Lloyd George and Germany

Abstract

David Lloyd George has long been recognized as the most puzzling and paradoxical of modern British politicians. He has been type-cast for ever in Maynard Keynes's sardonic 'Essay in biography'-'Who shall paint the chameleon, who can tether a broomstick?'. Lloyd George, Keynes went on to assert, was 'rooted in nothing'.1 Whatever the many limitations of Keynes's diagnosis, the contradictions of Lloyd George's career in domestic British politics, during which the radical partisan of one period became the architect of coalitions with the Conservative enemy of another, are abundantly clear. But this volatility is no less marked in Lloyd George's perceptions and policies in foreign affairs, for instance in how the 'little England' opponent of the Boer War became the all-powerful leader in an imperial war. Throughout his career, his concern with Germany was clearly a dominant and abiding interest, from the first decade of the twentieth century to the coming of the second world war. Here, again, apparently wild variations are to be seen. The tough-talking nationalist of the Mansion House speech in I 9 I I is also the champion of Anglo-German rapprochement shortly afterwards. The belligerent wartime premier who advocated a 'knock-out blow' and 'a fight to the finish' in 19 I6-I8 was later to advocate the appeasement of Hitler. Yet there is also some consistency in Lloyd George's views of Germany, a consistency underscored by his two crucially significant visits to Germany in I908 and then in I936, which provide in some ways the parameters of his career. They are vital both to our understanding of Anglo-German relations in the present century, and to our appreciation of Lloyd George as a political animal, and I propose to examine them in this paper.