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"He did not have to wait long before getting into Parliament. In March 1890 the Conservative MP died, and in April, in a desperately close contest, he [David Lloyd George] defeated the local squire, Ellis Nanney, by a mere 18 votes. He was 27, but had come within a hair's breadth of disaster a few weeks earlier when some leading Liberal supporters discovered that he had fathered a child on a widow in Caernarvon. Given the moral climate of the time--just before the Parnell divorce case--this could well have aborted his parliamentary career once and for all. Wealthy backers, however, succeeded in hushing up the affair, by setting an annuity on the widow on condition that not a word was to be revealed. So successful was the cover-up that nothing was ever known about it until many years later when Lloyd George's elder son Richard, already middle-aged, stumbled upon the truth through a chance meeting with a Caernarvon resident in South America...

"This was the first in a long series of extramarital scrapes in which Lloyd George, described by his son as 'probably the greatest natural Don Juan in the history of British politics', became involved, yet despite the incredible risks that he ran he never actually came a cropper. Although his predatory attitude to women later became notorious in political circles, where he became known as 'the Goat', the naturally discreet press of the time, coerced by draconian libel laws, seldom permitted itself more than the most oblique reference to his amatory activities. Nor did his 30-year-long relationship with his secretary, Frances Stevenson, which began in 1913 and eventually led to their marriage in 1943, following Margaret's death, ever make the public prints. In 1927, she bore him a daughter, Jennifer, who was successfully passed off as her adopted child..." Dick Leonard, *A Century of Premiers: Salisbury to Blair* (2005), p. 75. https://books.google.com/books?id=1l6CDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA75

I believe that some of the later sex scandals have been mentioned here (at least Frances Stevenson has been) but I would like here to discuss the one in 1890, because it could have ruined DLG's political career just as it was getting started. Suppose the widow had gone public about the affair before she could be bribed not to do so? Now I know that Grover Cleveland could be elected President of the United States despite acknowledging an illegitimate child. But Cleveland was a bachelor at the time, and DLG was a married man. And anyway, DLG's constituency in Caernavon Boroughs consisted largely of pious Nonconformists who would not look at all favorably on that sort of behavior--and again remember that his victory in OTL was by only eighteen votes. So suppose the scandal ruins his prospects for election in 1890. Will he ever make a comeback? If not--if in Dick Leonard's words it "abort(s) his parliamentary career once and for all"--what are the consequences for British politics? Just to list a few obvious questions: Who becomes Asquith's Chancellor of the Exchequer? (Churchill?) Is there anything like the OTL "People's Budget?" Does the Liberal Party still split during World War I?
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