Why didKeynes an exceedingly well connected young man with his feet very well planted in the English establishment,decide to take the risk of writing such an explosive book like The Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919? After all, others had their doubts about Versailles; butnone went public;and ifor when theydid,it was certainly not to criticizethe peace settlementor the peacemakersin such a vitriolic fashion. SowhatledKeynes to write a book likeThe Economic Consequences of the Peace? What was his purpose in doing so? Who did he think he was writing it for?Was it his last word on the subjector was it – as Keynes believed at the time – merely the first step in a longer struggle to effectively render the economic parts of the Treaty invalid? Finally, why was the volumethe great success it turned out to be at the time, and whyis it still being debated today by both admirers and critics alike?

In a parallel way, when we move to consider Keynes’s political views and involvement, we find a similar reliance upon the privileged networks of his intimates. In particular the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Keynes, as the two figures of real genius in Bloomsbury, is explored – with insights on the impact that her tract Three Guineas had upon his (much-discussed) memoir ‘My Early Beliefs’. Keynes’s political stance is also examined through his proprietorial influence upon the left-wing weekly the New Statesman, of which Kingsley Martin (a close friend of the late Frank Ramsey) was now the presiding editor. What Keynes wrote about uncertainty in decision-making was as relevant to choices in foreign policy as to the macro-economic universe that he surveyed in his General Theory.

It has long been a puzzle to reconcile two well-known facts: first that the Economic Consequences became the received version on the left for a contemptuous view of Lloyd George; second, that Keynes came to cooperate so closely with Lloyd George in seeking to revive the Liberal party in the 1920s. Their own relationship had begun during the First World War, when Keynes was first drawn into advising the Treasury on key policy issues from 1914. It was in these years that Keynes benefited from the sponsorship of Edwin Montagu, a key minister in the Liberal government. This chapter shows how much Lloyd George’s initial hostility to Keynes on economic policy was the product of a cultural clash between them; also how this came to be resolved (at least temporarily) when Keynes picked up economic insights from Lloyd George’s untutored intuitions. And the chapter draws on the memoir ‘Dr Melchior’, composed by Keynes for his Bloomsbury friends, to illustrate the way that – almost against his own prejudices – he became captivated by Lloyd George’s intuitive mastery of the political process.