JAMES GOLDSMITH

'Sir James Michael Goldsmith' (February 26, 1933, Paris, France - July 18, 1997, Benahavis, Spain) was a British billionaire ^[1] businessman and founder of the eurosceptic Referendum Party.

Contents

Early life

Business

Goldsmith and the media

Politics

Personal life

References

External links

Early life

Born in Paris, he was the son of luxury hotel owner and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Major Frank Goldsmith and his French wife Marcelle Moullier, and the younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith.
James Goldsmith attended Eton, but dropped out in 1949. Two years later Goldsmith joined the army after his father had paid off the very substantial gambling debts he had incurred in the interim^[2]

Business

James's father Frank changed the family name from the German Goldschmidt to the English Goldsmith. The Goldschmidts, like their neighbours and relatives the Rothschilds, had been prosperous merchant bankers in Frankfurt since the 16th century. James' grandfather Adolph came to London as a millionaire in 1895.^[3]
During the 50s and 60s Goldsmith's involvement in finance, which was always more as a gambler than as an industrialist, brought him several times close to bankruptcy.^[4] His successes included winning the British franchise for Alka-Seltzer heartburn relief medicine.
He was also notable as a greenmail corporate raider and asset stripper. With the financial backing of Sir Isaac Wolfson^[5], he acquired a diverse bunch of food companies which was quoted on the London Stock Exchange as 'Cavenham Foods'. This included the Bovril company - the acquisition of which he financed by selling off its assets in South America and elsewhere.^[5] As investigative journalists began to question his techniques of dealing with the funds and assets of publicly-quoted companies, Goldsmith began increasingly to deal through private companies registered both in the UK and abroad. These included the French company ''Generale Occidentale'' and the 'shell' company, ''Anglo-Continental Investments''. During the 60s and 70s Goldsmith had been given some backing by the finance company ''Slater, Walker'', run by Jim Slater. When Slater,Walker crashed and had to be rescued by a 'lifeboat' organised by the Bank of England in 1975, eyebrows were raised when it was handed to Goldsmith for its final dismemberment through his private companies.^[7]
In the 1986 Goldsmith's companies reportedly made $90 million from an attempted hostile takeover of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.
Goldsmith retired to base himself in Mexico in 1987, having correctly anticipated the market crash of that year and liquidated substantial assets. However he continued his involvement in corporate raiding, including an attempt on British-American Tobacco in 1989 (for which he joined forces with Kerry Packer and Jacob Rothschild), and another on the US Newmont Mining group, where, despite aggressive share-trading ^[8], he remained on the board until 1993.

Goldsmith and the media

Goldsmith is well known for his legendary legal attack on the magazine, ''Private Eye'', who referred to him as "Sir Jams" and in Goldsmith's Referendum Party period as "Sir Jams Fishpaste". In 1976 the billionaire issued over sixty libel writs against ''Private Eye'' and its distributors, nearly bankrupting the magazine and almost imprisoning its editor Richard Ingrams. This story is detailed in Ingrams' book ''Goldenballs!'' Goldsmith also pursued vendettas against other journalists who queried his methods, including Barbara Conway who wrote the ''Scrutineer'' column in the City pages of the Daily Telegraph.
In 1977 Goldsmith bought the French weekly ''L'Express'' and between 1979 and 1981 published the UK based news magazine ''NOW!'' which ultimately failed to sell sufficent copies to survive.^[9]
Oliver Stone's 1987 film ''Wall Street'' featured a British billionaire financier, Sir Laurence Wildman. This character is widely believed to have been modelled on Goldsmith.

Politics

Goldsmith, like his friends Lord Lucan and John Aspinall, was obsessively concerned that Britain had been a victim of a socialist conspiracy and that communists had infiltrated the Labour party and the western media.^[10] In the mid-1990s, Goldsmith was a major financial backer of a leading Euro-sceptic thinktank, the European Foundation. In 1994 he became an elected member of the European Parliament representing France, associating himself with a right-wing coalition. ''L'Autre Europe''.
Goldsmith founded (and funded) the Referendum Party in the UK, on the same lines as ''L'Autre Europe'', which stood candidates in the 1997 general election. Part of its campaign was that Goldsmith mass-mailed over five million homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has been suggested that he made plans to broadcast nationwide to the UK during the election from his own offshore pirate Referendum Radio station.^[11]
In the 1997 election, Goldsmith stood as a candidate for his party in the London parliamentary constituency of Putney, against Tory cabinet minister David Mellor. Goldsmith himself stood no chance of victory, but the declaration made for one of the most memorable moments of the entire election - Mellor lost his seat to the Labour candidate and was subsequently taunted by Goldsmith (who clapped his hands slowly and chanted "out, out, out!") and other candidates. Goldsmith's own electoral performance was however feeble; the 1518 votes he received did not in themselves deny victory to Mellor, who lost by 2976 votes; moreover they amounted to well under 5% of those voting and were thus not sufficient for Goldsmith to retain his candidate's deposit of £500.^[12] Mellor correctly predicted that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and it effectively died with Goldsmith who passed on two months after the electon. The seat was regained by the Conservatives in the 2005 General Election.

