Lloyd George was born in Manchester in 1863, where his father was employed as a schoolmaster. Shortly afterwards, his father took the family back to Pembrokeshire, where he rented a smallholding and intended to start farming. However, he died when David was 18 months old.

His mother, Elizabeth, asked her brother Richard Lloyd to help, which he did. A determined man, he helped to raise her three children, ensuring that they were educated and their talents nurtured. After school, David qualified as a lawyer and gained permission from his uncle Richard to add ‘Lloyd’ to his own name.  During the 1880s, Lloyd George made his name as a lawyer in North Wales.

It was at this time that he became involved in Liberal Party politics. He was elected MP to Caernarvon Boroughs in 1890 he would represent the seat for the rest of his life. In Parliament, Lloyd George enthusiastically supported Welsh causes, regardless of what his party leadership thought. In 1899, he became a national figure with his strident opposition to Britain’s military intervention in South Africa, the Boer War. He saw the Boers as the people of a small nation, just like Wales, under attack for an unjust cause. On one occasion, a violent mob in Birmingham attacked an event where he was speaking, and he had to be smuggled out in a policeman’s uniform.

Over the 1900s, his reputation as a parliamentarian grew. When the Liberals formed a government in December 1905, Lloyd George was appointed to President of the Board of Trade. He impressed in that role and was able to avert a national rail strike in 1907. When Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, he asked Lloyd George to be Chancellor.

Lloyd George’s 1909 ‘People’s Budget’ brought in higher taxes on the wealthy, including three new land taxes, to pay for old-age pensions and naval rearmament. It provoked a storm of opposition from the House of Lords, who voted against the budget, and a constitutional crisis followed. Two general elections took place in 1910, neither truly decisive, though eventually the Lords backed down. The Parliament Act of 1911 limited the powers of the House of Lords.

In 1911, Lloyd George created National Insurance, laying the foundations for what would later become the welfare state. Over 1912-13, he was embroiled in a scandal over insider trading related to the Marconi Company and might not have survived without Asquith’s support.

During the July Crisis, Lloyd George proved a reluctant interventionist, and only made up his mind when Germany invaded Belgium. Once war began, he worked to stabilise the financial crisis that began with the war. In 1915, he became Minister of Munitions, galvanising the industry, which went from producing 70,000 shells a month to 1.1 million (and rising thereafter) by mid-1916.

Lloyd George’s effectiveness and dynamism contrasted with the lackadaisical Asquith. He started to form his own views on how the war should be waged. In December 1916, he and a group of political allies demanded that Asquith reorganise the central apparatus for running the war. When Asquith did not accept these terms, Lloyd George resigned, and the government collapsed. On 7 December, George V asked Lloyd George to form a government, which he did, largely with the support of the Conservatives.

Now Lloyd George got his chance to reshape the war effort. A small central War Cabinet was formed and a Cabinet Secretariat was created for coordination. The central direction of the war became much more focused.

Where Lloyd George failed to get his way was the Western Front. Lloyd George believed that there were alternatives, but his generals did not. In mid-1917, Lloyd George consented to the ill-fated Passchendaele offensive, which he would regret for the rest of his life. However, in 1918 the trench stalemate was finally broken, the Allied forces won a decisive series of victories, and the German government ended the war.

Lloyd George continued to lead into peacetime. Conservative leader Bonar Law was content for the coalition to continue, and in December 1918 Lloyd George won a big election victory and was hailed as ‘the man who won the war’.

Over the years that followed, Lloyd George played a key role in negotiating the Treaty of Versailles but was dissatisfied with the final peace which he felt was too harsh on the defeated. He also imposed a solution on Ireland, where war had broken out over 1918-21, partitioning the country and creating Northern Ireland.

Domestically, his government struggled to deliver on its ambitious promises in the severely financially straitened circumstances that followed the war.  During Lloyd George’s premiership, key pieces of legislation passed included: the Education Act of 1918 raising the school leaving age to 14; the Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act 1920 prohibiting the employment of children below a certain age in industrial jobs; and the Representation of the People Act of 1918, which granted the vote to all men aged over 21 and all women aged over 30.

In 1922, Lloyd George was involved in a scandal over the brazen selling of honours (which was not illegal but was quite unscrupulous). He was also becoming far more forthright, consulting less and less with his ministers. In 1922, he almost provoked a war with Turkey without consulting the Cabinet. This was the last straw for the Conservatives, who now voted to end the coalition. On 19 October 1922, Lloyd George resigned. He left in high spirits and was confident that he would return to the premiership.

During the 1920s and 1930s he continued to play an active role in politics, but the (reunified) Liberal Party’s collapse in the second 1924 election left him much less influential. Later, he also damaged his reputation with his favourable remarks about Nazi Germany. He was offered a place in the Cabinet by Churchill in 1940 but declined rather than sit besides Neville Chamberlain, who he detested. In 1943, he voted in the Commons against the government’s unwillingness to fully back the Beveridge Report. He accepted a peerage in the 1945 New Year Honours, but never took up his seat in the Lords.

Lloyd George married Margaret Owen in 1888, and they had five children. In Downing Street, his secretary Frances Stevenson was also his lover. There may have been other affairs too. After Margaret’s death in 1941, Lloyd George married Stevenson in 1943. Lloyd George died in March 1945.