201. Decline before the fall

In 1921 and 1922, the sharks were beginning to circle around Lloyd George. While he thought that getting a Peace Treaty for Ireland was a major success, many felt dissatisfied with a compromise that gave no one entirely what they wanted, and therefore had a sense of being betrayed. That sense deepened as violence continued to surge in Ireland, even leading to the murder by anti-Treaty forces of one of the great figures of Sinn Fein, the pro-Treaty political and military leader, Michael Collins. He’d recorded in his diary, after accepting the Treaty in the negotiations with Britain, that he’d signed his death warrant. So it proved.

The Irish violence even spilled over into a high-profile murder in Britain, for which the government’s Irish policies were blamed. On top of that came a scandal over the Lloyd George was shamelessly selling titles of nobility to get himself a political war chest. What he was doing wasn’t illegal at the time, and since he had no party behind him to raise money or run campaigns, he chose this short cut to financing his political work.

That, however, did him no favour among Conservatives becoming increasingly disenchanted with him and wondering why, with a majority of their own in the House of Commons, they still had to rally behind a Liberal as Prime Minister. Wasn’t it time to break with him and with his coalition and prepare to form a government of their own again?

Top Tories holding positions in his government remained true to the coalition and to him. But their rank and file was running out of patience. And that spelled nothing good for Lloyd George.

Illustration: Michael Collins addressing a crowd on St Patrick’s Day, 1922, less than half a year before his death. Public domain photo

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.