The serially married billionaire warned his supporters of an “uncontrolled invasion” of immigrants, unscrupulous countries taking advantage of them, and an unseen global elite infringing on their rights. He lambasted the media and lamented his country’s lost greatness, and the adoring crowd lapped it up. He was one of them, even if he did have a customized Boeing 757 idling on a nearby runway waiting to whisk him away to his palatial southern refuge.
However, this wasn’t Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this year, but rather Sir James Goldsmith at the conference for his Referendum Party in Brighton, England, in 1996. Goldsmith wasn’t the first billionaire to run for office—Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and Ross Perot in the United States had both been forerunners—but in many ways his insurgent campaign, ill-fated though it was in the short term, anticipated the rise of populist politicians in both Europe and the U.S.
With his piercing blue eyes, stentorian but slightly lisping voice, and air of absolute certainty, Goldsmith was undeniably charismatic. The child of a French mother and a half-German father, he was educated at Eton College. But after winning almost $10,000 on a horse-racing parlay bet at 16, he dropped out and entered the world of high finance.
Goldsmith became one of the pre-eminent corporate raiders of the 1970s and 80s, preaching a buccaneering creed of kill or be killed. “Predators are a necessary stimulant,” he said. “If you eliminate predators in business and just create comfortable bureaucracies and monopolies with no predators you will have a dead industry.” His ruthless business instincts, compounded with a colorful private life, made him notorious. He was the basis for Sir Lawrence “Larry” Wildman, the cold-blooded English investor in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street played by Terence Stamp.
With impeccable timing, he sold most of his assets shortly before the financial crash of 1987 and found himself, at the age of 54, one of the richest men in the world. He had always been a regular traveler between New York, London, and Paris—where he openly, and seemingly quite happily, supported multiple ex-wives and mistresses along with his eight children—but increasingly he retreated to Cuixmala, a Moorish palace on the Mexican Pacific coast, surrounded by shark-infested waters and a scorpion-infested jungle. Goldsmith’s friend the journalist Edward Jay Epstein called it “his kingdom by the sea.”
Here the great and the good of the world came to pay homage: Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Jacob Rothschild. But Goldsmith was always top dog. When Richard Branson playfully pushed his fully clothed host into a swimming pool, Goldsmith had Branson immediately driven to Cuixmala’s private airstrip and expelled from Xanadu.
It was here, too, that Goldsmith’s idiosyncratic politics began to take shape. Unusually for both his time and class, Goldsmith had a strong environmental bent, largely due to the influence of his older brother, Teddy, who had founded the precursor to Britain’s Green Party. Goldsmith was concerned about factory farming, nuclear power, antibiotic resistance, and global pandemics, and the apocalyptic tenor of this environmentalism infused much of his political thinking with a similar tone.
With impeccable timing, he sold most of his assets shortly before the financial crash of 1987 and found himself, at the age of 54, one of the richest men in the world.
In 1993, Goldsmith wrote Le Piège (The Trap). In incisive and intelligent French prose, he laid out not only his environmental worries but also an economic viewpoint that was fundamentally opposed to globalization, the prevailing philosophy of the age.
He warned that globalization would produce social divisions “deeper than anything Marx anticipated” and worried that the balance between capital and labor was tilting radically in capital’s favor. He foresaw that the push toward free trade in developing countries would lead billions of people to move from rural communities into cities, straining infrastructure, welfare, and peace. It was to be “the greatest migration ever” and would “make Stalin’s collectivization look like child’s play.”
Meanwhile, all that cheap labor would lead to wage stagnation and increased income inequality in developed countries. “Almost every national government has fallen into the trap of counting and measuring without attempting to understand the consequences,” he wrote. “They will be like the winners of a poker game on the Titanic. The wounds inflicted on their societies will be too deep, and brutal consequences could follow.”
He foresaw that the push toward free trade in developing countries would lead billions of people to move from rural communities into cities. It was to be “the greatest migration ever.”
“He believed in economic and political localization, which is odd, given that he was a guy who built quite large businesses with global footprints,” says his son, the environmentalist Ben Goldsmith. But “as a takeover specialist, what he was looking for were companies which had deviated from their area of specialization and had become lazy conglomerate-type businesses in which the executive-management team were far from shareholders, and accountability had been diminished.”