Personal life

Goldsmith was married three times, and is said to have coined the phrase: ''"When you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy."''
His first wife, married when he was 20, was the Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño, the 18-year-old daughter of tin magnate Antenor Patiño and the Duchess of Durcal, a member of the Spanish royal family. When Goldsmith proposed the marriage to Antenor Patiño, Patiño is alleged to have said, "We are not in the habit of marrying Jews", to which Goldsmith is reported to have replied, "Well, I am not in the habit of marrying [Red] Indians.". This story if true is typical of the crude and aggressive 'wit' with which his supporters seemed proud to identify.
With the heiress secretly pregnant and the Patinos insisting the pair separate for good, the couple eloped in January 1954. The marriage was tragically brief. Rendered comatose by a massive cerebral hemorrhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Patiño de Goldsmith died in May 1954; her only child, Isabel, who survived, was delivered by Caesarian section. This marriage - the legal contract to access the financial riches of the Patiño family - ensured James securing the "Goldsmith" billions.
Goldsmith's second wife was Ginette Lery, with whom he had a son, Manes, and daughter, Alix.
In 1978 he married for the third time; his new wife was his hitherto mistress Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry (gaining access to a further fortune based on real property located in the UK); the couple had three children, Jemima (born in 1974), Zacharias (born in 1975) and Benjamin (born in 1980).
After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on an affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, with whom he had two more children.
Goldsmith died a phenomenally wealthy man, (as much through his marriages as through his own slapdash business transactions), in 1997 of a heart attack brought on by pancreatic cancer, aged 64. His death attracted a bizarre tribute from Tony Blair, whose consensual style was the exact opposite of Goldsmith's blend of bullying and bluster - "He was an extraordinary character and though I didn't always agree with his political views, obviously, he was an amazing and interesting, fascinating man and I think people will miss him." ^[13]
But although Goldsmith was frequently termed a 'billionaire' (especially by friends and journalists partial to him), this term should be used with caution. His dealings were often done on the back of other people's (or other shareholders') money, and it is difficult to evaluate how much might have been available to him personally at any one time.

References

1. Billionaire: The Life and Times of Sir James Goldsmith by Ivan Fallon
2. Obituary, National Review, Oct 1 1997 [1]
3. The Lucky Gambler Sir James Goldsmith Is a Billionaire Buccaneer (Yes, Even After the Crash)
4. BBC obituary [2]
5. Ketupa.net (media industry resource) article on Goldsmith
6. Ketupa.net (media industry resource) article on Goldsmith
7. ''End Game for Slater'', TIME Magazine 10 November 1975 [3]
8. ''New York Notebook'', International Herald Tribune, 17 May 1993 [4]
9. Suddenly, Now! Is Never
10. Desperate Lucan dreamt of fascist coup
11. Sir James Goldsmith's UK Referendum Radio of 1997 Genie Baskir
12. UK Parliamentary election procedures
13. BBC Obituary [5]


★ ''Communist Propaganda Apparatus & Other Threats to The Media'', by Sir James Goldsmith - a booklet containing his statement to the Media Committee of the Conservative Party at the British House of Commons, 21 January, 1981. (The Conservative Monday Club distributed this booklet).

★ Richard Ingrams, ''Goldenballs!'' London: Harriman House, 1993. ISBN 1-897597-03-7.

★ ''The Mayfair Set'', a 1999 BAFTA Award-winning documentary series by Adam Curtis describing buccaneer capitalists in the Thatcher years, focusing on James Goldsmith and other members of the Clermont Set.

External links

★ Television coverage of the Putney election result 1997 (featuring Goldsmith heckling David Mellor on YouTube)