| Sir James Goldsmith (1933 - 1997) was a
British businessman and founder of the euro-sceptic Referendum Party. The party stood
for the UK 1997 general election, as part of
which Goldsmith mass-mailed thousands of homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has
been suggested [1] (http://www.geocities.com/sirjamesgoldsmith) that he made plans to broadcast nationwide to the
UK during the election from his own offshore pirate Referendum Radio
station. In the 1997 election Goldsmith stood as a candidate in the London parliamentary constituency of Putney, against
Tory cabinet minister David Mellor.
Goldsmith 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 The Labour Party candidate and was subsequently taunted by
Goldsmith and other candidates. Mellor however correctly predicted that the Referendum Party was "dead in the water", and it
effectively died with Goldsmith when he succumbed to cancer a few months later.
In the mid-1990s he was a major financial backer of the leading Euro-realist thinktank
The European Foundation.
Goldsmith was married three times. His first wife was the Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patino, the
18-year-old daughter of Antenor
Patino and his first wife, the Duchess of Durcal, a member of the Spanish royal family. 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 hemmorhage in her seventh month of pregnancy, Maria Isabel Goldsmith died in May 1954; her only
child, Isabel, who survived, was delivered by Caesarian section.
Goldsmith's second wife was Ginette
Lery, with whom he had a son and daughter. In 1978 he married for the third time; his
new wife was his mistress Lady
Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry; the couple had three children, Jemima (born 1974), Zak and Benjamin
(born 1980). After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on yet another extramarital
affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman. Goldsmith is believed to have coined the phrase "When you marry your mistress you create
a job vacancy."
Goldsmith died in 1997 of pancreatic cancer.
In 2003, his son Benjamin, married Kate Rothschild of the Rothschild family.
Business
Goldsmith dropped out of Eton College in 1949, observing, "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy." His business successes included winning the
British francise for Alka-Seltzer heartburn relief medicine and acquiring
the Bovril company. He was also notable as a greenmail corporate raider; in the 1980s he made $90 million from his attempted hostile takeover of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. He retired from business dealings in 1987.
Goldsmith is also well known for his legendary legal attack on the magazine, Private Eye. In 1976 the millionaire issued over sixty libel writs
against Private Eye and its distributors, and nearly bankrupted the magazine. This story is detailed in the book,
Goldenballs!
External reference
Ingrams, Richard (1993). Goldenballs! London: Harriman House. ISBN 1897597037.
External links
- Wedding info (http://portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/20/nwedd20.xml)
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