War leader who inspired Churchill

How Lloyd George, who grew up in a Welsh cottage and didn’t go to university, set about winning World War I with fearless genius... RIVALS IN THE STORM: HOW LLOYD GEORGE SEIZED POWER, WON THE WAR AND LOST HIS GOVERNMENT

Kitchener murdered him! that was what Lord northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and the times, is said to have exclaimed on hearing of the death of his nephew Lucas King at the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915.

nine months into World War i, northcliffe was heartily sick of the failure of Prime Minister Asquith’s Liberal government to organise Britain’s military resources, and of Secretary of

State for War Lord Kitchener’s military blunders — which had already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers. the editorials in his papers, read by millions, became a conduit for his fury. he spoke in contemptuous terms of Asquith’s and Kitchener’s ineffectiveness. ‘Kitchener’s brain is paralysed,’ he said.

in one afternoon in 1915, more shells were fired by the British Army than during the whole Boer War. this was a new kind of war, on an industrial scale. And it was clear that not nearly enough shells were being manufactured.

northcliffe decided the public needed to know. On May 21, a Daily Mail headline blared: ‘the tragedy of the Shells: Lord Kitchener’s Grave error’. in the article, he wrote: ‘ Lord Kitchener has starved the army in France of high-explosive shells.’

the reaction to this uncomfortable truth was violent, and northcliffe had to be given special police protection.

the political genius whom northcliffe had in mind to come to the fore at this moment of crisis was David Lloyd George: the 5ft 5in chancellor of the exchequer, who grew up in a Welsh cottage; had not attended university; and had a unique ability to grasp complicated situations, pick other people’s brains, see the whole picture and take decisive action.

‘Lloyd George may be our man,’ northcliffe said. ‘ he is the best of the lot.’

LLOYD George was given the post of minister of munitions. ‘God help me!’ Lloyd George wrote to his secretary and mistress Frances Stevenson — he had a wife, Margaret, based in Wales, and he seemed to run the two women in parallel.

‘the only thing i care about now,’ Lloyd George said to his friend Winston churchill, who was unhappy about being demoted from First Lord of the Admiralty after the disastrous Dardanelles campaign, ‘is that we win this war.’

And this he set about doing, passionately and tirelessly.

in this brilliantly researched book by Damian collins, tory MP for Folkestone and hythe, we get to know Lloyd George: a man of extraordinary energy, an outstanding orator, who cared about ordinary people.

he, in his turn, would be driven to distraction by the military blunders, as he saw them, of commander of the British Army Douglas haig, and chief of the imperial General Staff William robertson, who were sending hundreds of thousands of British troops to almost certain death.

he insisted that Britain must have a small War cabinet, consisting of up to five people, which sadly came to pass too late to challenge haig’s misguided plans for the murderous Somme offensive, in which, as Lloyd George later wrote, ‘the choicest and best of our young manhood… fell in this bull-headed fight’.

the carnage on the Western Front happens off-stage in this book, but it pounds away in one’s head. Lloyd George raged that, while those military commanders had too much power, nothing would be done ‘ except repeat the old fatuous Do it now: David Lloyd George tactics of hammering away with human flesh and sinews at the strongest forces of the enemy’.

Asquith resigned in December 1916, and the King invited Lloyd George to become prime minister of a coalition government with Bonar Law’s conservatives.

northcliffe summed up this change of personnel in the Daily Mail: two photos, one of Asquith, with the caption ‘Wait and See’, and one of Lloyd George, with the caption ‘Do it now’. At last, the Do it now man was in charge.

the sinking of hundreds of ships by U-boats in the Atlantic was halted by the brilliant tactic of convoys, and the production of shells increased.

‘What about our vote?’ a woman heckler asked Lloyd George. to which he replied: ‘We will get her into the shell factory first.’ And it was indeed thanks to women proving themselves in wartime factory work that they did get the vote.

He FeLt the Allies needed one overall commander, and that it should not necessarily be a British one. there was huge resistance to this but, at last, in March 1918 the French General Foch took over supreme command — much too late to stop the pointless British carnage at Passchendaele.

American forces arrived in time to push through the German lines and secure the Allied victory.

collins’s book gives us a memorable overview of what was being discussed, urgently and sometimes furiously, in the club dining rooms and country houses in which Lloyd George dined, his mind always focused on one thing: how to secure total victory.

churchill later said that, when he became prime minister in 1940, he was inspired by the strong, fearless wartime leadership of his old friend Lloyd George.