Sir James Goldsmith, the multibillionaire financier turned crusading politician, has been attacked again, to his apparent delight. “This is very amusing,” he says, unfolding a photocopy of the previous day’s London Independent. “This columnist really dislikes me. We disagree on everything. But I quite like this column.” In a cultivated baritone—old Etonian touched lightly with a French rolling r—he reads the column aloud, until he alights on his favorite point: “But what of Sir James’s 20 million pounds?” writes the left-leaning Polly Toynbee. “Is he spending his money in vain? No, because he has already achieved precisely what he always wanted. He has frightened the Tory party into turning xenophobically anti-Europe and he has tilted public opinion alarmingly.”
For Goldsmith, being attacked means being noticed, and being noticed means being taken seriously. “It shows the effect we have had,” he says. “We have woken up the electorate.” “We” is the Referendum Party, the renegade political movement that he launched in November 1994 with a single goal: to pressure the British government into giving its citizens a chance to vote on the extent of their involvement in the European Union. Goldsmith pledged to spend as much as $30 million of his $2 billion self-made fortune, and to field Referendum Party candidates in this spring’s general election against every member of Parliament who opposes such a plebiscite.
It is one p.m. in Paris on a sunny day in late January, and he is seated at his customary corner table in Laurent, a luxurious restaurant just off the Champs-Élysées that he bought nearly 25 years ago because it enchanted him and he enjoyed the idea of owning his own place to eat. Conversing with the waiter in flawless French, Goldsmith looks impeccably Continental in a suit of soft, supple gray flannel and a light-blue shirt. Six hours later, he has changed into a crisp dark-blue suit befitting an English banker, and he sits in a folding chair at the front of a jammed church hall in London for a Referendum Party rally. In between, he has talked for two hours about his life and ideas, visited his doctor for a checkup, and then flown across the Channel in his Boeing 757, customized with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a combination living room and office.
The transformation is vintage Jimmy Goldsmith, a man with a legendary ability to shift from one persona to another, one family to another, one obsession to another, and one career to another—making him an elusive quarry for enemies, as well as anyone trying to understand his overlapping identities. His dramatic foray into British politics has confounded those who thought he would disappear seven years ago, when he retired from business.
Having multiplied his fortune as a brash corporate raider in the United States during the 1980s, Goldsmith seems an unlikely politician. But his retreat from business led him to question many of his assumptions about the world. He came to believe that global free trade would lead to severe societal dislocations. He also concluded that the movement to unify Europe politically as well as economically would restrict national sovereignty and undermine democracy as unelected European Union bureaucrats assumed greater control. “European nations are deeply rooted,” he says. “You cannot push nations against their will.” As a citizen of both France and England, he decided to take action in both countries. Nearly three years ago in France he was elected to the European Parliament, and this month he is running for the British Parliament as a candidate of his own Referendum Party.
Now 64, Sir James Goldsmith won’t be elected prime minister, and he may not even be elected to the House of Commons, but as Polly Toynbee and many others have noted, he has already altered both the mood and the thinking in Britain about the value of a unified Europe and has shown how one man with energy, ideas, and independent means can elevate a political concern into a national preoccupation.
Even after many years in the public eye, Goldsmith remains a figure of intriguing contradictions. He is a tall man (six feet four) who walks with a slight stoop, who has a commanding presence along with a disarming diffidence, who projects great confidence but rubs a piece of amber for reassurance, who is both open and secretive, who holds ideas strongly but sometimes not for long, whose friends run the gamut from the quintessential plutocrat Lord Jacob Rothschild to the ultimate gadfly Ralph Nader. Yet Goldsmith has an underlying consistency which his closest friends understand. Whether in politics or business, “I see the same mind at work,” says 84-year-old Tennessee businessman John Tigrett, a friend and associate for 30 years.
The father of eight children ranging in age from 8 to 42, Goldsmith also lives a famously unconventional life. His brother, Edward, known as Teddy, once called him “a natural tribal polygamist.” Goldsmith has a wife in London, a British aristocrat born Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the sister of the Marquess of Londonderry and the inspiration for the eponymous nightclub on London’s Berkeley Square. On the other side of the Channel he has an ex-wife (the former Ginette Lery, his onetime secretary) and a mistress (Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, a wellborn French magazine editor), who live in two parts of the same house in Paris. Like an Arab pasha, Goldsmith moves among all three households, supporting everyone with lavish generosity.
He is the object of intense curiosity, who manages to infuriate journalists of every political stripe. Hugo Young wrote in The Guardian last October that the Referendum Party “is a rich man’s folly on an unusually massive scale. A distraction from boredom, with righteous passion added, for a man of some charm who takes limitless pleasure in the air of menace with which the pathetic Tories have endowed him.”
Goldsmith has been compared in the British press to Cecil Rhodes, Charles Foster Kane, Savonarola, Cincinnatus, and, more outlandishly, not one but two notorious villains in James Bond novels—Auric Goldfinger (with special reference to the AU registration on Goldsmith’s private jet) as well as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Bond’s nemesis in You Only Live Twice. Starting in the 1970s, when Goldsmith began a bitter libel action against the satirical magazine Private Eye, its staff nailed him with the one nickname that has stuck: Goldenballs.
Yet Jimmy Goldsmith defies the caricatures. Loping toward his table at Laurent, he seems anything but intimidating. As he sits down, he instinctively pushes the table away, crosses his left leg over his right knee, leans back, and sprawls against the red velvet banquette at a leisurely angle. His large eyes are pale blue and shallowly set; his thin eyebrows arch above them like circumflex accents. The fringe of silver hair surrounding his bald dome is well trimmed, his round face lightly tanned and freckled, with high cheekbones and a cleft chin, and he readily deploys his dimpled smile. For all his wealth and influence, he seems almost down-to-earth—more Jimmy than Sir James.
