Words: Gentleman's Journal
“People ask why I am doing all this. You know why. I am doing it for the same reasons as you. We just cannot stand by and see this nation surrendered. We are just not built that way.”
Two months before Sir James Goldsmith’s death at the age of 64, Vanity Fair described him as ‘a high-flying financial buccaneer, crusading politician and famously unconventional family man’. Seventeen years on, we get under the surface of this provocative figure whose actions still send a tremor through British politics, business and society today.
For a man who dipped his fingers into so many different pies, Jimmy’s closet is filled with its fair share of accusations, rumours and tales, some of which still remain unresolved in the eyes of the public and the media, while many stand confirmed. There is, of course, the unsettled controversy surrounding the disappearance of the 7th Earl of Lucan which got pretty nasty and the legal battle Goldsmith waged against Private Eye. Dig around deeper and you’ll uncover stories about his controversial love affairs, from which he had eight children from four separate women. These, coming from a man who was quoted as saying, ‘When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy,’ are less easy to shake off. Probe a little more and you’ll find plenty of tall stories and half-truths about his corporate raiding blitzes and misogynistic character, all of which kept the media on tenterhooks.
As an obstinate businessman, Goldsmith was largely unaffected by and accepting of peoples’ judgement of him, openly remarking on one occasion to an interviewer, “All establishments—industrial, political, bureaucratic—don’t like me (…) I reject most of the bases everyone else is working from, so I can’t expect to be popular.”
Despite the negativity from the press which dogged Jimmy’s media profile for much of his life, the publicity that surrounded him clearly reinforced the mesmeric control he had over everyone, whether they had come face-to-face with him or not. He enchanted and insulted women, angered and supported politicians, despised and sought the media, and destroyed and saved businesses to carve a unique path in the world. Those who scorned him and deprecated him, including the then current Prime Minister, John Major, who described him as ‘living in cloud-cuckoo-land’, responded to his ways and in doing so fuelled fascination with him on a global scale.
The Telegraph described Jimmy in its obituary as a ‘mercurial stock market predator, a quixotic political thinker and a man of volcanic passions whose private life defied all convention.’ Reflecting back on his life, it is clear to see a pattern emerge in the way Jimmy went about doing business. He had to be the leader, he had to be different and he had to be the one on top; when the tables turned and he ended up on bottom all hell broke loose until order was restored.
Leap forward to January 12th 1997, when a few dozen followers Goldsmith rallied together on a London pavement in front of a huge billboard that read pointedly “Why can’t we have a proper referendum on Europe, Mr. Major?” With a cheer from the crowd, the Referendum Party’s general election campaign against the British Establishment got under way.
Goldsmith founded the Referendum party in 1995 for the explicit purpose of demanding a comprehensive referendum on Britain’s role in Europe. His campaign was one aimed purely at shaking up British politics as it stood and uniting a public force against the Tories. His was a campaign of numbers and short-term strategy over long-term tact…
Read the full interview in the Summer issue of The Gentleman’s Journal, subscribe at thegentlemansjournal.co.uk/subscribe/
By Emma Corbett
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