Did Lloyd George's mistress order the silencing of the PM's most virulent critic?

Socialist firebrand Victor Grayson was tipped as a future Labour PM until an extraordinary fall from grace and his subsequent sudden disappearance

- Stephen May

VICTOR Grayson was Britain’s first revolutionary socialist MP, idolised by hundreds of thousands — but feared and despised by the Establishment.

A hero of the working class or a treacherous, sexually incontinent drunk, depending on your point of view. A troublemaker whose sudden and mysterious disappearance remains unsolved to this day, but which may have been ordered by the prime minister - or his lover.

It’s a story that, once I'd stumbled across it, demanded to be written.

Britain of 1920 was bitterly divided, a nation struggling to overcome the effects of both war and a global pandemic, led by an infamously promiscuous premier who relied more on the advice of his mistress, Frances Stevenson, than his cabinet colleagues. She began her connection with prime minister David Lloyd George as tutor to his daughter, before graduating to the positions of primary mistress and private secretary.

This is the Britain in which the now almost forgotten Victor Grayson became prominent. The story of a fractured post-war, post-epidemic Britain provided a suitably tumultuous backdrop for a novel. The story of the most powerful man in the country conducting a secret love affair with a woman 25 years his junior and relying on her for political advice was a juicy foundation for a book. But it was researching the enigmatic figure of Victor Grayson that proved the key to recreating a vanished world.

An early member of the Independent Labour Party, he was young, good-looking, witty and able to think fast on his feet. Born in poverty in Liverpool, Victor showed exceptional promise as an amateur preacher and so was supported by leaders of the non-conformist Unitarian church to train as a minister.