There are as many views of Lloyd George as there are students of his times. According to A J P Taylor, he was ‘the nearest thing England has known to Napoleon’. Baldwin thought him ‘a dynamic force . . . a very terrible thing’. Beaverbrook maintained that ‘Churchill was perhaps the greater man, but George was more fun’. He was widely hailed after 1918 as ‘The Man Who Won The War’. One of his best-known nicknames was ‘The Goat’, in testimony to his sexual propensities. To historians, wrote Robert Blake, a distinguished member of the fraternity, he was simply ‘an enigma’.

Modern research has dispelled some of the mystery. But the engaging thing about the old boy, at this distance in time, is that almost any view of his life can still be defended, so multifarious were the complexities and contradictions of his personality. He was a superb public servant or