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British Conservative politician (1879–1941)
the British politician

George Ambrose Lloyd, 1st Baron Lloyd, (19 September 1879 – 4 February 1941) was a British Conservative politician and colonial administrator who was strongly associated with the "Diehard" wing of the party. From 1937 to 1941, he was chairman of the British Council in which capacity he sought to ensure support for Britain's position during the Second World War.

Lloyd was born at Olton Hall, Warwickshire, the son of Sampson Samuel Lloyd (whose namesake father was also a Member of Parliament) and Jane Emilia, daughter of Thomas Lloyd. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He coxed the Cambridge crew in the 1899 and 1900 Boat Races. He left without taking a degree, wad unsettled by the deaths of both his parents in 1899 and made a tour of India. In 1901, Lloyd joined the family firm Stewarts & Lloyds as its youngest director. In 1903, he first became involved with the tariff reform movement of Joseph Chamberlain. In 1904, he fell in love with Lady Constance Knox, daughter of the 5th Earl of Ranfurly, who forbade the match with his daughter considering him unsuitable (she then married Evelyn Milnes Gaskell, son of the Right Honourable Charles Gaskell, in November 1905). In 1905, he turned down an offer by Stewarts & Lloyds of a steady position in London and chose to embark on a study of the East in the British Empire.

Through the efforts of his friends Samuel Pepys Cockerell, working in the commercial department of the Foreign Office, and Gertrude Bell, whom he had come to know, he started work as an unpaid honorary attaché in Constantinople. At "Old Stamboul", as he came to remember the Embassy of Sir Nicholas O'Conor, he worked together with Laurence Oliphant, Percy Loraine and Alexander Cadogan. There also, he first met Mark Sykes and Aubrey Herbert. In April 1906, Herbert joined him on an exploration of the state of the Baghdad Railway. His confidential memorandum of November 1906 on the Hejaz Railway gave a detailed account of many economic problems. That and other papers on Ottoman finance, for example, led to his appointment in January 1907 as a special commissioner to investigate trading prospects around the Persian Gulf. At the January 1910 general election, Lloyd was elected as a Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for West Staffordshire. He married Blanche Lascelles the following year. In February 1914, Lloyd was adopted as Unionist parliamentary candidate for Shrewsbury ahead of the next general election (expected no later than the end of 1915) when the sitting MP, the unrelated namesake George Butler Lloyd, intended to retire. Lloyd was completely opposed to women's suffrage and wrote that to give women the right to vote would ensure that they would vote "for the beaux yeux of the candidates". The general election and his candidacy were both forestalled by the outbreak of the First World War, and the sitting member continued to hold his seat until 1922. He and another backbench colleague in Parliament, Leopold Amery, lobbied the Conservative leadership to press for an immediate declaration of war against Germany on 1 August 1914. In conjunction with Edward Wood (later Earl of Halifax), Lloyd wrote The Great Opportunity in 1918. The book was meant to be a Conservative challenge to the Lloyd George coalition and stressed for devolution of power from Westminster and the importance of reviving English industry and agriculture.

As a lieutenant in the Warwickshire Yeomanry, Lloyd was called up three days after Britain had entered the war. During the war, he served on the staff of Sir Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli and landed with the ANZACs on the first day of that campaign; took part in a special British mission to Petrograd to improve Anglo Russian liaison; visited Basra to update his study of commerce in the Persian Gulf; and, after a time in Cairo, with T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Bureau in Hejaz, the Negev and the Sinai Desert. he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and made Companion of the Indian Empire in 1917. For services in the war, he also received the Russian Empire's Order of St Anne, 3rd Class,

In December 1918 he was appointed Governor of Bombay and made Knight Commander in the Order of the Indian Empire. His principal activities as governor were reclaiming land for housing in the Back Bay area of the city of Bombay and building the Lloyd Barrage (now Sukkur Barrage) an irrigation scheme, both of which were funded by loans raised in India, instead of in England. Lloyd's administration was the first to raise such funds locally. His province was one of the centres of Indian nationalist unrest to deal with which he insisted in 1921 on the arrest of Mahatma Gandhi, who was subsequently imprisoned for six years for sedition. A strong believer in what he regarded as the greatness of the British Empire, Lloyd wrote from Bombay to a friend on 25 August 1920: "The real truth is that we can't withdraw the legions: every schoolboy knows what happened to Rome as the legions began to do so". The British historian Louise Atherton described Lloyd: "Idealistically, almost mystically, devoted to the British Empire, he advocated the use of force, if necessary, to maintain British control". and Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Star of India. He was instrumental in selecting and sending the first truly Indian team of athletes to Olympics in 1920 to the 7th Olympic Games, held at Antwerp, Belgium. He helped form the ad hoc Indian Olympic Association under the chairmanship of the industrialist and philanthropist Sir Dorabji Tata. Lloyd made special arrangements for the preparations and training of the six member team in England, arranged for their travel and stayed in military facilities both in London and then Antwerp. He negotiated the arrangements with Sir Winston Churchill and got the required permissions even when the Britain was broke from the First World War and struggling even to send its own teams to the Games. A patron of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, he also established an annual grant dedicated to its efforts in producing a critical edition of the Hindu epic Mahabharata.

