By 1990, James Goldsmith was bored. His life until that point had been dominated by a single-minded pursuit of money, fame and beautiful women. But that no longer seemed enough. After leaving Eton at 16, he had made and lost several fortunes while terrorising the British business establishment via his takeovers of everything from Bovril to Express Dairies. He had made an enemy of Private Eye after issuing over 60 writs against the magazine for suggesting his involvement in the disappearance of Lord Lucan, and pursuing its editor Richard Ingrams in court for criminal libel. And he had made friends with much of the great and the good of British and international high society. He courted politicians and prime ministers – from Harold Wilson, who so loathed Private Eye that he knighted Goldsmith in the resignation honours of 1976, to Margaret Thatcher. He was nationally famous as much for his seigneurial promiscuity (his affairs were legendary on Fleet Street; while his brother, the environmentalist Edward, known as Teddy, once called him “a natural, tribal polygamist”) as his business dealings. He would later become something of an international celebrity, cutting loose from a Europe he saw as backward and dominated by socialists and taking his business practices to the US, helping to establish the cut-throat Wall Street of the 1980s in the process. In between, he fathered a dynasty of children, many of whom would become famous in their own right: Zac, Jemima, Ben. But by the end of that decade he was weary.
That year, in 1990, he was asked by the former chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, John Harvey-Jones, one of the dominant figures in postwar British industry, what monument he would leave to the world after he died. Goldsmith pondered the question, but he thought nothing he had done worth preserving. “Businesses,” he said, like those he had spent decades buying and selling, stripping them for parts before cashing out with vastly inflated profits, “have to be alive, not dead like monuments”.
Having retired from the world of business a few years earlier, selling his stakes in his American companies with impeccable timing – shortly before the stock market crash of 1987 – the restless billionaire had been casting around for something else to devote his life to. In the process, he had amassed a large personal library. Initially he’d planned to collect the volumes in the ocean-front mansion on his Mexican estate, Cuixmala, where alongside hosting famous friends – both Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger were regular guests, as were a revolving cast of lovers and wives – he sought to protect what remained of the country’s dry tropical forests, introducing a menagerie of African wildlife (zebras, giraffes and antelopes) that roamed freely among the jaguars and ocelots. But the climate was hostile to the books’ fragile paper, and he was forced to settle the books instead in his lavish chateau in Montjeu, Burgundy. “Dealers in France send me lists,” he told his biographer, Ivan Fallon, “and I see this plethora of biographies of people who were no doubt significant in some way, and have now faded into complete obscurity. I don’t expect to do anything else.”
Just a few years later, Goldsmith would build his monument. In 1994, he used his vast personal wealth to found the Referendum Party, a single-issue group that stood candidates in the 1997 general election calling for a national referendum to determine the UK’s future relations with the European Union. It was an audacious move, and an expensive one. Goldsmith put £20m of his own money into the campaign, buying full-page adverts in many of the nation’s newspapers and sending a 12-minute-long VHS tape to millions of homes detailing the party’s agenda. The video, an extended party-political broadcast set to ominous music, warned of a plan agreed behind the backs of the British people by an out of touch political elite to turn Europe into a “federal European superstate” ruled by unelected “eurocrats”. Britain, meanwhile, would soon experience an “uncontrolled invasion” of illegal immigrants, Goldsmith wrote elsewhere, while footloose transnational companies undercut the local workforce in favour of cheap imports, destroying communities and lives along the way. Luckily, he stood against these elite plans, standing on the side of ordinary people. Goldsmith was just like them, bar the odd private jet or two. In doing so, Goldsmith stood at the beginning of a genuinely new form of politics in the UK, helping to develop a strain of nationalist populism and conservatism that is today coming into its own.
Come the 1997 election, the Referendum Party failed spectacularly: over 90 per cent of its candidates lost their deposits, including Goldsmith himself in Putney, and the party averaged just 2.6 per cent of the nationwide vote. Yet its influence belied its meagre electoral footprint. By putting the question of Europe at the heart of a British election campaign, Goldsmith helped to deepen the already widening fault line between the Eurosceptic and Europhile wings of the Conservative Party, while creating a new populist mould for insurgent campaigns from the right. The Referendum Party was in this way a vanishing mediator for two of the most significant events in recent British politics: the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the rise of Nigel Farage. Almost as significant, however, were the ideas from which his monument was cast, which Goldsmith first set to paper in a curious book published in 1994 called The Trap.
