June 23, 2013

Finest Hour 137, Winter 2007-08

Page 52

Toying with Myths

By James R. Lancaster

2025 International Churchill Conference

Join us for the 42nd International Churchill Conference. Washington, DC | October 9-11, 2025

2025 International Churchill Conference

Iloyd George & Churchill: Rivals for Greatness, by Richard Toye. Macmillan, 504pp,$60. Member price $48.

Good front cover: two well-dressed gentlemen in top hats, the younger one looking respectfully at the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is Budget Day 1910.

The subtitle Rivals for Greatness would indicate that this book is a comparative study of two Great Britons spanning eventful times, from 1863 to 1965. How do they measure up, as war leaders, as peacemakers, as social reformers, as politicians, as statesmen? How do their lives compare? What are their respective strengths and weaknesses? In the judgment of history, who wins this “rivalry”?

But this is not what the book is about. Instead, it is an exhaustive study of the personal and professional relationship between Lloyd George and Churchill— “the longest friendship in politics,” as they both liked to assert. Dr. Toye, a young academic from Homerton College, Cambridge, says that this is a myth. To lend significant weight to his argument, he has toiled in innumerable archives, private papers, unpublished drafts, manuscripts, diaries and letters.

Why such extensive research to explode the myth behind the “Heavenly Twins,” the “Two Romeos,” “Winston and David,” “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” or the “George-Churchill combine”? The reason is that, in public, the two men appeared as brothers-in-arms. They found it to be to their mutual advantage. In private they often made disparaging comments about each other. To find these comments, Dr. Toye has left no stone unturned.

Shortly after they met for the first time in 1901 Churchill wrote to a Birmingham Tory, “Personally, I think Lloyd George a vulgar, chattering little cad.” Forty years on, Lloyd George used the same word, telling Boothby, in anger, that “Churchill has behaved to you like the cad he is.” There are hundreds of similar character assassinations in the intervening years, many of which are published for the first time. For those interested in disparaging remarks, this book is a joy.

Has the author been fair to both players? At first glance, this seems to be the case. But a closer analysis reveals that the author has been selective in his “revelations”—in favour of Lloyd George. He devotes a short paragraph to Lloyd George’s article, published in the Strand Magazine in April 1937, “What has the Jew done?,” a piece which concludes that the separateness of Jews is in part responsible for anti-Semitism.

This paragraph is followed by four pages, complete with lurid and sensational extracts, about an article which Churchill is said to have written in June 1937, an article critical of the Jews. This stunning “discovery” was used by the University of Cambridge in a news release to hype the publication of Toye’s book.

But the article in question was not from Churchill’s pen. It was ghost-written, and it was never published. The true story about this “stunning discovery” was explained in detail in responses in various media by Sir Martin Gilbert and Richard Langworth.

Another example of selectivity is the attitude of Lloyd George and Churchill to Hitler. On one page we are told that Lloyd George met Hitler “only briefly.” On another page a little more light is shed on his notorious four-day visit to Berchtesgaden in 1936. When he returned to England Lloyd George wrote gushing articles in praise of Hitler in the Daily Express and the News Chronicle. As late as August 1944, Lloyd George told A.J. Sylvester that he was pleased that Hitler had strengthened his position after the purge following the attempted assassination on 20 July.

The author acknowledges that Lloyd George misjudged Hitler, not only in 1936 but also in June 1940, when he described him as “the greatest figure in Europe since Napoleon, and possibly greater than him.” But Churchill’s judgment of Hitler, not altogether without significance, is hardly mentioned, let alone analysed.

Despite calling him the “Artful Dodger,” Churchill clearly admired Lloyd George in the early years, from 1901 to 1922. He came to his rescue over the Marconi scandal in 1912. This good turn was reciprocated when Lloyd George brought him into the Cabinet as Minister of Munitions in 1917. But the fateful election of .1922 left Lloyd George a bitter man, one who was never to see office again.

When he became Prime Minister in 1940, Churchill tried on several occasions to bring Lloyd George out of the wilderness. He was rebuffed each time, while the man whom he was asking to join the team confided many disparaging remarks in private about the “old fool.” One of these remarks was “I shall wait until Winston is bust,” which Dr. Toye uses as the title for the penultimate chapter of his book.

Lloyd George emerges badly from this chapter, not only for his lack of moral courage, but for the extremity of his language towards his “friend” of forty years. Churchill had ignored him since May 1941, but in December 1944 he offered him an Earldom, which Lloyd George accepted, much to the chagrin of his friends.

So although Dr. Toye has not attempted a comparative study of two Rivals for Greatness, by the end of the book Churchill emerges as incomparably the greater man.