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behest. She also agreed to Lloyd
George’s suggestion that she
should marry another man as cover
for their affair, and became engaged
to an Army captain who was prom-
ised by Lloyd George that it would
benefit his career.
As she recalled in her diary, she
broke it off because, even though it
was his idea, Lloyd George ‘was
making himself miserable over the
idea of my belonging to someone
else even in name’.
He placed no such restrictions
upon himself, however, and his
continued dalliances perhaps
explain why Margaret did not
initially regard Frances as a
particular threat.
This was easy while Lloyd George
still lived at No 11 Downing Street
as Chancellor, with his offices at
the Treasury. From there he and
Frances could slip away to the flat
she’d taken on nearby, or to his
large country house in Walton
Heath, Surrey.
But the move to No 10 saw the
two women spending much of each
day under the same roof. While
Margaret lived with Lloyd George
and daughter Megan in the flat
upstairs, Frances was installed in
her own office next to the Cabinet
Room on the ground floor.
The first female Private Secre-
tary to a British prime minister,
she was now the most powerful
woman in Downing Street.
But it was his wife who continued
to reign supreme in Lloyd George’s
personal life.
Faced with the reality that the
Lloyd Georges were still sharing abedroom, Frances realised that his
marriage was far from the sham he
had pretended and directed her
anger at Margaret, with petty criti-
cisms of her failures as a wife,
including the accusation that she
had ‘failed to get a comfortable
room ready for him’ when they
moved from No 11 to No 10.
‘The first night he came down to
my office to work after dinner,’ she
wrote in her diary. ‘The second
night he did not go up to dinner at
all as he & Mrs Ll.G were not on
speaking terms.
‘She had closed the bedroom
windows on the quiet, thinking
that the room was cold, but
knowing that he always get a
headache when he sleeps with
closed windows.’
Over the coming months, Frances
chose to believe Lloyd George’s
protestations that he was trying to
persuade his wife to spend more
time at their home in North Wales
and increasingly resented her
presence in London.
‘I am not sure I would want to
remain with a man who showed so
plainly that my presence was not
wanted,’ she wrote. ‘She is simply
a lump of flesh, possessing, like the
jelly fish, the power of irritating.’
In this antipathy towardsMargaret, she found an ally in
Sarah Jones, the family’s long-
serving dragon of a housekeeper
who was utterly devoted to Lloyd
George, with his child-like need to
be looked after.
‘Nearly always he had to have
somebody to help him dress,’
recalled Richard Lloyd George.
‘Old Sarah would grumblingly
bend down and tie up his boot-
laces because she feared he would
tie his feet together or something
equally daft.’L
LOyD George was also
baffled by the simplest
mechanical gadget, includ-
ing the awkward dining
room door handle at No 11.
‘Whenever we heard a loud shout
we suspected it was father,
demanding help to have the door
opened,’ wrote Richard.
If annoyed with her employer,
Sarah sometimes deliberately left
him in there, but she was privately
critical of Margaret for neglecting
the creature comforts his lover
stepped in to provide.
Whenever they managed time
alone, Frances cooked him his
favourite meal of fried bacon andpotatoes, and if he was feeling
stressed she persuaded him to go
for a walk and would prepare a
concoction of egg, port, honey and
cream to ‘buck him up’ on
his return.
Approving of Frances’s devotion,
Sarah actively helped the lovers,
conveying messages between
them, concealing his mistress’s
visits to Walton Heath, and
generally hiding the full extent of
the relationship from his wife.
‘As far as Margaret was concerned,
Sarah was her faithful house-
keeper,’ writes Ffion Hague in her
book about the women in Lloyd
George’s life.
‘Neither she nor Megan had any
inkling of Sarah’s secret sympathy
with Frances, or how she had
promoted the affair. Had they done
so, they would not have had her in
the house.’
Frances’s status as the ‘other
woman’ continued in the years
following his departure from
Downing Street in 1922. Although
she supervised the building and
furnishing of the family’s new
house in the Surrey village of
Churt, and spent much time with
Lloyd George there when his wife
was in Wales, she had to disappear
whenever Margaret paid one of hervisits. These could be unexpected,
with staff sometimes bundling
Frances out of the back door as
Margaret came in at the front.
On one occasion Margaret was
infuriated to find Frances’s under-
clothing strewn around. The family’s
feelings against her intensified as
the youngest Lloyd George girls,
Olwen and Megan, reached adult-
hood and discovered that the
woman they regarded as a family
friend had long been sleeping
with their father.
For her part, Frances grew
increasingly resentful of the
family’s intrusion on the rare
private moments when Lloyd
George wasn’t preoccupied
with his continued leader-
ship of the Liberal Party.
Neither was she happy
about reports that, on a
family cruise to South
America in December
1927, he had become
close to his son Richard’s
wife, Roberta.
It was around this time
that she began an affair
with married Liberal
Party official Thomas
Tweed and the following
year she gave birth to a
daughter Jennifer, disap-
pearing to France during
the later stages of her
pregnancy and passing
her off as an adopted child
on her return.
Jennifer’s paternity
remains unknown to this
day but Lloyd George,
unaware that Frances had
been playing him at his own
game, had no reason to
doubt Jennifer was his until
1932 when below-stairs
gossip alerted his daughter
Olwen to Frances’s relation-
ship with Tweed.S
eIzING this opportunity
to be rid of their father’s
mistress once and for all,
Olwen and Megan told
him how he had been betrayed. He
briefly froze Frances out, but found
he could not face life without her
and their relationship continued,
with Lloyd George continuing to
cheat on both his wife and his
mistress with other women.
In the coming years he conducted
‘intrigue after intrigue’ according
to Richard Lloyd George who
described how in later life his
father squandered his political
talents, preferring to ‘vegetate in
luxury at Churt, surrounded by
bevies of female retainers’.
‘Many had official positions: there
were bee-keepers, Land Girls, lady
filing clerks, librarians, maids of all
sorts, or just plain “visitors”,
gallant and giggling ladies with
exotic airs and graces.
‘I could not help but remark the
relative youthfulness of them —
their lord was about 30 to 40 years
older than most.’
Following Margaret’s death in
January 1941, his daughters Olwen
and Megan upped the ante against
Frances. Megan, in particular,
remained implacably opposed to
the idea of her father marrying his
mistress as he had long promised
her he would when free. She threat-
ened to kill herself if the ceremony
went ahead.
By the time he and Frances were
finally wed in a small register office
ceremony in October 1943, Lloyd
George was nearing the end of his
life. eighteen months later, on
March 26 1945, he died of bowel
cancer at the age of 82.
His 57-year-old widow, now the
Countess Lloyd George of Dwyfor,
lived the rest of her life at
Churt, dedicated to perpetuating
his memory.
Among the tributes paid to Lloyd
George was one from his friend
Winston Churchill describing him
as ‘the greatest Welshman’. He was
also celebrated as the ‘Welsh
Wizard’, but many might agree
that his nickname of ‘The Goat’
is, in retrospect, more appropriate.
‘Bonking Boris’ should take note!Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019Power couples:
Lloyd George and
Frances and (above
left) Boris Johnson
with girlfriend CarriePIC
‘He fed on the love of those
around him like a greedy child’
Pictures: GETTY/REUTERS