Henry Du Pré Labouchère (9 November 1831 – 15 January 1912) was an English politician, writer, publisher and theatre owner in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Labouchère, who came from a wealthy Huguenot banking family, was a junior member of the British diplomatic service before briefly serving in Parliament in 1865–68.

He made a name for himself as a journalist and theatre producer, first buying a stake in The Daily News and in 1876 founding the magazine Truth, which he bankrolled during an extensive series of libel suits.

John, who settled at Broome Hall,[citation needed] was a partner in the banking house of Thomas Hope, and then in Deacon's; his uncle, also called Henry Labouchère (d. 1869), entered politics and served in Parliament from 1826 to 1859, when he was made a peer as Baron Taunton.

Despite disapproving of Labouchère, his uncle helped the young man's early career and left him a sizeable inheritance when he died leaving no male heir.

His mother Mary was from an English nabob family,[2] the daughter of James Du Pré MP, a nephew of Lord Caledon, and his wife Madeline Maxwell, a niece of the Duchess of Gordon.

[citation needed] Labouchère was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge,[3] where, he later said, he "diligently attended the racecourse at Newmarket", losing £6,000 in gambling in two years.

[6] Leaving Cambridge, he was sent to South America to look after family business interests there; however, he ended up working in a circus troupe in Mexico and lived for several months in an Ojibwe camp near Minneapolis.

[1] In 1867, Labouchère and his partners engaged the architect C. J. Phipps and the artists Albert Moore and Telbin to remodel the large St. Martins Hall to create Queen's Theatre, Long Acre.

[11] A new company of players was formed, including Charles Wyndham, Henry Irving, J. L. Toole, Ellen Terry, and Henrietta Hodson.

His unflinching style gained a large audience for first his reporting, and later his personal weekly journal, Truth (started in 1876), which was often sued for libel.

[18] Labouchère was a vehement opponent of feminism; he campaigned in Truth against the suffrage movement, ridiculing and belittling women who sought the right to vote.

However, his position became gradually alienated from his party and from public opinion, as he strongly opposed the South African War and argued for peace.

[1] He retired to Florence, Italy, where he died seven years later, leaving a fortune of half a million pounds sterling[n 6] to his daughter Dora, who was by then married to Carlo, Marchese di Rudini.