John Campbell on David Lloyd George

“[T]he political gifts that he offered to his country in his sixties were scarcely, if it all, less brilliant than those that had propelled him to the...Premiership in his early fifties. His determination to improve the life of the mass of the people was as strong, simple and sincere as in his youth... [and] this consistent purpose was still backed by the same adventurously open mind, creative imagination, inexhaustible application and compelling oratory. His ability to synthesize ideas from different sources resulted in the most practical programme of social reconstruction produced between the wars. Almost alone among politicians...Lloyd George grasped the facts, the causes and the implications of the national economic decline which began to manifest itself after 1918; unerringly, he seized on the means offered by the new economics by which it might be arrested. But his dynamic alternative was rejected: the men who replaced him presided passively over fifteen wasted years, a loss which all the feverish efforts of post-war Governments have been unable to recover... His exclusion from office after 1922 was the country's loss.”

“John Grigg is a good measure of the turnaround that has taken place in attitudes to Lloyd George. Twenty years ago he was still generally regarded as a tricky villain, clever but unprincipled. Asquith, ousted in 1916, had his revenge in the history books: accounts of the leadership crisis were dominated by a tradition of Asquithian historiography heavily influenced by Lady Violet Bonham Carter. The alternative view was associated with Lord Beaverbrook, and who believed him? Answer: A. J. P. Taylor. It was Taylor, first in his own writings, then as Director of the sadly short-lived Beaverbrook Library where the Lloyd George papers were opened in 1967, who launched and presided over the revisionist reaction which has thoroughly reversed the received opinion of Lloyd George, and practically buried the reputation of poor old Asquith in the process.”