Lady Megan Lloyd George Joins the Labour Party

‘L. G. thinks that Gwilym will go to the right and Megan to the left, eventually. He wants his money spent on the left.’1 Thus did Lloyd George’s trusted principal private secretary A. J. Sylvester write in his diary entry for 14 April 1938 when discussing his employer’s heartfelt concern over the future of his infamous Lloyd George ‘Political Fund’. It was a highly prophetic comment. The old man evidently knew his two politician children. Lady Megan Lloyd George, the left- wing Liberal MP for Anglesey from 1929 until her defeat there in 1951, eventually joined the Labour Party in April 1955 following an extended, rather fraught period of vacillation and intense soul-searching. She later served as the Labour MP for Carmarthenshire from 1955 until her premature death in 1966. The purpose of the present essay is to examine the essential elements of her starkly radical, labourite Liberal philosophy through the years and to chart in some detail the successive steps in her political journey leftwards towards the Labour Party.

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