In 1992 the journalist Edward Pearce published a diary of that year's general election campaign. It was reviewed for the London Review of Books by Peter Clarke.
Here is Clarke on Lloyd George:
Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model.
As A.J.P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George's platform oratory owed a heavy debt to the music hall. He could control an audience with the inspired timing of a stand-up comic. His one-liner about the House of Lords – "five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed" – was fit to bring the house down.
He was the politician as entertainer, subordinating reason to emotion as much as any party political broadcast in the last campaign. He could pirouette, like Chaplin, from the broadest belly-laugh to tear-jerking pathos without having to say: "but to be serious for a moment, ladies and gentlemen ..."
Yet, as the last of the great pre-electronic politicians, Lloyd George became a hapless victim of technological advance in the Twenties. While, like Archie Rice, he was still having a go on the public stage, Stanley Baldwin stole into the sitting-room of anyone lucky enough to have a new wireless.
His avoidance of histrionics in favour of the fireside manner was pitched perfectly for his middle-brow, middle-class constituency, and showed that the public meeting, in its classic form, was doomed. Baldwin could be relied upon to rise to the small occasion.
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