James Goldsmith

Early life and family background

Born in Paris, Goldsmith was the son of luxury hotel tycoon and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Major Frank Goldsmith and his French wife Marcelle Mouiller, and younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith.

Goldsmith first attended Millfield and then later Eton College, but dropped out in 1949 aged 16, after he had bet £10 on a three-horse accumulator at Lewes, winning £8,000 (equivalent to about £262,000 in March 2017). With his winnings he decided that he should leave Eton immediately; in a speech at his boarding house he declared that, "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy." Goldsmith served in British Army's Royal Artillery under the National Service requirements, during which time he received a commission as an officer.

His father Frank Goldsmith changed the family name from the German Goldschmidt to the English Goldsmith. The Goldschmidts, neighbours and rivals to the Rothschild family, were a wealthy, Frankfurt-based, Jewish family, who had been influential figures in international merchant banking since the 16th century. James's great-grandfather was Benedict Hayum Salomon Goldschmidt, banker and consul to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. James's grandfather Adolphe Benedict Goldschmidt (1838–1918), a multi-millionaire, came to London in 1895. His father had had to flee France with his family when the Nazis overran the country, and only just managed to escape on the last over-loaded ship to get away, leaving behind their hotels and much of their property. His father and grandfather had lived in great style, and there was little left of the family fortune by the time Goldsmith started out in business.

Career

During the 1950s and 60s Goldsmith's involvement in finance and as an industrialist involved many risks, and brought him several times close to bankruptcy. His successes included winning the British franchise for Alka-Seltzer and introducing low-cost generic drugs to the UK. He has been described in the tabloid press or by those with a contrary political agenda as a greenmail corporate raider and asset stripper, a categorisation he denied vigorously. He claimed the re-organizations he undertook streamlined the operations, removed complacent inefficient management, and increased shareholder value.

Goldsmith started out in business after the tragic death of his first wife by taking on the management of a small enterprise selling an arthritis remedy in France. His father had set up the company with the initial intention that it would provide a career for the older son, Edward. But Edward had little interest in business and was more engaged with his pioneering environmental activism. After a publicity stunt involving an arthritic racehorse, sales escalated and within a couple of years the staff had been expanded from two to over a hundred. Goldsmith took on the agency for various slimming remedies and branched out into the manufacture of generic prescription drugs. His acquisition of the distributorship for Slimcea and Procea low-calorie breads were the start of the shift of focus towards the food industry. In the early 1960s in partnership with Selim Zilkha, Goldsmith founded the Mothercare retail chain, but sold out his share to Zilkha who went on to develop it with great success.

With the financial backing of Sir Isaac Wolfson, he acquired diverse food companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange as Cavenham Foods in 1965. Initially the group had an annual turnover of £27m and negligible profits. He added bakeries and then confectioners to the group, and then took over a number of wholesalers and retailers including small chains of tobacco, confectioner and newsagent shops. By rationalising the activities, closing inefficient factories, and improving the management practices, he steadily improved productivity. By 1971 the turnover was £35m and profits were up to £2m.

In June 1971 he launched a bid for Bovril which was a much larger company with a diverse portfolio including several strong brands (including Marmite, Ambrosia, Virol and Jaffajuice), dairies and dairy farms, and cattle ranches in Argentina. It was run by the third generation of the founding family and Goldsmith concluded that they were clueless. The bid was strongly contested and Goldsmith was fiercely attacked by the financial press. The directors tried to induce Beechams and Rowntree Mackintosh to make rival offers, but in the end they both withdrew.

After the successful bid, Goldsmith sold the dairies and farms to Max Joseph's Express Dairies group for £5.3m, and found buyers in South America for the ranches. Sales of other parts of the company recouped almost all of the £13m that the acquisition had cost him. Some years later he sold the brand names to Beecham for £36m. Later he took over Allied Distributors, who owned a miscellaneous portfolio of grocery stores and small chains, including the Liptons shops. He set Jim Wood (who had been responsible for imposing systems and business discipline on the sweetshops) to work on rationalising the operations of these shops, and disposing of those that did not fit into the overall business logic. As journalists began to question his techniques of dealing with the funds and assets of publicly quoted companies, Goldsmith began dealing through private companies registered in the UK and abroad. These included the French company Générale Occidentale and Hong Kong and then Cayman-registered General Oriental Investments.

In early 1973 Goldsmith travelled to New York to assess the US business opportunities, followed by a tour round Central and South America. He took the view that the UK economy was due for a downturn and began aggressively liquidating many of his assets. In December that year, in the midst of financial chaos, he announced that he had acquired a 51% controlling stake in Grand Union, one of the oldest retailing conglomerates in the US. He set Jim Wood – who had revitalised his British retail operations – to work on rationalising the operations of the chain, but he ran into continuous obstruction from both unions and management.

