Sir James Goldsmith | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Goldsmith in 1994 | |
| Leader of theReferendum Party | |
| In office 1994–1997 | |
| Preceded by | Office created |
| Succeeded by | Office abolished |
| Member of the European Parliament forFrance | |
| In office 1994–1997 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | James Michael Goldsmith (1933-02-26)26 February 1933 Paris, France |
| Died | 18 July 1997(1997-07-18) (aged 64) Benahavís, Spain |
| Nationality |
|
| Political party | |
| Spouses | |
| Domestic partner | Laure Boulay de La Meurthe |
| Children | 8, includingJemima,Zac,Ben, andCharlotte |
| Parents |
|
| Relatives | SeeGoldsmith family |
| Education | Millfield,Eton College |
| Known for | Finance,Eurosceptic politician |
| Website | sirjamesgoldsmith |
Sir James Michael Goldsmith (26 February 1933 – 18 July 1997) was a French-British[1] financier and politician who was a member of theGoldsmith family.[2] His controversial business and finance career led to ongoing clashes with British media, frequently involving litigation or the threat of litigation.
In 1994 he was elected to represent a French constituency as aMember of the European Parliament. He founded the short-lived EuroscepticReferendum Party in the United Kingdom, which became an early campaigner for opposition to Britain's membership of theEuropean Union.
Born in Paris,[3] Goldsmith was the son of luxury hotel tycoon and formerConservative Member of Parliament (MP) MajorFrank Goldsmith and his French wife, Marcelle Mouiller,[4] and younger brother ofenvironmental campaignerEdward Goldsmith. Frank Goldsmith had previously changed the family name from the GermanGoldschmidt to the EnglishGoldsmith. TheGoldschmidts, neighbours and rivals of theRothschild family, were a wealthy,Frankfurt-based, Jewish family that had been influential in internationalmerchant banking since the 16th century. James's great-grandfather was Benedikt Hayum Goldschmidt, founder of theB. H. Goldschmidt [de] bank and consul to theGrand Duke of Tuscany. James's grandfather wasAdolphe Benedict Goldschmidt (1838–1918), a multi-millionaire who moved to London in 1895.[3]
Raised initially in Paris, James Goldsmith had to flee France with his family whenNazi Germany overran the country in 1940, only just managing to escape on the last over-loaded ship from the French port of exit, leaving behind their hotels and much of their property.[5] After that the family relocated to the Bahamas, and Goldsmith was sent to school atSt. Andrew's College, Aurora, in Canada,[1] where he founded a business trapping small furbearing animals such as rabbits, skunk and mink.[5] He later attendedMillfield andEton College, which he left early in 1949 at the age of 16, after winning £8,000 (equivalent to £357,000 in 2023) on a horse racing bet of £10 (equivalent to £450 in 2023) for a three-horse accumulator atLewes racecourse. With the money, 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!"[1] He then took over a business in Paris from his brother Teddy, which sold a cure for rheumatism and electrical plugs and sockets.[5]
Goldsmith served as aGunner in theBritish Army'sRoyal Artillery under theNational Service requirements, during which time he received a commission as an officer.[6]
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During the 1950s and 60s, Goldsmith's involvement in finance and as an industrialist involved many risks, and brought him close to bankruptcy several times.[7] His successes included winning the British franchise forAlka-Seltzer and introducing low-costgeneric drugs to the UK. He was described in the tabloid press as agreenmailcorporate raider andasset stripper, a categorisation he denied vigorously. He claimed the re-organizations he undertook streamlined the operations, removed complacent inefficient management, and increased shareholder value.[2]
Having taken on the management of the Paris business handed on by his brother Teddy, Goldsmith organised a publicity stunt involving an arthritic racehorse. Sales escalated in response 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.[8] His acquisition of the distributorship for Slimcea and Procea low-calorie breads was the start of the shift of focus towards the food industry. In the early 1960s, in partnership withSelim Zilkha, Goldsmith founded theMothercare retail chain, but sold out his share to Zilkha who went on to develop it with great success.[9]
With the financial backing of SirIsaac Wolfson,[10] he acquired diverse food companies quoted on theLondon Stock Exchange asCavenham Foods in 1965. Initially, the group had an annual turnover of £27 million 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 £35 million and profits were up to £2 million.[2]
In June 1971, he launched a bid forBovril, 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 ineffectual. The bid was strongly contested and Goldsmith was fiercely attacked by the financial press. The directors tried to induceBeechams andRowntree Mackintosh to make rival offers but, in the end, they both withdrew.[2]
After the successful bid, Goldsmith sold the dairies and farms to Max Joseph'sExpress 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 £13 million that the acquisition had cost him.[10] Some years later, he sold the brand names to Beecham for £36 million. Later, he took over Allied Distributors, who owned a miscellaneous portfolio of grocery stores and small chains, including theLipton shops. As journalists began to question his techniques of dealing with the funds and assets ofpublicly quoted companies, Goldsmith began dealing through private companies registered in the UK and abroad. These included the French companyGénérale Occidentale and Hong Kong and thenCayman-registered General Oriental Investments.[2]
In early 1973, Goldsmith travelled to New York to assess 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 inGrand 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 ran into continuous obstruction from both unions and management.[citation needed]
During the 1960s and 1970s, Goldsmith received financing from the banking arm of the conglomerateSlater Walker, of which he succeeded founderJim Slater as chairman following the company's collapse and rescue by theBank of England in thesecondary banking crisis of 1973–75.