Globalization supercharged this dynamic, divorcing the interests of “transnational companies” from the needs of the nation in which they were based. Goldsmith wanted to call a halt to it all and saw some form of protectionism as essential to preserve “the consensus that emerged painfully in the West, as a result of strikes, lockouts and political debate.”
But his advice was not heeded. The Daily Telegraph labeled Goldsmith’s argument “an old story.” The Sunday Times suggested he was a Communist. Yet from today’s vantage point, it’s notable how prophetic he was, not just in perceiving the mass migration from country to cities, as in China, and from developing to developed world, as in Europe, but also the return of protectionism and tariffs in the U.S. as globalization lost its luster. “He forecast all of the blue-collar unrest and the rise of Trump and populism as a result of global free trade,” Ben Goldsmith observes.
When Goldsmith’s Le Piège was updated and translated into English, 18 months later, it had taken on a slightly different tone, says Dermot Hodson, the author of Circle of Stars: A History of the EU and the People Who Made It. It now named the European Union and its technocrats as the central enemy. Criticism of the E.U. had heretofore labeled it a “capitalist club.” Goldsmith wanted to portray it as something more virulent. “It was him really trying to find a new type of populist politics,” says Hodson. “He was railing against technocrats in Brussels as the conduit for this new, dangerous type of globalization.”
Goldsmith had previously been pro-European, supporting Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973. However, the Maastricht Treaty, which had gone into effect in late 1993, established a Federalist European Union and paved the way for a single European currency, without any democratic vote on the matter. This was unconscionable to Goldsmith. “When the elite imposes its will on the people,” he said in an interview with The Guardian, “that leads either to a revolutionary situation or a suspension of democracy, and we’re seeing both.” So began Goldsmith’s first foray into politics and the last hurrah of his long and heady life.
“The People from the Zoological Society”
In 1994, he founded the Referendum Party and began a quixotic campaign to become prime minister. He, along with every other candidate fielded by the party, would run on just one issue: the holding of a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should be part of a federal Europe. If Goldsmith was elected, he promised to legislate for an immediate referendum and then dissolve the party—whatever the vote’s outcome.
The party set out to contest every seat in the upcoming 1997 British general election, and thanks to Goldsmith’s deep pockets—it was estimated he spent more than $30 million, more than all the other political parties combined—his message was inescapable. Newspaper ads and billboards were bought by the hundreds. A pop song entitled “Let the People Decide” was commissioned from the Motown hitmaker George Hargreaves. To circumvent a hostile press, Goldsmith published an eight-page newspaper, News from the Referendum Party, which was delivered to 24 million homes. The party also mailed an astonishing five million VHS cassettes, on which its founder preached his anti-European message directly to British voters on their couches.
Goldsmith’s cause began to draw followers from all walks of life. He tagged them “the rabble army,” even though many of them were rich, powerful, and often titled. Goldsmith had tapped into an under-exploited wellspring—nationalistic, suspicious, with a large dollop of anti-French and anti-German feeling—that seemed to cut through all classes and traditional political affiliations.
This was not the reactionary, “Back to Basics” message the Conservatives were trying to push at the time, nor the Blairites’ sunny “New Labour, New Life for Britain.” Instead, Goldsmith offered a warning: that faceless technocrats in Brussels were hastening a borderless Europe that would leave Britain exposed to all manner of external threats.
The party mailed an astonishing five million VHS cassettes, on which its founder preached his anti-European message directly to British voters on their couches.
The Conservative prime minister, John Major, declared it “a fringe organization.” The Financial Times labeled it “a harmless indulgence doomed to failure,” and The Guardian mocked it as the “Monster Raving Ego Party.” Yet more than 5,000 supporters flocked to the Referendum Party conference in Brighton in 1996, including the actor Edward Fox, the singer Adam Faith, and the writer Frederick Forsyth. But most enticing of all, at least to the press, was Goldsmith’s glamorous daughter Jemima, who had just married the dashing cricketer (and eventual prime minister of Pakistan) Imran Khan.
