James Goldsmith

Sir James Goldsmith (1933 - 1997) was a British businessman and founder of the Euro-sceptic Referendum Party. The party stood for the United Kingdom general election, 1997, as part of which Goldsmith mass-mailed thousands of homes with a VHS tape expressing his ideas. It has been suggested 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 Labour 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.

Related Topics:
1933 - 1997 - British - Euro-sceptic - Referendum Party - United Kingdom general election, 1997 - VHS - Pirate Referendum Radio station - London - Putney - Tory - David Mellor - Labour

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In the mid-1990s he was a major financial backer of a leading Euro-sceptic thinktank, The European Foundation.

Related Topics:
1990s - European Foundation

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Goldsmith was married three times. His first wife was the Bolivian heiress Maria Isabel Patiño, the 18-year-old daughter of Antenor Patiño 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, Manes, and daughter, Alix. 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), Zacharias and Benjamin (born 1980). After his third marriage, Goldsmith embarked on yet another extramarital affair with an aristocratic Frenchwoman with whom he had two more children. Goldsmith is believed to have coined the phrase "When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy."

Related Topics:
Maria Isabel Patiño - Antenor Patiño - Duchess of Durcal - Caesarian section - Ginette Lery - 1978 - Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart - Jemima - 1974 - 1980

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Goldsmith died in 1997 of pancreatic cancer.

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In 2003, his son Benjamin, married Kate Rothschild of the Rothschild family.

Related Topics:
2003 - Kate Rothschild - Rothschild family

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