Born in Paris in 1933 to Frank Goldsmith, a luxury hotelier and former Conservative politician, and his French wife, Marcelle, James Goldsmith’s childhood was spent, as one of his biographers notes, in the “ambience of pampered women and servility”. His schooling, which would take him first to the Bahamas, where the family fled after the German invasion of France, and then on to England, was largely unsuccessful. He left Eton after he bet £10 on a three-horse accumulator and won over £8,000, a large sum at the time, though one he quickly squandered. Heroically reckless in matters of love, his first brush with fame came in the early 1950s when he eloped with the heiress of a Bolivian tin fortune against her father’s wishes, even going so far as to charter a plane and fly to Casablanca in pursuit of her, before arranging her abduction from her father’s house in Paris. A serial adulterer, he would marry twice more, the third time to his mistress, Annabel Birley, former wife of nightclub owner Mark Birley. Even after this last marriage he said “when you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy”.
Standing at more than 6ft tall, with piercing blue eyes and a rich deep voice, the hint of French never quite leaving it despite the otherwise dominant tones of public-school English, Goldsmith was charming and charismatic. This he would use to good effect in the world of business. During the 1970s and 1980s, Goldsmith was one of the world’s most successful, and most notorious, financiers and businessmen, practising a ruthless brand of predatory capitalism and growing immensely wealth along the way. Throughout, the stench of corporate raiding, and the tag “asset stripper”, clung to him and all his dealings. In business, his aim was simple: buy bloated and undervalued companies, such as the American timber firm Diamond International which he bought in the early 1980s, then strip away the unprofitable side ventures, like its matchstick manufacturing and fast-food arms, before selling on the remaining profitable venture. On the Diamond deal alone, Goldsmith made $500m profit after the company’s forests were audited just a year after his initial purchase.
“Predators are a necessary stimulant,” he once said. “If you eliminate predators in business and just create comfortable bureaucracies and monopolies with no predators you will have a dead industry.” This thinking found its natural home in the US, to where he moved after the election of the socialist François Mitterrand as French president in 1981. France and the UK, he thought, had been thoroughly infiltrated by the far left. In the more conservative US, he was thrilled by the opportunities, quickly habituating to the guiltless American culture of self-interest.
Scornful of those who preached caution, during an appearance on the television debate show Ethics in America in 1989, he dismissed those like his opponent, the Democratic senator Tim Wirth, who worried about the ills of the free market. The people “who believe in what Senator Wirth believes in”, he said, “which is a pastoral America with a company and a church, and it will be there forever, and that competition is awful” were deluded. There is a “difference between doing business and doing good. Doing business gives you the fuel to do good. Don’t mix them up. The bee doesn’t make honey because he’s doing good.” “My views can be summed up,” he said in a 1985 lecture, as “the best way to freedom and prosperity is competitive free enterprise within a meritocratic society; that national solidarity should take the form of a safety net for those who desperately need it and not a suffocating blanket for all; that the dominant geopolitical problem is the imperial and totalitarian ambition of the Soviet Union and that this can only be controlled through strength and even intransigence.” In this, he was swimming with the tide, so much so that he became a member of the “Downing Street irregulars”, an informal group of advisers to Margaret Thatcher.
His primary political commitment throughout this period, however, was anti-communism. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Goldsmith became an increasingly paranoid Cold Warrior, pumping funds into Brian Crozier’s private anti-communist intelligence organisation, the 61, which infiltrated groups like the World Peace Council and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and offering bungs to British journalists to write anti-communist hit pieces. Yet as the Berlin Wall fell, new fears began to take him over.
Written as a conversation between Goldsmith and Yves Messarovitch, the economics editor of the French newspaper Le Figaro, Goldsmith’s book The Trap is part polemic and part manifesto, laying out his new and increasingly apocalyptic and messianic vision of global politics. Such was his sense of cataclysm, he began to take aim at everything he had until recently dedicated his life to. The book begins with a warning. “Every society in the modern world,” Goldsmith writes, “is confronting serious problems which have no simple, universal solution.” They do, however, have a simple cause: at root (Goldsmith here sounding more like a bearded polytechnic lecturer than a man who made billions stripping corporations for profit) these ills are the product of the “inversion of values” that is central to modern economies, in which growth comes at the expense of stability. “The economy is a tool to serve us,” he writes. “It is not a demigod to be served by society.”
The primary economic tool that had come to serve this demigod was, for Goldsmith, the system of global free trade established by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or Gatt. Under the conditions prevailing in postwar Europe and America, free trade had produced unprecedented levels of economic stability and security, in which both labour productivity and living standards grew alongside GDP. Yet, in the new conditions which emerged at the end of the Cold War, this system had become destructive. Key to this was demographics: as the Iron Curtain fell some “4 billion people… suddenly entered the world economy”, presenting corporations with a unique opportunity. Under the regime of global free trade, companies could move to wherever in the world that production was cheapest. With dozens of poor nations all with millions of un- and underemployed workers opening up – vast reserve armies of labour ripe for exploitation – they did so in huge numbers.
