amounting to scores of thousands of pounds.
In 1880, with Charles Bradlaugh [q.v.] as his colleague, Labouchere began his twenty-five years' parliamentary representation of Northampton. For a dozen years an influential section of the nonconformist electors of Northampton had successfully opposed the candidature of Bradlaugh because he preached atheism. Labouchere, too, was a lifelong agnostic, but a silent one, and these same people gave him enthusiastic support: in his scoffing way Labouchere used to call himself the ‘Christian member for Northampton’. He soon became one of the most powerful radicals in the Commons. His only hatred in politics was reserved for the whigs, who still retained an influence in the liberal party disproportionate to their numbers and to their support in the country. He attacked their methods and their purposes alike in home and foreign policy, and although publicly he always treated Gladstone with respect, privately he mocked at his fervour and ‘mystifications’. He did not object, he once said, to Gladstone's always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but only to his pretence that God had put it there. Throughout the parliament of 1880–1885 Labouchere worked for an ‘all-radical’ government with Joseph Chamberlain [q.v.] at its head. Even before Gladstone ‘flew’ his first Home Rule ‘kite’, towards the end of 1885, Labouchere exploited his intimacy with the Irish nationalists in his campaign against the moderate liberals. A resourceful intriguer, he employed all his arts in the early months of 1886 to bring Chamberlain, Gladstone, and the Irish nationalists into agreement, using each in turn to further his plan of ‘dishing the whigs’. When Chamberlain decided to vote against the first Home Rule Bill, it was the greatest disappointment of Labouchere's life, for it ruined his main enterprise. Thereafter his political zeal, though unabated, was diverted. The reorganization of the liberal party and doctrine, for which he had worked, and which might have altered the course of history, had become impossible. The cause of Home Rule owed much to him, and he assisted in exposing the forgeries of Richard Pigott [q.v.], by which it was sought to represent Parnell as inciting to assassination. Pigott's confession, after his cross-examination by Sir Charles Russell, was written at Labouchere's house.
If political services were the chief qualifications, there were strong reasons why Labouchere should have been given a place in the liberal government of 1892–1895. His exclusion, it was understood, was due to the objection of Queen Victoria, who held that the proprietor and editor of Truth ought not to be given office under the Crown. Shortly afterwards he suffered another rebuff. He intimated a desire to be ambassador at Washington, but Lord Rosebery, who was then foreign secretary, would not recommend the appointment. Even if it had been a suitable opportunity, it was scarcely reasonable to expect Lord Rosebery to appoint his most unsparing critic as the mouthpiece of his policy in the United States.
Labouchere gained distinction and notoriety by being unlike any English politician of his time. His scepticism and realism were of the French rather than of the English cast, and he was the only English politician of the nineteenth century who made himself popular by cynical wit. For the forms of the British constitution he had little respect. He was hostile to the royal prerogative, to hereditary legislators, and to the formalisms and circumlocutions of diplomacy; he instinctively distrusted the appeal of idealism. An industrious student of politics, he was an especially dangerous critic in foreign affairs. His parliamentary reputation was founded on the skill with which he attacked the Egyptian policy of Gladstone's second administration. Yet—in this respect true to the tradition of the radical school to which he belonged—Labouchere was never a ‘little Englander’; and in his advocacy of an independent Egypt he recognized the need for British control of the Suez Canal. The settlement for which he pleaded in the 'eighties was, indeed, much like that embodied in the treaty of forty years later. He was among the most extreme opponents of the Chamberlain-Milner policy in South Africa. He took a prominent part in the commission of inquiry into the Jameson Raid, and while he admitted that there was no proof of Colonial Office complicity, he complained that access to some important documents was denied. In the South African War he was one of the leaders of the peace party, and this was perhaps the only period of his career in which he was personally unpopular. His constituents mobbed him at Northampton, and the worries of the time injured his health. But politics had now become almost his only interest, and he went on until December 1905, when the Balfour ministry fell and Sir Henry Campbell-Banner--
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