Professor Lord Morgan to champion Lloyd George in Greatest Liberal contest.
Was Lloyd George the greatest ever Liberal? As previously reported, the Liberal Democrat History Group is running a contest to determine who was the greatest Liberal of all time. Readers of the Journal of Liberal History voted over the summer to whittle down a list of 15 nominees (plus a number of write-in candidates) to a final four – W E Gladstone, John Maynard Keynes, John Stuart Mill and David Lloyd George.
Now, in the final stage, leading politicians and historians will make the case for each one, and Journal readers and participants in the Liberal Democrat conference in Brighton will be able to vote for the final choice of the greatest Liberal.
The meeting at which the contestants will be championed takes place at 20.00, on Wednesday 19 September 2007 at the Forest Room, Quality Hotel, Brighton. Paddy Ashdown speaks for Gladstone; Tom McNally for Keynes and Richard Reeves for John Stuart Mill. Martin Kettle, Assistant Editor and political correspondent of The Guardian will chair the meeting.
Speaking for Lloyd George will be Professor K O Morgan, the eminent historian, Welsh scholar and author and biographer of Lloyd George. Professor Morgan is a previous speaker at the Lloyd George Society weekend school. In February 2006, Lord Morgan’s lecture, ‘Blissful dawn? The Liberal government of 1906’ first delivered to the Corporation of the City of London was presented to the weekend school in Llandrindod Wells. There could be no more distinguished academic champion for LG.
