Thre Sun TUESDAY, JULY 3, 1928 FORTUNE IN POLITICS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 396, 3 July 1928, Page 8

Thre Sun TUESDAY, JULY 3, 1928 FORTUNE IN POLITICS

MB. DAVID LLOYD GEOKGE has reached that point in years at which democratic politicians of his humanitarian class would award an old-age pension to every deserving man. He is 65. But he does not look his age, and it appears certain that he does not feel it. Arterially, the nimble statesman is as supple as his political artifices. Nor does the clever leader of the British Liberals need an old-age pension or any other State dole. He has made a ■fortune out of his fame as a politician, and continues to make money on a scale that has no parallel in political history. With his pen as a political journalist and with his pay as a journalistic politician, the Welsh wizard earns or is paid exactly £65 a day, excluding Sundays on which, it is right and proper to emphasise, he is one of the devoutest men in the British Empire, a thoughtful man with more interest in the Bible, the source of much of his eloquent inspirational oratory, than in the Sunday newspapers which flagellate him for his polities. His position in polities just now is only worth a little over one guinea a day, and there have been occasions when opponents and political enemies have suggested unkindly that, even at that modest figure, he was overpaid. The formidable balance of his enviable income is gained by overworking the pen in politics. It is explained by a London journal, which has always lain close to Wee Davy, that Mr. George has been the highest paid writer of newspaper articles in the world. A series of fortnightly contributions syndicated by an American company him £125,000. If that sum were paid as a reasonable price for the stuff he wrote about international politics, then not less than £1,125,000 would be fair value for the- full story that only Mr. Lloyd George, among British statesmen, could tell. With reason he might say, as Marka, Queen of Sheba, said of Solomon’s glory, “the half has not been told.” The Peace Conference of Paris alone still could yield him a fortune, particularly if he were to disclose all the reasons why M. Clemeneeau thought and said that, on the Supreme Council of the Allies at the Quai d’Orsay, he had on his right hand a man who believed himself to be the Messiah and, on his left, another man who considered himself to he the reincarnation of Napoleon—a quaint delusion that must have annoyed the late Lord Northcliffe, then at Fontainebleau, watching the congress of peacemakers with wrath in his eyes and possibly in his heart a desire to use a whiff of grapeshot. It is announced by the British Liberal leader that he will lay down his pen at the end of this year in order to devote all his time and energy to preparing his party for the general election. This will involve a sacrifice of £20,000 a year. His battered cause may not seem worth so great a sacrificial zeal, but everybody must admire the Liberal enthusiasm which is prepared to forfeit £20,000 for the joy of “bashing the Tories.” And it also is suggested that Mr. Lloyd George may exploit the deep Protestantism that has been demonstrated in the Parliamentary debates on the revised Prayer Book and make disestablishment of the Church of England a plank in the Liberal platform. Most politicians everywhere are always looking for a godsend, but it is to be hoped that a controversy on Disestablishment will not fill the British political arena with fury. That would make the enemies of religion rejoice. Better far that Mr. Lloyd George, who revels in such warfare and has vivid memories of great conflict with Gladstone in the old days, should stick to his golden pen, and tell the world the whole truth about the game of politics.