David Lloyd George : A Political Life. The Architect of Change 1863-1912

David Lloyd George was arguably the most influential British statesman of the twentieth century, and has been the subject of numerous biographies. Yet there remains the need for a full scale account of his life which concentrates primarily on his political career--for he was in many ways the first modern politician, one for whom politics was a twenty-four hour a day occupation rather than a family duty or a nobleman's hobby. In this, the first part of a major new study, Bentley Gilbert tells the story of Lloyd George's rise to power from his youth in Wales to he beginning of 1912, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Lloyd George recognised early on that, with a democratic, mass electorate, the road to power lay through manipulation of the voter rather than by relying on traditional methods of building up support within one's party. He made his way in the House of Commons, first as the Welsh, then as the national champion of the time-honored non-conformist causes of secular education, temperance and pacifism. After 1908, however, he almost completely reversed his position on these issues, urging the Liberals towards the populist politics that became identified with the New Liberalism. In practice, his led him towards the creation of a new, class-oriented programme based on the provision of state welfare benefits, in order to counter the appeal of revived Tory democracy, Chamberlainism and tariff reform.

This book is written largely from primary letter collections, official documents, cabinet papers and newspapers. It substantially revises the conventional view of Edwardian politics by showing that, for Lloyd George, the main threat to Liberalism was not the challenge from the growing Labour party, which caused him little far more dangerous was the revived, energetic and, as he saw it, demagogic and irresponsible Toryism now bidding strongly against the Liberals for the working man's vote.