He returned to Parliament again for Eastbourne in 1924 and served until 1925, when he was made Baron Lloyd, of Dolobran in the County of Montgomery, named after his Welsh ancestral home. He agitated for rearmament against Germany as early as 1930, before Churchill did so.

From July 1937 onward, he was chairman of the British Council in which he oversaw an increase in lectureships and made cultural tours of neutral capitals to maintain sympathy for Britain's cause during the early months of the Second World War. As head of the British Council, Lloyd ran his own private intelligence network that employed as one his spies the journalist Ian Colvin, who served as the Berlin correspondent of The News Chronicle. Unusually, Lloyd enjoyed a privileged access to the secret reports of MI6, the British intelligence service. In November 1937, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden instructed Lloyd that the British Council was to concentrate especially on improving Britain's image in Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland. Regarding the Middle East, especially Egypt, as a crucial area of control for Britain, Lloyd regarded the approaches to the Near East as equally crucial, which led him to become obsessed with the Balkans, which called the "eastern approaches", independently of Eden's instructions. In April 1938, he suggested in a memo sent to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax that Britain needed to become more economically involved in the Balkans, which were rapidly falling into the German economic sphere of influence. In response, Britain granted Turkey a credit of £16 million that month, but Lloyd's idea of an "economic offensive" in the Balkans was not taken up at the time.

Lloyd was not in sympathy with the Chamberlain government's policies towards Czechoslovakia in August–September 1938, and his advice that he gave to his old friend, Lord Halifax, who served as Foreign Secretary after Eden had resigned in February 1938 in protest against the Chamberlain's government's policies towards Fascist Italy, was not followed.

In the tense atmosphere of 1938, Lloyd tried hard to increase British propaganda in the United States to an attempt to involve the America in the Sudetenland dispute and favored an approach of trying to appeal to the American elite, rather than the American people in general. In June 1938, he argued that the British Council should arrange for British professors to serve as visiting lecturers at American universities to strengthen Anglo American relations. The same month, the US Congress passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required all propaganda by foreign governments in the United States to be registered with the State Department and to be labelled as propaganda. US Representative Martin Dies Jr., the chairman of the House Committee for the Investigation of Un American Activities (HUAC), announced his committee would be investigating British attempts to get the United States involved in European conflicts. He alleged that the only reason that the United States had declared war on Germany in 1917 was because of improper British propaganda, and he vowed his country would not be "tricked" again into declaring war on Germany. In particular, American journalists were cultivated with the principle theme being that both countries were champions of freedom and democracy and should work together more closely for that reason. As those meetings took place in Britain with individuals who were ostensibly expressing their own personal views, and the American correspondents in their writings and broadcasts merely recorded their own experiences of Britain, that completely bypassed the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Accepting that Czechoslovakia was a lost cause after the Munich Agreement, in the autumn of 1938, Lloyd focused on convincing the government that greater British involvement was needed with the remaining two members of the Little Entente: Yugoslavia and Romania. Lloyd was especially involved with the latter, where his two principal collaborators were Grigore Gafencu and Virgil Tilea, both of whom he knew from his work with the British Council. Lloyd who rather liked Carol, sent a series of vigorously written telegrams from Bucharest urging for Britain to commit itself to spending £500,000 on buying Romanian oil, purchase 600,000 tons of Romanian wheat and assist Romania with building a naval base where the Danube River flowed into the Black Sea. Chamberlain agreed with the idea, but he committed to buying only 200,000 tons of Romanian wheat after objections from the Treasury. Lloyd noted that Germany had no oil of its own and that there were only two places in Europe where oil could be obtained in massive quantities, the Soviet Union and Romania, and that since the latter was by far the weaker, he believed that Romania would be Hitler's next target. In response, Halifax argued that the Germans saw Romania as being in their sphere of influence, and too great of British involvement in that kingdom would have been seen by Hitler as "encirclement". When Carol visited London between 15 and 18 November 1938, Lloyd was present to argue on his behalf. The Chamberlain government committed to spending £10 million in support of threatened nations in November 1938, but the bill authorising the spending was not passed until February 1939, of which the largest sum, £3 million, went to China, and in the Balkans £2 million went to Greece and £1 million to Romania. In January 1939, Lloyd advised Gafencu, who just been appointed Romanian Foreign Minister, to appoint someone of "considerable energy and position" to be the Romanian minister in London, which led to Tilea receiving the appointment. After King Carol, the Balkan leader to whom Lloyd was closest was Prince Paul, the Regent of Yugoslavia for the boy King Peter II. Lloyd made clear during his Greek visit his personal preference for Venizelism and met several Venizelist Greek politicians, which was also a way of expressing his distaste for the 4th of August Regime. During his visit to Greece, both King George and Mextaxas had told him that Germany had more to offer Greece economically than Britain, which led Lloyd to decide on a dramatic gesture to prove otherwise. Lloyd's advocacy of buying the entire Greek tobacco crop for 1939 led to bureaucratic struggle, as objections were raised that it was unfair to force British smokers to use Greek tobacco, regarded as inferior, when they were used to American and Canadian tobacco, regarded as superior. Lloyd argued to Halifax that based upon his sources in Romania, Germany had indeed threatened an invasion, which the Romanians were denying for fear of enraging Hitler. After the Italians annexed Albania on 4 April 1939, there was a general consensus within the Chamberlain cabinet that Britain should guarantee Greece, but it was felt that the Romanians should commit to strengthening their alliance with Poland before Britain offered a guarantee of Romania. A recurring theme of Lloyd's letters to Halifax during the Phoney War was that the Treasury was not providing enough money for the British Council's work in the Balkans. Lloyd, who was in close contact with Churchill who was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty on 3 September 1939, called together with Churchill for a "Balkan league", which would form a line to block any German expansion into the Balkans. It is possible that Lloyd and Tilea had been working together on the same day that Tilea had asked for Lloyd to go to the Balkans. Lloyd had told Lord Halifax of his desire to go the Balkans saying "the urgency of which at the present moment obviously cannot be exaggerated".