Goldsmith wasknighted in the1976 resignation honours – the so-called "Lavender List" – of Prime MinisterHarold Wilson. In early 1980, he formed a partnership with longtime friend and merchant banker SirRoland Franklin. Franklin managed Goldsmith's business in the Americas. From 1983 until 1988, Goldsmith, viatakeovers in America, built a privateholding 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 ofdepreciation).[2]
Goldsmith, a reader of financial statements, realised that in the case ofCrown Zellerbach the underlying value of the timberland assets alone, carried at only $12.5 million on the balance sheet, was worth more than the target company's totalmarket capitalisation of around $900 million. With this insight, Goldsmith began raids that left him with a holding company owning huge tracts of timberland acquired at virtually no net cost.[11][12] The majority of thepulp and paper assets were sold in 1986 toJames River Corporation,[13][14][15] which in turn became a part ofGeorgia-Pacific in 2000. (The brown paper container division becameGaylord Container.)[16]
Additionally, in 1986, Goldsmith's companies reportedly made $90 million from an attemptedhostile takeover of theGoodyear 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.[2]
Goldsmith retired to Mexico in 1987, having anticipated themarket crash that year and liquidated his assets. However, he continued corporate raiding, including an attempt onBritish-American Tobacco in 1989 (for which he joinedKerry Packer andJacob Rothschild). He also swapped his American timber assets for a 49.9% stake inNewmont 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.[2]
A large Hong Kong-linked and Goldsmith-funded stake in one of the world's largest nickel operations, INCOIndonesia, 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 playerNoble Group, with low-profile long-time Goldsmith protégé Tobias Brown serving for many years as the company's non-executive chairman.[citation needed]
Goldsmith attracted little attention until he became embroiled in a damaging dispute with anti-establishment satirical magazinePrivate Eye. In 1976Private Eye accused Goldsmith of being part of what amounted to a conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice in relation to the fugitiveLord Lucan, who was wanted for the murder of his children's nanny. The article falsely stated that Goldsmith had participated in a meeting supposedly called byJohn Aspinall to help Lucan. Goldsmith was a regular at his close friend Aspinall's gambling club, theClermont, where Lucan was one of the house players having their losses written off, rather than a true member.
In addition to pursuing a large number of civil lawsuits against the editor of the magazine and a journalist who was also a TV researcher and regarding them as dangerous subversives, Goldsmith sought to bring acriminal libel prosecution, though there had not been one for half a century. Through his actions Goldsmith formed an unlikely friendship with the Labour Party's then Prime MinisterHarold Wilson who loathedPrivate Eye. The access to Wilson aided Goldsmith when, to the horror of Bank of England officials, he became head of the troubledSlater Walker, and this is said to have been the reason for his knighthood. The costly libel suits were eventually settled by Goldsmith, but he was subsequently dogged by disparaging commentary from a wide range of British media.[17]
In November 1977, there were two editions ofThe Money Programme on BBC; the first gave a critical account of Goldsmith's business history and methods. In the second programme a combative Goldsmith appeared in person and countered the implication of asset stripping by pointing to an investment of over a hundred million pounds his company was making to upgrade their going concerns.[18]
In 1977 Goldsmith bought the French weeklyL'Express and between 1979 and 1981 published the UK news magazineNOW! which never met circulation targets and incurred heavy losses. After 84 issues, Goldsmith closed it in early May 1981.[19]
In 1999 an episode ofThe Mayfair Set, a BBC television documentary series by filmmakerAdam Curtis, portrayed the by then deceased Goldsmith as a playboy, speculator and deluded victim of the success as a corporate raider that made him one of the world's richest men.[20][better source needed]
Goldsmith had become increasingly concerned throughout the 1980s about the nature of theEuropean Economic Community (EEC), 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 for him confirmed further when in 1992, via the passage of theMaastricht Treaty, the EEC re-titled itself as theEuropean Union, with dramatically centralising governmental powers being enacted over its constituent member nations.[21]
In March 1993 Goldsmith gave a televised lecture publicly declaring opposition to the European Union, which was transmitted across the United Kingdom onChannel 4 Television as part of itsOpinions political commentary series, the text of which was published inThe Times the following day under the titleCreating a Superstate is the way to destroy Europe.[22] In the mid-1990s he financially supported aEuroscepticthink tank entitled theEuropean Foundation.
