The Pain and the Privilege: The Women in Lloyd George's Life
Ffion Hague
HarperPress £25, 608pp
Ffion Hague is, by all accounts, far too astute to have married William without considering the role of the politician's wife. Back then, Hague was the coming man and it must have seemed reasonable to suppose she would one day be running 10 Downing Street, thus restoring the Welsh establishment to the centre of British affairs.
To Ffion Hague, as to all true Welsh nationalists, Lloyd George is a god, a status that makes censure of his rabid and exploitative sexual appetite apostasy. He was undeniably a political genius. He was also an extraordinary philanderer, surely the last ever to be prime minister, for in the doublespeak world of Westminster, sex remains scandalous even as the marriage rate plummets. But to Hague, Lloyd George's women are strictly handmaidens to the Welsh Wizard. She acknowledges his manipulative streak but she believes the women in question, strong, intelligent individuals, went into it with their eyes open and ultimately gained from their relationships. Hence the privilege and the pain.
When Lloyd George was courting Maggie Owen, he warned her: "My supreme idea is to get on. To this idea I shall sacrifice everything - except, I trust, honesty. I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my Juggernaut, if it obstructs the way."
A quarter of a century later, he set out even more brutally the terms of engagement with another young, single woman. Early in their relationship he gave to Frances Stevenson a biography of Charles Parnell, whose political career was destroyed when his affair with Kitty O'Shea became public. It was a warning: there would be no divorce from Maggie, no sacrificing of ambition to mere love.
Lloyd George made love to many women. He had sustained relationships with several. But he remained married to Maggie for more than 50 years, and for 30 of those years Frances was his mistress. It is the complexity of these relationships, the unexpected mutual contributions and the shameless manipulation by the man his enemies called the Goat, that makes this such an unexpectedly engaging portrait.
Lloyd George was the greatest political personality of his age, bold, radical, witty. He loved women, and long before he became a national figure, women loved him. Maggie's hesitation in committing herself to him was partly because her parents disapproved. But it was also because the man she loved began building his reputation as a womaniser before he was out of his teens. Within months of their marriage, he had begun his first adulterous affair. Although that was successfully hidden from Maggie, she realised soon enough that the honesty that her husband expected from her would not be reciprocated by him.
He was almost indiscriminate in his search for sexual gratification. It may have been something to do with the constant desire for praise and approval of the radical outsider of humble origins among the society salons of Westminster. Or maybe it was the size of his penis ("the biggest I have ever seen", an admiring - male - secretary noted many years later). But if Maggie reproached him for his infidelity, he reproached her more. Since she would not live with him in London, she was more or less to blame, he wrote, blithely overlooking the fact that for the first seven years of their marriage there was little more than a year when she was not either pregnant or nursing a baby.
There is something drearily familiar in the inability of the spoilt and self-absorbed Lloyd George to accept that Maggie, the mother of his children, whose entire support network was based in north Wales, could not also be Maggie the consort of an up-and-coming political star in London. But there is also something exceptional in Maggie's determination to do what she believed was right for her family, at least until an affair with the wife of a mutual friend appeared to pose a real threat to their marriage - at which point she finally went to London.
From 1913 onwards, however, she was sharing her husband with his political "wife", Frances Stevenson - a schoolfriend of their beloved oldest daughter Mair Lloyd George, who died of peritonitis when she was only 17. Frances was everything Maggie was not. Twenty-five years younger than her lover and his wife, she was highly educated and good at both domestic comfort and office administration.
If Lloyd George was unrepentant about his frequent flings, he was shameless about Frances, who had originally been recruited as a summer governess for his youngest daughter, Megan. Soon she had been inserted into his political staff, first at the Board of Trade, then at the Treasury and ultimately in No 10. In this respect she was a prototype special adviser, a temporary civil servant welded on to the existing team.
By committing herself to life as the mistress of a well-married man, Frances thought she was in the vanguard of the early feminism that drove the suffragettes, whose campaign she enthusiastically supported (though not in its violent aspects). She was rejecting convention to live as an independent woman. On one level, she did: she was at the centre of events for nearly 10 years, through political crises, war and peace-making.
But, however open a secret her relationship with Lloyd George was in the political world, she was also condemned to a life of hypocrisy and a sad childlessness (there were at least two abortions) until the late arrival of a daughter whose paternity was never quite resolved. And when, after Maggie's death early in 1941, Lloyd George was free to honour his frequent promises to marry her, he sheltered behind the opposition of his daughter Megan, until Frances practically dragged him to the register office in October 1943. Within 15 months, he was dead.
There are curious parallels in the lives of these two women. As wife of the prime minister, Maggie developed a career in Welsh politics that made her indispensable to the man from whom she became almost estranged. Similarly, in the last years of her life, long after Lloyd George's death, Frances could reveal the role that she had played as consort of the Welsh Wizard and relive in public the glory that she had lived only secretly.
The only disappointment in this absorbing read is that there is not more of Ffion Hague in it. Yet it is clear that, even though she famously met William when he was secretary of state for Wales and she his private secretary (Welsh-speaking, with an MPhil in Welsh literature), her heart is with Maggie, the wronged home-maker, rather than Frances, the clever, independent-minded political aide. But then, the one thing Frances could never be was Welsh.
· Anne Perkins's A Very British Strike is published by Pan. To order The Pain and the Privilege for £23 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop