An early muck-raker
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Journalists and backbench members of Parliament are bit-part players in the public drama. But they are sometimes more interesting — and more attractive — than the stars. Henry Labouchere was both a journalist and a backbencher. He never held public office; but Labby' — who was born on 9 November 1831, 150 years ago next Monday — was more than an idle observer, more too than just a great Victorian eccentric.
Labby came of Huguenot stock. His family had migrated to Amsterdam and made a large fortune with the Hope bank before coming to England. He was educated at Eton and at Cambridge, whence he was sent down after two years, £6000 in debt, mostly to bookmakers. He roamed the world, mixing with Red Indians and circus troupes. In London, according to his friend Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, he lived 'entirely in the society of whores and croupiers'. He is supposedly the model for Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda. His family found him a place in the diplomatic service and several years were passed here and there in Europe. The foreign secretary, Russell, caught up with him in Baden-Baden and asked if he would take the appointment of consulgeneral in Buenos Aires. Happily, Labby told Lord John — as long as he could perform his duties from Baden-Baden. This was the end of his diplomatic career.
The combination of exotic background and upper-class upbringing endowed Labby with an extreme form of insolence, or arrogance, or goat de deplaire. This was fortified by his financial circumstances: in 1869 he inherited some quarter of a million. He was a good advertisement for private means. Like a few other journalists — Karl Kraus is a disparate example — he showed that financial independence really could mean political and intellectual independence.
In the 1860s he made his first attempt to enter Parliament. (At election meetings there was a regular cry of "Ow's 'Enrietta?' in reference to his irregular connection with the theatrical lady whom he eventually married. At one meeting he began with the words, 'In answer to any enquiries which may be made I am happy to say that Henrietta is quite well.') It was not until 1880 that Labby became MP for Northampton — the 'Christian Member'. This was a joke. He was a silent agnostic, but the other member was Bradlaugh. He sat in the Commons for more than 25 years.
Before entering Parliament he had acquired several journalistic interests: the Daily News, the World, most importantly Truth. The last mixed reflective editorials, mostly by Labby himself, with 'muckraking' or investigative journalism — though both terms are prochronistic. Labby's targets were corrupt businessmen and fraudulent promoters, the financial 'rotters' of Victorian and Edwardian fiction: Truth was an earlier (and better written) Private Eye. Of course many actions for libel were brought against it. Labby usually fought them and often won them. It is a dispiriting thought that the balance of power in libel law has so changed that nowadays no paper could survive if it exposed wrong-doers with Labby's recklessness. In 1885, incidentally, Truth was selling around 30,000 copies a week and making an annual profit of £14,000.
As men since Labby have discovered, the proprietorship of a weekly can be a hindrance in a political career. The Queen forbade Gladstone to include the owner of Truth in his last ministry. Not that Labby would have fitted easily into the government. He stood on the Liberals' extreme Radical wing, deploring the influence of the Crown and of the Upper House, favouring domestic reform and opposing the frantic Imperial expansion of the 1880s and '90s. This meant especially opposing the Scramble for Africa. Throughout the 1880s Labby spent much time talking about Uganda. But it was southern Africa which became the main focus of his concern.
Labby understood the South African problem better than most people at the time; than most people today, come to that. He managed the difficult feat of being both pro-Boer and `Kaffirboetie'. He saw that both blacks and Afrikaners had their rights and that the Empire was trampling on both. 'The manifest destiny of the country is to become a Dutch state,' he said; and yet the blacks must be protected from the Boers — and from all whites. He saw through Imperialism instinctively. When someone was harrowing the Commons with an account of the terrible dangers facing 'a handful of men' in the African bush, Labby snapped, 'Maxim gums.' (His wit is difficult to capture, the sardonic repartee which convulsed the House at the time but reads flat in Hansard.) And although Imperialism had ended the slave trade it had 'replaced it by making the Africans slaves at home'.
The particular objects of Labby's hatred were the 'Randlords', above all Rhodes and Beit. He tried to expose and destroy them when he sat on the Committee of Inquiry on the Jameson raid. Although he failed, partly through his own intemperance (verbal that is; drink was the only vice which did not appeal to Labby) it is his verdict on Rhodes which history remembers: 'To me this Empire jerry-builder has always been a mere vulgar promoter masquerading as a patriot.'
The verdict was not quite right, and Labby should not be glamorised to excess. He had grave faults. The `Labouchere amendment' under which men were for so long sent to prison for private homosexual activity showed an ugly prejudice; the widespread distrust which he inspired among the politically respectable was not just their priggishness; his financial scrupulosity was not of the highest. His claim that the Raid had been no more than a financial ramp was in fact a remarkable piece of Freudian projection, for there is evidence that Labby himself sometimes used his papers to manipulate the stock market to financial advantage (though his friends', not his own).
For all that, he was a force for good. Queen Victoria called him 'That horrible lying Labouchere'; after one of his parliamentary ruses the staid Spectator said that he was 'unable to resist the impulse of bedevilment'. We may prefer Blunt's words: 'One of the few quite honest MPs who always told the truth.'
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