last reason we should all be interested in Lloyd George — as readers will have anticipated — is that he was the last British politician to inter a governing party. His actions during the war split the Liberals into Pro-Asquith and pro-Lloyd George factions, and the government he led from 1916 until 1922 was propped up by the Conservatives. Though the Liberal split was partly healed in 1923, it was all over for the party as a governing force. By the time Lloyd George at last became leader of the Liberal Party (in the Commons) in 1924, he had only a rump of 40 MPs left to command.

By the 1920s, Lloyd George’s shifting ideologies could not easily accommodate the old party traditions or the new forces reshaping allegiances and identities in the aftermath of the war. In 1918 he described his political creed to George Riddell, the press magnate, as “Nationalist-Socialist”. The consequence was an unprecedented redrawing of the map of British party politics, producing the Labour/Conservative hegemony we have lived with ever since.

The Liberals could not come back because they were left with no clothes of their own

The rot had arguably begun to set in for the Liberals in the elections of 1910, when they lost their majority. Fourteen years later, in 1924, Lloyd George stepped up to the Commons leadership of an exhausted, defeated party, and neither he nor his successors could arrest the slide into irrelevance. 2024 will see a new Conservative leader take the reins, after 14 years of rather different challenges. It will be interesting to see whether they have better luck.

The Liberals could not come back because they were left with no clothes of their own. What had once been distinctive lines on economics, religion, welfare, the constitution, foreign policy and even “progress” were either appropriated by their competitors or ceased to be politically relevant. The party’s history as the dominant political force of the last near-century was no proof against radical structural change.

Reform UK is, to state the obvious, not the early-twentieth-century Labour Party. Arthur Henderson had served in the Cabinet during World War I, familiarising the country with Labour leaders in high office. Nigel Farage may at last have become an MP, but — at the time of writing — he has not yet been asked to join Keir Starmer’s administration. Reform UK does not have a Sidney and Beatrice Webb infusing the party with intellectual energy. So the prospects of outflanking perhaps seem a little less immediate, if historical analogies mean anything.

The 20‐year-old Benjamin Disraeli didn’t think they did. His first published work suggested that history was a wonderful guide to political practice in the present, just so long as nothing was different. Otherwise, it was possible to be horribly misled. It has been a long time since a British governing party was so decisively swept aside that nobody could put it back together. It would look different this time.

Lloyd George tends to fade out of our recollection after the 1920s. In fact, he lived for another two decades. He died in 1945, a month and a half short of VE Day and a year and a half after the birth of another of the twentieth century’s undisputed titans: Jim Morrison. Morrison died in a less timely fashion, the last of the classic 1969-71 “27 club” members to go, after Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Riders on the Storm was the last song Morrison recorded with The Doors before his (seeming) overdose. The title of Rivals in the Storm is, presumably, a play on that masterpiece. The book does not tell us. But the ends of eras seem to swirl around it, inadvertently or not.