Portraits and Miniatures(108)

Selwyn Lloyd



This essay is based on a 1989 Observer review of D. R. Thorpe’s Selwyn Lloyd (Cape).





Selwyn Lloyd, born in 1904 and dying in 1978, was Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and both leader and then Speaker of the House of Commons, without ever quite becoming more than a middle-rank politician. Nevertheless, he thoroughly deserved a good-quality biography, the more so as he was in my view an unusually nice although sad man, and he got exactly this from D. R. Thorpe. Mr Thorpe’s book is tailor-made to fit Lloyd, and indeed sits on him more easily than any of his oddly stiff suits (abundantly illustrated within) ever seemed to do. These tailor-made qualities of the book are neatly summed up by a phrase from a review, quoted by Mr Thorpe, of Lloyd’s own memoir of his five years in the Speaker’s chair: ‘modest, open-minded, friendly and honest’.

I use ‘almost’ because ‘modest’ understates Mr Thorpe’s achievement in building a highly readable and rewarding new account of the politics of the 1950s and 1960s around Lloyd. This list omits, however, a certain nostalgic provincial piety which was a quality of the subject as it is of parts of the Thorpe book. The account of Lloyd’s funeral in Wirral, with its description of the service and the principal participants, could almost be a ‘50 years ago’ extract from the Hoylake Gazette (shades of the recurring ‘Mr Hoylake Urban District Council’ joke about Lloyd in the Spectator of thirty years ago, on which Bernard Levin made his reputation). But these sorts of detail fit the narrative and add to the interest, as well as illustrate what emerges as a fascinating sub-theme of the book, which is the uneasy interplay of Harold Macmillan’s self-conscious metropolitan Edwardianism and Lloyd’s instinctive respect for the golf courses and villas of 1930s Cheshire suburbia.

Macmillan, late in life, when reminded that Lloyd was from the Wirral murmured, ‘up there … juts out … funny place to come from’, and had not made things better by referring to him earlier as ‘a little country notary’. Selwyn (rather like Austen Chamberlain he could be referred to by his Christian name without undue familiarity) probably minded the tone more than the substance, apart from treating Merseyside as a bucolic village, for he was eager to call his never-written autobiography ‘A Middle-Class Lawyer from Liverpool’.

He was not a very notable lawyer - a reliable Northern Circuit junior before the war and a part-time silk earning barely £2000 a year from his practice after it - he was amongst Liverpool barristers not merely well behind great advocates like F. E. Smith and Hartley Shawcross but not quite up to Maxwell Fyfe. The one surprising thing that the Bar did for him, however, was to make him a determined opponent of capital punishment. On that he never subsequently wavered.

If he was a second-class lawyer he was undoubtedly a first-class soldier. He leapt into the Territorial Army just before the war began and bounded up in rank. By the end of 1939 he was through the Staff College and a brigade major. He never commanded troops, but he was a staff officer of the highest quality who ended the war as one of the select band of ‘civilian’ brigadiers. He loved the army because it filled his life, kept his endemic loneliness at bay, provided him with official accommodation, demanded the loyal and efficient discharge of higher orders, and rewarded him with the prestige of rapid promotion. Much of his remarkable political career he spent trying to get the same benefits out of political life, and succeeding for a high proportion of the time.

He began as Minister of State at the Foreign Office. Esprit de l’escalier made him subsequently believe that he said on appointment, ‘I think there must be some mistake; I’ve never been to a foreign country, I don’t speak any foreign languages, I don’t like foreigners,’ and that Churchill responded, ‘Young man, these all seem to me to be positive advantages.’

Even if this had been entirely true, he would have been no worse than Edward Grey in these respects. After this start he not only served three reasonably successful years as Minister of State, but, after a fourteen-month sabbatical as Minister of Supply and then of Defence, came back to the Foreign Office to serve as Secretary of State for five and a half years, until very recently the longest continuous period for any Foreign Secretary since the equally insular Grey.

They both landed the country in disastrous wars. Grey’s was won after four and a half years of slaughter. Lloyd’s was lost after twenty-four hours of humiliating miscalculation and chicanery. But there the comparison stops, for Grey’s foreign policy under an easy-going and domestically oriented Prime Minister was very much his own, whereas Lloyd’s, under a fretful and externally obsessed one, was very much his master’s. Mr Thorpe portrays him as being snatched away from negotiating a perfectly tolerable Suez settlement with the Egyptian Foreign Minister in New York, brought back overnight and even more jet-lagged because it was (just) the pre-jet age, half-charmed and half-brainwashed over lunch alone with Eden, and then rushed off to Paris for secret and committing talks with Prime Minister Guy Mollet and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau without any officials present. The verdict for which Mr Thorpe goes on Lloyd’s role in the Suez affair is one of guilty but with heavily diminished responsibility because of a mind enfeebled by excessive loyalty and inadequate self-confidence. It can hardly be a ringing exculpation but I think he achieves it. In any event his Suez chapter is a very good one, fair, convincing and compelling.