VII. Lloyd George's Premiership: A Study in ‘Prime Ministerial Government’

‘The Power of the Man in the Saddle’: this was the burden of the Liberal chief whip's advice to David Lloyd George in April 1918. But the Prime Minister hardly needed any instruction in this theme: the uses and the limitations of power formed his absorbing passion. Even at the time many felt that his period as prime minister had marked a totally new departure in British politics. Some later commentators (most recently Mr Humphry Berkeley) have even claimed to detect the dawn of a new political era between 1916 and 1922, one in which ‘prime ministerial government’ gradually took the place of conventional cabinet government. But, despite their certainty, the precise character of Lloyd's George premiership, like the man himself, is still shrouded in mystery. Was it rule by a dictator or by a democrat? Did any consistent principle animate the ‘man in the saddle’ or was it all opportunism gone berserk ? Was Wales's Great Commoner really ‘rooted in nothing’, as Keynes was to allege? Not even Lloyd George's closest associates, Kerr and Riddell, felt able to say with any assurance. They were as baffled as the rest. Lloyd George was suddenly thrust from office in October 1922 with the issue still inconclusive. Ever since then the debate about his premiership has been passionate and unremitting. Each observer seems to have seen a different prime minister, one created in his own image. Fifty biographies on, the essential Lloyd George remains as elusive as ever. He remains the most controversial and contradictory of political animals, ‘the Big Beast’, the rogue elephant of twentieth-century prime ministers.

Tendentiousness in Patristic Collections

The problem of judging the dogmatic tendency of mixed patristic corpora is often a delicate one. As I have pointed out elsewhere such collections appear often to have been made up for general theological or devotional reading and were probably valued more for the variety of their contents than for any consistent principle of selection. This point is strikingly confirmed by an anecdote in John Moschus's Pratum spirituale c. 46 (P. G. 87, 3, col. 2900):We once approached Father Kyriakos, a priest of the Laura of Kalamon on the holy Jordan. And he related to us,“Once I saw in my sleep a woman of honorable appearance and dressed in purple and with her two venerable and worthy men, standing outside my cell. And I assumed that the woman was Our Lady the Mother of God and that the two men with her were John the Divine and John the Baptist. Therefore, leaving my cell I invited them to enter and pray in my cell. But she did not consent. I stayed therefore a while beseeching her and saying, ‘Let not the humble man be turned away and put to confusion’ (Ps. 74:21) etc. And when she saw me pressing my request, she answered me severely saying, ‘You have my enemy in your cell and how do you expect me to enter?’ And saying this, she departed.