Liberal Unionist Party - in Popular Culture and The Media

In Popular Culture and The Media

In Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest there is an exchange between Jack Worthing and Lady Bracknell about his suitability as a match for her daughter Gwendolen.

LADY BRACKNELL : ... What are your politics?

JACK: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.

LADY BRACKNELL: Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us.

The play was first performed at the Queen's Theatre London on 14 February 1895 and ran for 83 performances. Jack Worthing's declaration that he was in essence apolitical but - if pressed - would say Liberal Unionist was a joke that would have appealed to the audiences that saw the play in that period. As a party that depended on an electoral pact with the Tories to maintain their MPs in parliament, the Liberal Unionists had to at least appear to be also 'Liberal' in matters not connected with Home Rule including some measures of promoting reform. To someone like Jack, the Liberal Unionists attempts to be two things at the same time but in different places would have appealed with his double identity ('Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country', he says in act 1).

Since 1895 the then topical 'Liberal Unionist' reference has caused some problems with later productions of the play. Usually the line is retained - despite its reference to a long dead political issue (and also party) but it was certainly changed or altered in at least two film versions of the play.

In 1952 film version directed by Anthony Asquith (the son of a former British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith) Jack answers that he is a 'Liberal' rather than 'Liberal Unionist'. Lady Bracknell's answer remains the same - strangely suggesting the Liberals are virtually identical with the Tories except she won't have them round for lunch. This is an ironical re-reading of the passage which suggests Lady Bracknell agreed with the Marxist Social Democratic Federation and their leader Henry Hyndman who thought the same about the two main British parties then. However, in 1952 this comment was oddly true about the then Liberal party whose continued political representation in parliament was largely due to the Conservative party avoid splitting the 'anti-socialist' vote. So perhaps Asquith was making a political point for the 1950s.

Since then - other adaptations of the play for TV or theatre have usually left this brief mention of a largely forgotten political party intact. However in the 2002 film version which starred Judi Dench, Colin Firth, Rupert Everett and Reese Witherspoon - the lines were dropped even though this film re-incorporated episodes and characters in an earlier version of the play that Wilde had been encouraged to drop before the play's first performance.