The Winnipeg Daily Tribune - Tuesday, July 30, 1895

LONDON SCANDAL.
A Story Abroad Regarding a Man High Up in the Political World.

London, July 30 — A remarkable story, which went the rounds of the London clubs several weeks since as found its way to the masses, and is now being bandied around from one end of the country to the other, although, owing to the peculiar ethics of journalism in this country no newspaper has yet been found willing to give it the authority of type. It is to the effect that the decent defeat of the government was in reality welcomed, if not actually connived at, by the administration owing to the fact that a member of parliament on the Liberal side — a statement in point of fact — was implicated in the Oscar Wilde scandal, and that prominent members of the Tory part threatened to make the fact public in order to discomfit the administration and add to the burden which it bore during its latter days. It is significant in this connection that the incriminated witnesses against Wilde when on the witness stand made references to the influential gentlemen whom they saw from time to time at the house where the Wilde orgies took place, but were invariably choked off by counsel for the prosecution with the remark, "I do not ask you to mention any names."  The politician whose name is associated with the story has not been in good health for some time past, and has been reported in the public press as breaking down or talking incoherently at various meetings which he has been booked to address. So far as the Tories are concerned the story is not at all unlikely, as it has been for years an admitted fact that the then leaders of the party forced into public view the scandal that compelled Sir Charles Dilke to retire for years from public life, solely in order to remove from the parliamentary arena one who had already become their most dangerous opponent.