Reeling Blow

"David's daughter for St. David's day," cried a musical Welsh voice in the bar at Brown's Hotel as its owner raised his pint high. Across the street, their collars turned up against the icy wind, the voters of Carmarthen constituency in Wales were queueing up to cast their votes in Britain's third parliamentary by-election since Tory Harold Macmillan took over as Prime Minister. Under normal circumstances the results would have been easily predictable, for Carmarthen is a Liberal Party stronghold and one of the candidates was pert, jaunty, 54-year-old Lady Megan Lloyd George, daughter and longtime political aide of the late Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George. The trouble was that

Lady Megan ("Megan Turncoat," as some of her detractors called her) was standing against and not with her father's old party.

A tiny, flinty chip off the old block, who herself served as Liberal M.P. from the Welsh island of Anglesey for 22 years and as deputy party leader for two, Megan Lloyd George turned Laborite-in 1955, and when taxed about it replied: "I'm a radical, like my father before me. The Liberal Party is no longer the home for radicals." Last week, representing her new party on the hustings for the first time, she was contesting the first Liberal seat to fall vacant since she joined Labor.

There were other confusing aspects about the election. The Tories had put up no candidate at all; Lady Megan's chief opponent was a Liberal who had gone against his own party policy to support the Tory stand on Suez; and a third candidate, representing a Welsh nationalist party, declared herself as "not anti-anything, just constructive." When the votes were all in, Laborite Lady Megan was the victor by 3,069 votes. "A great victory for Labor. A reeling blow for the government," crowed Lady Megan.

But though Macmillan's Tories had already lost one seat to Labor last fortnight and seen Labor boost its local majority by 50% to retain a seat at Wednesbury last week, the "reeling blow" that Lady Megan dealt was felt less by the Tories than by the once powerful party of her father and of the young Winston Churchill. With Laborite Lloyd George's election, the Liberal Party's representation in the House of Commons was reduced to a pitiful five members.

*Her brother Gwilym Lloyd-George (the only member of the family who hypbenates) slipped away from the Liberals to join forces with the Tories in 1951, now sits in the House of Lords as Viscount Tenby of Bulford. Megan's elder brother, Richard, who inherited his father's peerage as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, rarely attends the House of Lords and says, "I'm thankful I'm not a politician."

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