The Londoner slipped into a Hogarthian den of iniquity at Merchant House near St Paul’s last night, where writer Olivia Williams was celebrating the launch of Gin, Glorious Gin. Among the cocktail-drenched pages of her lively history of the spirit, Williams — pictured centre with journalist Lara Prendergast, left, and film assistant Charlotte Goldney — recounts how David Lloyd George, before becoming Prime Minister in 1916, led a campaign for national sobriety.
During the first years of the war he declared that not only was Britain fighting three enemies: Germany, Austria and drink, but that booze was “the greatest of these deadly foes” — leading the then Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, to pronounce that Lloyd George had “completely lost his head on drink”. We can think of far more inviting — and less abstemious — ways of doing that.