If this was a boon to corporations and their shareholders, it would be disastrous for everyone else. In its wake came a wave of deindustrialisation that swept through working-class communities. “We export jobs,” wrote Goldsmith pithily, “and import unemployment.” The positive side of this this system, the stupefying effects of credit and cheap goods, meanwhile, would only last so long. “Consumers are also citizens, many of whom live in towns,” he wrote, proving himself a far more clear-eyed anatomist of the troubles to come than the political boosters of the End of History. “As unemployment rises and poverty increases, towns and cities will grow ever more unstable.” The effects of this, Goldsmith prophesied, “will be deeper than anything ever envisaged by Marx”.
This new-found denunciation of global free trade would come to be the dominant theme in Goldsmith’s political activism. It would also fuel his crusade against the European Union. In doing so, he would stand out from previous critics of European integration, whether those from the right, who saw the EU as a dirigiste drag on trade, or the left, who saw it as little more than a multinational capitalist club. Instead, Goldsmith framed the EU as a conduit for a new and destructive form of “globalism” that aided the destabilising effects of global free trade by moving power ever further from a country’s citizens. In its place – and prefiguring the new form of right-wing populism to come, a mutant strain of Thatcherite neoliberalism which has become a dominant ideology of the 21st century – he advocated for the creation of a fortified Europe, buttressed by both a solid internal market and a heavily defended frontier.
It also raises one of the central puzzles of Goldsmith’s life and career: the profound contradiction between the vision that found form in the mid-1990s, and the free-market corporate raiding in which Goldsmith had so gleefully and gainfully participated. Yet there were continuities, too. Goldsmith had long warned about the effects of rule by an ensconced and out-of-touch elite, detached from reality. In Britain, this took the form of an industrial middle class which, he wrote in 1985, had been “devitalised by gentrification”, drawn away from the thrusting free enterprise that made them rich and into the drawing rooms of the aristocracy. In France, his other home country, it took the form of a “caste of mandarins”, professional bureaucrats that had trapped the nation and which “stifles both the French and France”. On both sides of the English Channel, what resulted was not so much a class society as a one dominated by rigid and distinct “castes”. These in turn produced “cultures of decay”, stultifying societies disdainful of free enterprise and entrepreneurship. In this, his thought overlaps with many other nationalist outriders for Thatcherism, not least the historian Correlli Barnett and his “declinist” reading of British history.
Also unexpected was Goldsmith’s deep and seemingly genuine concern for the environment. Much of this can be attributed to the influence of his brother, the environmental activist Edward, who in 1969 founded the Ecologist magazine. As Goldsmith told an interviewer from the Observer in 1976, he “agreed with the bulk of his brother’s views, except that he thinks ecological disaster to be further away”. During the 1980s, the brothers grew apart, as Teddy’s environmentalism clashed with his brother’s public backing of the economics of Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. In a curious coincidence, we can see signs of this divergence in two television programmes screened during the same week in 1990: Teddy’s Channel Four’s documentary, Fragile Earth, where he lamented humanity’s destruction of the natural world in the name of profit, and James’s interview on BBC2’s The Midas Touch, where he defended vulgar displays of wealth. “Vulgarity is to some degree a sign of vigour,” Goldsmith told the interviewer, Anthony Sampson. “It means that new people, coming from nowhere, are making it. It’s the old American dream – anybody can become a millionaire.”
Nevertheless, Teddy’s work would help set much of apocalyptic tone of Goldsmith’s writing: in 1972, Teddy was one of the co-authors of the book, A Blueprint for Survival, one of the bestselling books of that year. He warned that the world was on course for “breakdown”, and to avoid it we would need to revert to small-scale de-industrial communities based on the tribal societies he had observed in the 1960s while travelling with his friend John Aspinall, the millionaire owner of Mayfair’s Claremont Club and later of a private zoo in Kent. Both James Goldsmith’s business dealings and his politics were conducted in a similarly messianic register: either we win, he seemed constantly to announce, or the world and all we hold dear will end in catastrophe.
Reading The Trap today is an uncanny experience. Goldsmith reads as a figure out of time: his critique of global free trade would find far more admirers in contemporary Britain (and indeed America) than that of the 1990s. It would also set him deeply against many of his former Thatcherite comrades. The mid-1990s are usually remembered as a period when free-market, end-of-history globalised capitalism stood all conquering. In Goldsmith’s words, free trade was by then a “sacred principle of modern economic theory, a sort of generally accepted moral dogma”. Perhaps that is why the public reaction to the book was so fierce. In the Sunday Times, Norman Macrae was scathing, accusing the book of being “based on a twaddle of misconceptions”. The Telegraph were more conciliatory, noting Goldsmith’s skill in bringing together many of the anxieties of the age, while stating that “the stress on protectionism severely weakens Goldsmith’s case”. The Thatcherite think tank, The Centre for Policy Studies, meanwhile, released a 34-page rebuttal just a month after The Trap’s publication.
