COMMONWEALTH
(British Commonwealth of Nations)
David Lloyd George replied, last week, to the hundreds of articles ground out against him, year after year, because he is thought to control a secret political fund (TIME, Jan. 31) often charged to total more than £3,000,000 ($15,000,000).
The sheer immensity of such a sum would constitute the best reason why it should not exist as a political “war chest”; but enemies of Mr. George, having failed to make him disclose the significant total, began some six months ago to hound him about where the money came from in the first place.
To smoke out the Welshman they have flayed him for pursuing a com mon practice: that of allegedly accepting party contributions from commoners who were raised to the peerage during his term as Prime Minister (1916-22). Because this charge has been shrewdly ignored by Mr. George, a new one was started recently. By word of mouth it was alleged that his private purse has been swollen from his secret party fund.
Smoked out at last, Mr. George laid about him last week. Canny, he still concealed the one essential fact: how much money there is in his secret fund. On other points he went the limit in a bristling press statement.
Wrote he: “Not one penny of the fund has ever been handled by me and not one penny have I ever touched for my private use. . . . “
Since I left office, I have worked hard as a journalist to earn mylivelihood — I am pleased to say with some success. My articles have appeared in almost every great country in the world and my emoluments from this source during these four years have been much greater than the aggregate of my salaries during seventeen years of office. This statement would have been an unwarrantable boast on my part had it not been rendered necessary by the cowardly slander privately circulated as to my use of party funds. . . . “
The National Liberal Political fund was collected by the whips of that party in exactly the same way as every other political fund, Whig or Tory, Liberal or Conservative, for well over a century. … As for the honor lists* during my Premiership, they were prepared by the chief whips in the usual way. They were then submitted to the joint leaders of the coalition, myself and Bonar Law, and afterward Sir Austin Chamberlain,†who succeeded him. We sat together in joint meeting to consider and settle those lists. The claims were urged on purely public grounds. . . . During the existence of the National Liberal Party, until after the general election of 1923 the fund was administered by the whips of the party without reference to me. When the party dissolved the administration passed to a committee of three former whips, the Right Hon. Charles A. McCurdy, K. C.; Sir William Edge and Major Gwilym Lloyd George,** who are still members of the Fund Committee. I was never even consulted, except on large questions of policy.
“Most of the fund, the amount of which has been caustically exaggerated, was derived from the sale of certain newspaper properties,††in which almost all of it was invested. The fact that those papers should have prospered naturally excited the envy of journals which were flounder-ing helplessly in the mud.”
*Recommending to His Majesty persons slated for elevation to or in the peerage.
†Always a Unionist (liberal conservative), he served in the coalition Cabinet of Liberal Premier Loyd George, but is now Foreign Secretary in the Conservative Cabinet of Premier Stanley Baldwin.
** Son to David.
††The London Daily Chronicle, The Sunday News, The Edinburgh Evening News, The Yorkshire Evening News and the Doncaster Gazette.
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