During the 1960s and '70s Goldsmith received financing from the banking arm of the conglomerate Slater Walker, of which he succeeded founder Jim Slater as Chairman following the company's collapse and rescue by the Bank of England in the secondary banking crisis of 1973–75.

Goldsmith was knighted in the 1976 resignation honours – the so-called "Lavender List" – of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. In early 1980, he formed a partnership with longtime friend and merchant banker, Sir Roland Franklin. Franklin managed Goldsmith's business in the Americas. From 1983 until 1988, Goldsmith, via takeovers in America, built a private holding company, Cavenham Forest Industries, which became one of the largest private owners of timberland and one of the top-five timber-holding companies of any type in America. Goldsmith and Franklin identified a quirk in American accounting whereby companies with substantial timberland holdings would often carry them on their balance sheets at a nominal valuation (as the result of years of depreciation).

Goldsmith, a reader of financial statements, realised that in the case of Crown Zellerbach the underlying value of the timberland assets alone, carried at only $12.5m on the balance sheet, was worth more than the target company's total market capitalisation of around $900m. With this insight, Goldsmith began raids that left him with a holding company owning huge tracts of timberland acquired at virtually no net cost. The majority of the pulp and paper assets were sold to James River Corporation in 1986, which in turn became a part of Georgia-Pacific in 2000. (The brown paper container division became Gaylord Container).

Additionally, in 1986 Goldsmith's companies reportedly made $90 million from an attempted hostile takeover of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, although he regarded this profit as an inadequate consolation for the failure to carry the bid through to a successful conclusion. The management of the company coordinated a virulent campaign against Goldsmith, involving unions, the press and politicians at state and federal level.

Goldsmith retired to Mexico in 1987, having anticipated the market crash that year and liquidated his assets. However he continued corporate raiding, including an attempt on British-American Tobacco in 1989 (for which he joined Kerry Packer and Jacob Rothschild). He also swapped his American timber assets for a 49.9 percent stake in Newmont Mining and remained on the board of Newmont until he liquidated his stake through open-market trades in 1993. He had been precluded by the original purchase of Newmont from acquiring a controlling shareholding in the company. In 1990, Goldsmith also began a lower-profile, but also profitable, global "private equity style" investment operation. By 1994 executives working in his employ in Hong Kong had built a substantial position in the intermediation of global strategic raw-material flows.

Studies of public filings have found signs of the same Goldsmith-backed Hong Kong-based team taking stakes in operations as diverse as Soviet strategic ports in Vladivostok and Vostochny, and in Zee TV, India's dominant private television broadcaster later sold to Rupert Murdoch.

A large Hong Kong-linked and Goldsmith-funded stake in one of the world's largest nickel operations, INCO Indonesia, was also disclosed in the 1990s, showing Goldsmith's ability to position capital before a trend became obvious to others. The Group was also a major backer of the Hong Kong-based and Singapore listed major raw material player Noble Group, with low-profile long-time Goldsmith protégé Tobias Brown serving for many years as the company's non-executive chairman. Although little is known about the somewhat enigmatic Brown, he is widely credited with orchestrating the Goldsmith investments in the Far East, which have created more than a third of the family's wealth.

Environmental campaigning

Goldsmith became an active campaigner on environmental issues during his later years. He published a book entitled The Trap in 1994 outlining what he believed were some key challenges facing mankind, with a focus particularly on the fields of modern intensive farming and the use of nuclear power. This area had been a lifelong passion of his brother, Edward, but Goldsmith himself had shown little interest publicly in the topic during his business career. The book received criticism of its content from a variety of sources, including the European Commission, the British Tory politician Chris Patten, Brian Hindley of the Neo-Liberal Centre for Policy Studies, John Kay and Norman Macrae. Goldsmith rebutted their reaction in another publication entitled The Response, published in 1995.

Posthumously Goldsmith's estate would provide funding for an organization entitled the 'J.M.G. Foundation', which supports a range of activism opposed to the commercial advance of Genetically Modified Organisms in farm production.

Personal life

Goldsmith was married three times, and some assumed that he coined the phrase "When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy." However, the phrase was actually coined by Sacha Guitry.

His first wife, whom he married when 20, was the Bolivian heiress Doña María Isabel Patiño y Borbón, the 17-year-old daughter of tin magnate Antenor Patiño by his wife María Cristina de Borbón y Bosch-Labrús, 3rd Duchess of Dúrcal. When Goldsmith proposed the marriage to Don Antenor Patiño, it is alleged his future father-in-law replied, "We are not in the habit of marrying Jews". Goldsmith is reported to have replied, "Well, I am not in the habit of marrying [Red] Indians". The story, if true, is typical of Goldsmith's humour. With the heiress pregnant and the Patiños insisting the pair separate, the couple eloped in January 1954.