Yet it wasn’t just in his criticism of global free trade that he prefigured many of the concerns of the new and more nationalistic right. By unleashing a wave of poor and desperate refugees, the countries of Europe, he predicted, would soon be facing an existential crisis. For the advocates of free trade, the nation was simply a “populated space”, made up of whoever is a resident at any one time. Goldsmith, meanwhile, defined it as “a land whose citizens, in their overwhelming majority, share a common culture, sense of identity, heritage and traditional roots”. Humans can only flourish in stable communities that preserve their culture, identities and traditions. If too many people arrive who do not share that deep sense of tradition and identity, who are culturally incompatible, then the nation will “cease to be a nation”. The result: “hostility, intolerance and conflict”.
Goldsmith’s influence on the British right was more than just symbolic. One of the candidates for his Referendum Party in 1997, gaining his first taste of front-line political campaigning, was Rupert Lowe, the millionaire owner of Southampton Football Club. Standing in the Cotswolds, he did better than many of the party’s other candidates, finishing fourth with 6.6 per cent of the vote. Nearly 30 years later, he would finally win a seat, this time in Great Yarmouth, first for Reform UK before falling out with Nigel Farage and sitting as an independent. In Westminster, Lowe has pushed Goldsmith’s insights about the need for homogeneous communities far further towards an even more nativist nationalism than James ever anticipated. Lowe is now, in the words of Hope Not Hate, “by some distance, the most extreme MP in parliament”.
Lowe is also one of many figures now on the populist right who first cut their teeth in the world of finance and business, a list which includes both Farage and his Reform deputy, the former asset manager Richard Tice, as well, of course, as Donald Trump. Each conforms to the mould set by Goldsmith: the wealthy and patrician post-corporate figure who, having toiled and profited in the abyss of the free market, comes out to tell ordinary people how to fix its ills. Yet none of the new generation of plutocrats-turned-populists have been as penetrating as the original.
What Goldsmith saw clearly, as others celebrated the seemingly final triumph of the free world against the forces of nationalism and communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was the dark underside of capitalist globalisation. As wealth moved frictionlessly across the world, and as shareholdings and corporate balance sheets blossomed in the “new economy” of tech firms and financial services, millions of people would end up losers, thrown by the wayside as jobs were offshored and communities torn apart. To this, mainstream politics had little to offer. As another perceptive critic of globalisation, Edward Luttwak, wrote in 1994, “neither the moderate Right nor the moderate Left even recognises, let alone offers any solution for, the central problem of our days: the completely unprecedented personal economic insecurity of working people, from industrial workers and white-collar clerks to medium-high managers.” The results, Luttwak predicted, would be dangerous: “the space… remains wide open for a product-improved Fascist party, dedicated to the enhancement of the personal economic security of the broad masses of (mainly) white-collar working people”.
Goldsmith saw this too, as do, to different degrees, our contemporary populists. What would drive this new reaction, Luttwak said, would be the anger of those who were left behind, whose wages were stagnating even as others grew obscenely, ludicrously, rich. These would be the shock troops for the coming reaction. As Goldsmith sat in his palatial Mexican manor, pondering the world that he had created and the monuments he would leave behind, he saw that it wasn’t the coming waves of mass migrations that would prove to be the most destabilising factor for the world in the decades to come; it was the very foundations on which his own wealth and power rested.
Do any of our new populists truly understand the plight of the common man? Not if their economic policies are any indication: more of the same, but harder and deeper. Yet in many ways, the question is beside the point. Their position as both insiders to the world of wealth and power, and outsiders against what they portray as an out of touch and dangerous elite, has proved to have an enduring power and resonance. Unlike them, Goldsmith was nothing if not honest. As Goldsmith admitted in the run up to the 1997 election, a good result for the Referendum Party would be a million votes nationwide. In the end they missed this target, but not by much. Just two months later, Goldsmith would be dead at the age of 64, the pancreatic cancer which he had been diagnosed several years before made worse by the stress of campaigning. Others have stepped into his place. None since have been quite so acute, none nearly so far-sighted. While those like Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe can dissemble, valorising the free market in everything except labour, Goldsmith told us what he, and they, really think.
[Further reading: The prophet of the new right]
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