David Lloyd George

Maiden speech, June 13, 1890 A 27-year-old Welsh Liberal, in the House for barely two months, used his first speech to take on two of the biggest names in politics. The government planned to spend public money buying out pub licenses, and he opposed compensating publicans, calling it a puny attempt to grapple with a great evil. Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill, who had both spoken up for compensation, he mocked as "a kind of political contortionists" whose direction nobody could predict. The Nonconformist temperance radicalism and the gift for ridicule that carried him to Downing Street are both already on show.