Fame, money, style, glamour: it was like nothing British politics had seen before. “I have never had so much fun in my life,” Lord Alistair McAlpine, a former Conservative Party treasurer and the Referendum Party chairman, told a group of journalists as dinner and dancing followed Goldsmith’s keynote speech. “You know what’s marvelous about this party? It’s got lots of money and no policies—except the referendum.”
However, just as Goldsmith’s movement was reaching its zenith, Tony Blair’s Labour Party was becoming an electoral juggernaut. Riven by infighting for Goldsmith’s favor, the Referendum Party lost its momentum. In the 1997 election, Labour won by a landslide. The Referendum Party contested 547 seats and lost them all. It ended up winning roughly 800,000 votes, just 2.6 percent of the national total.
Goldsmith himself ran for the London seat of Putney against the scandal-ridden Conservative M.P. David Mellor. They both lost to the Labour candidate. While the 1,518 votes Goldsmith received weren’t decisive, they infuriated Mellor, who had contemptuously referred to Goldsmith and his followers as “the people from the Zoological Society.” The two appeared onstage together on Election Night, and upon the declaration of the result, Mellor raged against Goldsmith in his concession speech: “Sir James, you can get off back to Mexico knowing your attempt to buy the British political system has failed.” Goldsmith, with a vicious gleam in his eye, led the candidates of the other parties in chanting “Out! Out! Out!” It was seen as somewhat unbecoming behavior for a politician, but Goldsmith could never really have been mistaken for one.
It was to be his last public appearance. He died two months later, of the pancreatic cancer from which he had suffered quietly for the previous year. The party he founded died with him, but Goldsmith’s ideas didn’t.
On that same Election Night in 1997, Goldsmith claimed a victory. “All the parties that refused referendums, to begin with, have become referendum parties,” he declared. Through sheer force of will, and money, he had thrust the question into the mainstream. Many of the Referendum Party’s members joined the incipient United Kingdom Independence Party, which, two decades later, would lead the push for what became known as Brexit.
Meanwhile, Goldsmith’s anti-Establishment rhetoric is echoed today by Europe’s far-right parties, albeit in a twisted form. Goldsmith saw the loss of national borders and uncontrolled immigration as the unforeseen consequence of globalization, pushed by an unelected E.U. Today’s far right sees both as part of an engineered conspiracy. According to the “great replacement theory,” beloved by Giorgia Meloni and Marine Le Pen, Europe’s borders are dissolving and being swamped by dark-skinned immigrants at the behest of a shadowy “globalist” cabal. However, Goldsmith hardly shared in their white-nationalist fervor, nor, being Jewish himself, their veiled anti-Semitism.
Many of the Referendum Party’s members joined the incipient United Kingdom Independence Party, which, two decades later, would lead the push for what became known as Brexit.
Like Goldsmith, Trump has also presented himself as the voice of the people against the political elite. “Both preached the gospel of anti-globalisation,” Hodson writes, “turned on the multilateral trading system,” and railed against the apparatchiks of the deep state. (Curiously, Goldsmith used a Boeing 757 as his transport of choice, as does Trump, and both are known for notable phobias; Trump is a germophobe, while Goldsmith had an irrational hatred of rubber bands.)
“My father knew Donald Trump,” says Ben Goldsmith, “and while I don’t think he was a huge fan, I don’t think he disliked him. He understood how the MAGA movement could come about.” But, he says, there are limits to how many parallels can be drawn. “I don’t think he would have liked [Trump’s] rhetoric around the undermining of democracy, and he would have had a real problem with Trump’s position on the environment.”
Despite the many predictions that came true and the political seeds he unwittingly sowed, Goldsmith’s politics were sui generis. He was a man of the Establishment who kicked strongly against it, a citizen of Europe who battled to destroy it, and the very definition of a capitalist who was also a diehard environmentalist. It was an unlikely combination of ideas that only a political party of his own making could hold together.
Yet what was perhaps most striking in his political thought, seen from today, was an almost holistic idea that progress was not linked purely to material wealth. “To progress,” he wrote, “our society must maintain a balance. It must ensure that the benefits of this progress are spread among all who contribute, not concentrated in the hands of the few.” What billionaire would say such things today?
George Pendle is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. His book Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons became a television series for CBS All Access. He is also the author of Death: A Life and Happy Failure, among other books
