A Welshman among the English, a nonconformist among Anglicans and a self-made man in the patrician corridors of power, David Lloyd George, the last Liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain was always regarded an outsider. Contempt for the establishment, conviction and self-confidence combined to make him the authentic radical of British history. In this remarkable biography Roy Hattersley shows how during sixteen continuous years in the cabinet, six of them as Prime Minister, Lloyd George changed Britain by founding the welfare state.
 
Hattersley charts the great reforms –  old age pensions, sick pay and unemployment benefit  – which Lloyd George piloted through parliament but also sheds light on the complexity of the private man. The great leader is revealed as a shrewd pragmatist and tactical operator, who could hold together a wartime coalition government and was at the same time addicted to living dangerously. Self-obsessed, financially unscrupulous and a restless philanderer who kept a mistress for more than thirty years in the full knowledge of his loyal wife, Lloyd George would not have survived a year in twenty-first-century politics – even though his manipulation of the news and celebrity status made him the first modern politician.

Bracingly intelligent, meticulously detailed, wide-ranging and insightful, The Great Outsider is the portrait of one of the most remarkable figures in British political history, and is a towering literary achievement.