The Goat and the Bulldog
Andrew Roberts analyses Lord Beaverbrook's memories of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, first published in 1973.
It was inspired of History Today’s then editors Peter Quennell and Alan Hodge to ask Lord Beaverbrook to compare and contrast Britain’s two greatest war leaders of the 20th century, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Any such essay written by someone who served in both men’s wartime cabinets is an important historical document.
One assumes that Beaverbrook would be likely to get his facts right, while taking exception to his conclusions. He was a committed, sometimes bitter, partisan in all of the great issues of state in which Churchill and Lloyd George were also arrayed. It would be natural therefore if his judgement seems awry to us decades later. The fact that he wrote in the early 1960s (the essay was published in History Today in 1973), when Lloyd George was safely dead but Churchill was both alive and revered, might also be thought likely to skew his appraisal of the two men.
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