The marriage was brief: rendered comatose by a cerebral haemorrhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Patiño de Goldsmith died in May 1954. Her only child, Isabel, was delivered by caesarean section and survived. She was brought up by Goldsmith's family and was married for a few years to French sportsman Arnaud de Rosnay. On her father's death, she inherited a large share of his estate. Isabel has since become a successful art-collector. and is the successful owner of Hotel Las Alamandas in Mexico.

Goldsmith's second wife was Ginette Léry with whom he had a son, Manes (born in 1959), and daughter, Alix (born in 1964). This marriage was dissolved by divorce in 1978 but they shared a house in Paris until his death and he built her a house on his Cuixmala estate . His son Manes worked for FIFA and CONCAF and has also owned football teams in Mexico. His daughter Alix took over his properties in Mexico managing them with her husband Goffredo Marcaccini whom she married in July 1991, together they have had 4 Children together : Gaia, Lea, Siena and Giacomo . Cuixmala and Hacienda de San Antonio are two of the most re known Hotels in Mexico having won various prizes in the hospitality business.

In 1978, he married for the third time, to his mistress Lady Annabel Birley, by whom he had already had two children, Jemima (born in 1974) and Zacharias (born in 1975); they went on to have a third child, Benjamin (born in 1980). Zac and Jemima Khan have both become much reported upon figures in the media, the former being a Conservative Member of Parliament from 2010 to 2016 and the latter a journalist who was married to Pakistani cricketer and politician Imran Khan between 1995 and 2004. In 2003 Ben married heiress Kate Emma Rothschild (born 1982), daughter of the late Hon. Amschel Rothschild and his wife Anita Guinness of the Guinness Brewery family,they have had three children and divorced in 2013. Ben has since re married and has a child with model Jemima Jones.

After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on an affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman, Laure Boulay de La Meurthe (granddaughter of Bruno, Count of Harcourt and Princess Isabelle of Orléans) with whom he had two more children, Jethro and Charlotte. Charlotte married Philip Colbert and has a daughter.

Speculation about Goldsmith's romantic life was a popular topic in the British media: for example, in the press, there were claims that James Goldsmith was the father of the family friend Diana, Princess of Wales, due to his friendship with Diana's mother and, later, with Diana.

Goldsmith and the media

Goldsmith is known for his legal attack on the magazine Private Eye, which referred to him as "Sir Jams" and in Goldsmith's Referendum Party period as "Sir Jams Fishpaste". In 1976 he issued more than 60 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! The publisher of the magazine was Anthony Blond, an old friend; Blond and Goldsmith themselves remained on good terms.

The libel actions arose from a piece that Private Eye published following the disappearance of Lord Lucan after the murder of his children's nanny. The article stated (incorrectly) that Goldsmith had participated in a meeting called by John Aspinall after Lucan's disappearance, and further claimed that the meeting amounted to a conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice by hampering the police enquiries. Goldsmith certainly was acquainted with Lucan as a fellow regular at Aspinall's gambling club, the Clermont, but it is not clear how close they were (but apparently on good enough terms for Lucan to ask him for a loan of £10,000 the previous year, and for Goldsmith to counter with an offer to make him a gift of that sum).

The matter was made more serious by an action being brought for criminal libel in addition to the civil suits. This was a common law offence that had not been the basis of a prosecution for over fifty years, with a precedent which required a criminal libel to be "so serious as to risk the public order", and Ingrams was initially confident that the judge would dismiss the case. He became extremely anxious when Mr Justice Wein indicated that he favoured criminal proceedings, which then carried a jail sentence rather than just the award of damages as in the civil actions.

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; he expressed the hope that she would "choke on her own vomit". In November 1977, Goldsmith made an appearance on The Money Programme on BBC television when he accused the programme of making up lies about him.

In 1977 Goldsmith bought the French weekly L'Express and between 1979 and 1981 published the UK news magazine NOW! which failed to survive. Oliver Stone's 1987 film Wall Street featured a British billionaire financier, Sir Lawrence Wildman. This character was modelled on Goldsmith as stated by the film's director Oliver Stone in the DVD special feature documentary and the director's commentary as Sir Lawrence Wildman is introduced.

In 1993 he gave a half-hour Opinions televised lecture, transmitted by Channel 4 on 14 March 1993 and published the following day in The Times as "Creating a superstate is the way to destroy Europe".