By October 1939, it was agreed that Lloyd would visit Romania but all of the Balkan states to work for a "Balkan pact". Sir Reginald Hoare, the British minister in Bucharest, was opposed to the plan to send Lloyd to the Balkans, but George William Rendel, the minister in Sofia, and Sir Michael Palairet, the minister in Athens, were supportive. In the interval, Lloyd had visited Spain to ask the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, if he was willing to guarantee the proposed "Balkan pact", an aspect of his visit to Madrid about which he neglected to tell the Foreign Office. On 14 November 1939, Lloyd's Balkan tour began with a visit to Bucharest. Gafencu suggested a "machinery for common action", but negotiations broken down when King Carol learned that the British guarantee of Romania applied only against Germany, not the Soviet Union, as he wanted. In Belgrade and Sofia, Lloyd's visit was hampered by inability of Britain to supply weapons on the scale that both Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and King Boris III of Bulgaria wanted. After finishing his Balkan tour, Lloyd went to Syria to see Maxime Weygand, whose Armée de la Syrie had been intended by the French General Staff before the war to go to Thessaloniki. In response to objections from Sir Percy Loraine, the British ambassador in Rome, that he was not certain how long Italy would remain neutral, Lloyd argued that Britain should just ignore the possibility of Italy entering the war but start troops to Thessaloniki at once. At the same time, Lloyd advised Halifax that Britain should start shipping weapons to Yugoslavia at once to indicate that Britain was serious about defending the Balkans. In an assessment of Lloyd's work in the Balkans, Atherton wrote: "His position was an ambivalent one: neither a diplomat nor a politician, but a peer with a semi official position and influential political contacts. It was also increasingly irregular, but despite his opposition to the Munich agreement and, after September 1938, to further appeasement of Germany, Chamberlain never sought his removal".

When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940, he appointed Lloyd as Secretary of State for the Colonies and in December, he conferred on Lloyd the additional job of Leader of the House of Lords.

Lord Lloyd was a leading proponent of the future London Central Mosque. As early as 1939 he worked with a Mosque Committee, comprising various prominent Muslims and ambassadors in London. After joining Churchill's cabinet, he sent a memo to Churchill to point out that London contained "more [Muslims] than any other European capital" but that in the British Empire "which actually contains more Moslems (sic) than Christians it was anomalous and inappropriate that there should be no central place of worship for Mussulmans [sic]". He believed the gift of a site for the mosque would serve as "a tribute to the loyalty of the Moslems of the [British] Empire and would have a good effect on Arab countries of the Middle East".

In commerce, Lloyd was also director of the British South Africa Company and Wagon Lit Holdings. In peacetime, he habitually travelled in tropical countries every two months. and in 1937, he was appointed Honorary Air Commodore of No 600 (City of London) (Fighter) Squadron of the Auxiliary Air Force with which he insisted on training himself to qualify as a military pilot. Some in the Foreign Office had thought Lloyd was a homosexual and persisted in that view despite his marriage and the birth of his son.

Lloyd died of myeloid leukaemia at a clinic in Marylebone, London, in February 1941, aged 61, and was buried at St Ippolyts, Hertfordshire. He was succeeded in the barony by his son, Alexander. Lady Lloyd died in December 1969, aged 89.

He appears as the character "Henry Fortescue" in Compton Mackenzie's novel Thin Ice.