In 1994 he publishedThe Trap,[23] a book detailing his broader political philosophical thoughts, giving a critique of the dominance ofneoliberalism in the governments of theFirst World. In its text he criticised their ideological dogmatic pursuance offree 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 ofclassical liberalism, and a return tomercantilism. 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 escalatingThird World population demographics and First World governmental neoliberal andsocialist ideologies.[24][25]
In 1994 he waselected in France as aMember of the European Parliament, representing theMajorité pour l'autre Europe party, and subsequently became the leader of the euroscepticEurope of Nations group within the European Parliament.
In the early 1990s, with the removal ofMargaret Thatcher from the United Kingdom's Prime Ministerial office by theTories, and their enactment into law of theMaastricht Treaty, Goldsmith, who up until that time had retained close links with the Conservative Party, came to the conclusion that it was no longer a serious political vehicle to oppose theEuropean Union's advancing power, and that opposition would have to be created within the party political system beyond its current order of theConservative,Labour andLiberal Democrats parties, all of which supported the United Kingdom's incorporation into the European Union.[Note 1]
In consequence, in 1994 Goldsmith founded and financed theReferendum Party in the United Kingdom, modelled upon theMajorité pour l'autre Europe, with the objective of seeking areferendum 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 wasmainstream media culpability in playing down its supranational ambitions, and pouring scorn on aWestminster parliamentary political order that he stated had failed the nation and was now wilfully betraying its governmental sovereignty.[26]
During the 1997 electoral campaign Goldsmith had mailed to approximately five million homes aVHS 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 anoffshore radio station named "Referendum Radio".[27]
At the1997 general election, Goldsmith stood as a candidate for the Referendum Party in the London constituency ofPutney, against the formerConservative ministerDavid Mellor, MP, 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 inauguratedUK 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 the speech, 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 of which they had become so contemptuous.[28]
Goldsmith's electoral performance at Putney had been reasonably insubstantial, in a British electoral culture in which it is notoriously difficult for new political parties or maverick politicians to establish themselves. He was also terminally ill during the election, a fact which he had kept secret beyond his closest personal circle, and which had limited his ability to campaign. When interviewed by the BBC'sMichael Buerk during the count prior to the result being announced, he described his chances as being "extremely low" – the 1,518 votes that his candidacy had garnered had not in itself defeated the incumbent Mellor, who had lost by 2,976 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, a part of the 20 million pounds that he had reportedly poured into the Referendum Party in its brief existence.[29][30]
Mellor had correctly predicted at the count that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and indeed the party did disappear with Goldsmith's death two months after the election. However, many of the Referendum Party's activists and voters would go on to join and support the Referendum Movement, a non-party successor campaign against EU single currency membership, which, in 1998, was renamed theDemocracy Movement.[31]
Sir James Goldsmith's political legacy, in securing the promise of a referendum on euro membership and through successor campaigns, would almost 20 years later see the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union in areferendum on the issue.[32]
Two months after contesting the 1997 general election, Goldsmith died aged 64, frompancreatic cancer at a farmhouse that he owned inBenahavís, southern Spain, on 18 July 1997.[30]
Goldsmith was married three times. At 20 he married 17-year-old Bolivianheiress María Isabel Patiño yBorbón, the daughter of tin magnateAntenor Patiño by his wife María Cristina de Borbón y Bosch-Labrús, 3rdDuchess of Dúrcal [es]. When Goldsmith proposed the marriage to 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."[3] The story, if true, is typical of Goldsmith's attempts at 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 acerebral haemorrhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Patiño de Goldsmith died in May 1954. Her only child, Isabel Goldsmith, was delivered bycaesarean section and survived.[33]
Goldsmith next married Ginette Léry, with whom he had a son, Manes Goldsmith, and a daughter, Alix Marcaccini. They divorced in 1978 but shared a house in Paris until his death, and he built her a house on his estate at Cuixmala, in the Mexican state ofJalisco.
In 1978 Goldsmith married his mistressLady Annabel Birley, with whom he had already had two children,Jemima andZacharias; they later had a third child,Benjamin. After this marriage, Goldsmith embarked on an affair with Laure Boulay de La Meurthe (granddaughter ofBruno, Count of Harcourt andPrincess Isabelle of Orléans), with whom he had two children, film directorCharlotte Colbert and Jethro Goldsmith.
With losses mounting, Goldsmith folds his newsmagazine
