A statue of David Lloyd George, Prime Minister 1916-1922, was recently unveiled in Parliament Square in London. Several barristers have become Prime Minister (including Herbert Asquith, Clement Atlee, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair) but Lloyd George, known as “the Welsh Wizard” is the only solicitor to have become PM. He was a lawyer who changed the world.

Lloyd George was a controversial figure implicated in corruption and racism. His statue was opposed by some, including the Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter, because during the First World War Lloyd George ordered British troops to bomb Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq.

He was born in Manchester in 1863, the son of a schoolteacher. When Lloyd-George was eight year old his father died and since both of his parents had Welsh roots his mother took him to Wales soon after. He passed his Law Society Finals in 1884, and later set up his own legal practice in Cricieth, Caernarvonshire. In 1890, he was elected Liberal MP for Caernarvon, a seat he held until 1945.

In 1888, he won praise for his role in the Llanfrothen burial case. In it, Lloyd George successfully defended local nonconformists who had the courage to bury one of their dead, Robert Roberts, a Methodist quarryman, in the parish churchyard. Roberts wanted to be buried beside his daughter but the Church of England refused. Lloyd George studied the relevant documents and after promising to defend them afterwards, encouraged the nonconformists to break in to the cemetery and bury Mr Roberts according to his wishes.

The church rector sued the buried man’s family for conducting an unlawful burial service. Lloyd George applied for a jury trial. He confined his argument to one point: was the land owned by the parish or the rector? The jury agreed it was the parish’s and found for the family. The county court judge reserved judgment, saying there were still legal points to be considered. Then, eight weeks later, astonishingly, he decided in favour of the rector. Lloyd George appealed and won. Lord Chief Justice Coleridge decided for the family and gave a scarcely veiled reprimand to the trial judge.

In 1908, Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer. He championed old-age pensions, which introduced the state-financed pension of five shillings a week. In 1909, his budget was called the “people's budget” because it established a social insurance system that was to be partly financed by land and income taxes. The budget was initially rejected by the House of Lords. This, in turn, led eventually to the Parliament Act of 1911 by which the Lords lost their power of veto on legislation.

In December 1916, Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister. In the summer of 1922, he was involved in a scandal involving the selling of knighthoods and peerages. One of the results of these murky events was the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 – the legislation under which various key political figures were recently interviewed. The trafficking of honours was to fund political objectives rather than personal enrichment. Better to sell titles, he said, than to sell policies.

Although he denounced egotism in others Lloyd George was not shy of his own abilities. He was brutally ambitious, once saying to his first wife:

“My supreme idea is to get on. To this idea, I shall sacrifice everything—except, I trust, honesty. I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way”

He later left his first wife for his daughter’s French teacher. In 1912 he narrowly escaped being condemned for corruption. He had purchased shares in the American Marconi company when the British Marconi company was about to enter into a lavishly profitable deal with the Government to build telegraphy stations across the empire.

Lloyd George’s admirers included Lenin, who dedicated a book to him as the most gifted political leader in the capitalist world and Hitler, who he visited in August 1936. Hitler gave Lloyd George a signed photograph and in return the PM expressed warm enthusiasm for the man he referred to as “the greatest living German”.

Indisputably though, Lloyd George’s government established major reforms. The Education Act of 1918 substantially extended state elementary and secondary education and made provision for part-time education. The Representation of the People Act 1918 greatly extended the electorate from 8 million to 21 million – it enfranchised not only all adult men over 21 but all women aged 30 and over. Lloyd George was a complicated man whose approach is encapsulated in his thought that “if you want to succeed in politics, you must keep your conscience well under control”.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University

Times Recommends

• The best legal yarns this Christmas
• Legal school 'earned £1m by exploiting bar course'
• Axe may fall on 5,000 more City lawyers