Into politics

Goldsmith had become increasingly concerned throughout the 1980s about the ulterior nature of the European Economic Community, and harboured a deepening suspicion that at its core lay a desire for the domination of the European continent by Germany, a suspicion which was confirmed further when in 1992, via the passage of the Maastricht Treaty, it re-titled itself as the European Union, with dramatically centralizing governmental powers being enacted over its constituent member nations. In the mid-1990s he financially supported a Euro-sceptic think tank entitled the European Foundation.

In 1994 he published The Trap, a book detailing his political philosophical thoughts, giving a critique of the dominance of Neo-Liberalism in the governments of the First World. In its text he criticized their ideological dogmatic pursuance of Free Trade, and the facilitation of the American Melting Pot societal model being copied by the rest of the First World's governments through mass foreign migration, driven by a pursuance of short term economic advantage, which he posited was fatally flawed in societal concept and brought with it great societal dangers. As an economic alternative he espoused a restoration of Classical Liberalism, and a return to Mercantilism. He also advocated the prevention by governmental action of mass migrations by populations from poorer areas of the globe into the First World driven by economic motivation, which he foresaw as an inevitability of escalating Third World population demographics and First World governmental Neo-Liberal and Socialist ideologies.

In 1994 he was elected in France as a member of the European Parliament, representing the Majorité pour l'autre Europe party, and subsequently became the leader of the eurosceptic Europe of Nations group within the European Parliament.

The Referendum Party

In the early 1990s, with the removal of Margaret Thatcher from the United Kingdom's Prime Ministerial office by the Tories, and their enactment into law of the Maastricht Treaty, Goldsmith, who up until that time had had close links with the Conservative Party, came to the conclusion that it was no longer a serious political vehicle to oppose the European Union's advancing power, and that opposition would have to be created within the party political system beyond its current order of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrats parties, all of which supported the United Kingdom's incorporation into the European Union.
In consequence, in 1994 Goldsmith founded and financed The Referendum Party in the United Kingdom, modeled upon the Majorité pour l'autre Europe, with the objective of seeking a referendum for its national withdrawal from the European Union, which would go on to stand candidates in the country's General Election of 1997. As the mid-1990s progressed Goldsmith involved himself in British politics, appearing with increasing regularity in the political press, and in domestic political televised debates, raising opposition to the nature of the European Union and what he perceived was mainstream media culpability in playing down its supranational ambitions, and pouring scorn on a Westminster parliamentary political order that he stated had failed the nation and was now willfully betraying its governmental sovereignty.

During the 1997 electoral campaign Goldsmith had mailed to approximately five million homes a VHS video cassette film to allow him to address the electorate free from the editorial control of the nation's mainstream media, having previously rejected the idea of by-passing the United Kingdom's legal restrictions on the broadcast of political information by the means of an offshore radio station named "Referendum Radio".

United Kingdom general election, 1997

At the 1997 Westminster parliamentary general election Goldsmith stood as a candidate for the Referendum Party in the London constituency of Putney, against the former Tory Minister David Mellor, M.P., in an electoral contest in which Goldsmith polled 3.5% of the vote. The declaration of the Putney result, which was televised and nationally broadcast live on the night of 1 May 1997, saw a charged atmosphere at the count, with a rowdy crowd in attendance of anti-European Union activists from the Referendum Party, and the recently inaugurated United Kingdom Independence Party (which would itself receive only a couple of hundred votes in Putney that night). An acrimonious confrontation between Mellor (who had lost his seat to the Labour Party candidate) and Goldsmith developed on stage after Mellor, in what was to be his valedictory address from politics, personally insulted Goldsmith's candidacy, during which part of the crowd, Goldsmith and some of the other candidates began a gleefully defiant collective repetitive shouting chant of "Out!" in response, in celebration of the perceived substantive damage having been done to a prominent member of the Westminster Parliamentary political order which they had become so contemptuous of.

Goldsmith's electoral performance at Putney had been, however, reasonably insubstantial, in an English electoral culture in which it is notoriously difficult for new political parties or maverick politicians to break through overnight. He was also terminally ill during the election, which had limited his ability to campaign. The 1518 votes his candidacy had garnered had not in itself defeated the incumbent Mellor, who had lost by 2976 votes; moreover it amounted to less than 5% of the total votes cast, this being insufficient for Goldsmith to retain the candidate's financial deposit of £500. Mellor had correctly predicted at the count that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and the Party would subsequently disappear with Goldsmith's death two months after the election. However, many of its supporters would go on to join the then infant United Kingdom Independence Party, a Party which would ultimately lead a sea change in the United Kingdom's politics, which 19 years later would see the nation vote to leave the European Union in a referendum on the issue.

Death

Goldsmith died from pancreatic cancer on 18 July 1997 at Benahavis, Spain. He was 64 years old.