Kiss me on the apocalypse!

Some reflections on the life, times and politics of Sir James Goldsmith

The Clermont Set

The Clermont Club was opened in 1962 by John Aspinall after the gaming laws had been liberalised by the MacMillan government.(1)During the 1950s Aspinall built up a personal fortune providing premises for exclusive gambling sessions in London, much of which was used to fund his zoological interests. Until the law changed in 1962 these sessions shifted periodically, from one location to another. The stability that came with acquiring a permanent building allowed Aspinall to expand. He leased the basement of the Clermont Club to a friend, Mark Birley, who converted it into a night club, ‘Annabel’s’, named after his wife, Annabel, daughter of Lord Londonderry.A career gambler, Aspinall also had a lifelong interest in theories of human biology, evolution and genetics that had been common – and respectable – up until the 1930s, only to brought into disrepute by the Third Reich. At Oxford University in 1949-1951 he met James and Edward Goldsmith, becoming a close friend of both.

In the Clermont’s opulent rooms in Mayfair, the very rich mingled with a cross section of the British landed aristocracy and major business figures from Europe and beyond. Among those who would be typically found at its gaming tables were Lord Lucan, Tiny Rowland, Gianni Agnelli, James Goldsmith, Taki Theodoracopulous, Jim Slater and David Stirling.

The interests and activities of the better-known individuals who frequented the Club were not solely hedonistic. By the late ‘60s two distinct themes emerged in the conversations of the Clermont Set (as they were now called): there had been a very rapid decline in the political standing and strategic power of the UK; and these changes, together with more general concerns about the distribution of world resources, the exponential increases in world population and the instability of the developing world that resulted from this (and what this might imply for the living standards of the West) did not bode well for the future.

The Club of Rome

An early public appearance of these wider concerns came from the Club of Rome, an international group of planning, scientific and technological experts, launched with substantial funding from Clermont member Gianni Agnelli, the owner of the Fiat Corporation.(2) The Club of Rome was headed by Aurelio Peccei, a former executive at Fiat, and Alexander King, a senior figure at the OECD.(3) It took the view, controversial in 1968, that the increases in population, economic growth, consumption and material wellbeing seen after 1945 could not be continued indefinitely and were actually damaging to the human race and its survival on the planet. Many of the views put forward by the Club of Rome were picked up and publicised in the UK by The Ecologist, a magazine that first appeared in late 1969, edited and published by Edward Goldsmith, with funding from his brother James.

James Goldsmith was also active in British party politics, supporting the manifesto that was discussed and adopted by Edward Heath and the Conservative Shadow Cabinet at their meeting in Selsdon Park in early 1970. This marked (at the time) a strong shift to the right and a significant move away from the post-1945 ‘Butskellite’ consensus in the UK. It placed much less emphasis on the Welfare State and much more on what was thought to be the dynamic competitiveness of the UK private sector. A number of these policies – less regulation, greater consumer credit, and a significant programme of industrial and commercial expansion led by the private sector – were put into practice by the Conservative government in 1970-1971.

Heath took Britain into the EEC in early 1973, a move that was designed to secure for the UK, in the longer term, the type of prosperous economy that was perceived to exist in the EEC. (Heath was an admirer of the German economic model in particular.) Unfortunately for Heath, due mainly to the support given by the US to Israel in the Yom Kippur war in the Middle East, in October 1973 OPEC announced a significant increase in the price of oil. With the Suez Canal closed since the previous Arab-Israeli war, this led to dramatic price rises in most areas of economic activity across the world, followed by very high levels of inflation and an international stock market crash. Between 1971 and 1973 unemployment in the UK rose to levels not seen for 40 years. Heath responded to these complex events with his notorious ‘U-turn’, reverting to a major programme of traditional government intervention and spending, something that the Selsdon Park discussions had sought to abandon as a tactic.

Unlike Heath, Goldsmith did not shift back to the centre. Although maintaining good relations with Heath (he gave him £100,000 to ‘help the European cause’), he took the view that the Selsdon policies had failed because they were too timid and had not been allowed sufficient time. In late 1973 Goldsmith, fellow Clermont member, David Stirling, and ‘other businessmen’ met Peter Wright, an MI5 officer, at the suggestion of Victor Rothschild, a distant cousin of Goldsmith. Wright said that during the meeting Goldsmith stated that a large number of ‘significant UK business figures’ wanted the expected return to office of Harold Wilson stopped and steps taken to reduce the power of UK trade unions. It is unclear if anything flowed from this discussion. In any event Wilson took office again as Prime Minister in February 1974, but he had no overall majority and the prospect remained of Heath returning as Prime Minister in the very near future. Goldsmith continued to support Edward Heath, whom he met in June 1974 – an event organised by Clermont Club regular Jim Slater, at the house of Peter Walker MP – and appears to have believed that, had Heath won a subsequent election (and become prime minister in, say, 1975) he would have been given a peerage and a significant government position.

Despite his previous statements to the effect that it would be a national disaster etc. to have Wilson return as prime minister, Goldsmith now established a relationship with him. This evolved from the friendship between Marcia Williams, Wilson’s private secretary, and Lady Annabel Birley, who had separated from Mark Birley and was now living with Goldsmith. In July 1975, after Thatcher had become the new Conservative leader, Goldsmith met Wilson. Latching on to Wilson’s concerns that his office and home were being bugged, Goldsmith volunteered his own private security company to sweep both premises, apparently finding and removing a number of listening devices.(4)

Wilson awarded Goldsmith a knighthood in his 1976 resignation honours list, ostensibly for ‘services to ecology’. This was widely believed at the time to be a euphemism for funding libel actions against Private Eye, which had run many stories about Wilson and his secretary; but was possibly a way of thanking Goldsmith for his debugging work.

Whatever the circumstances of the unlikely Wilson-Goldsmith relationship, the views that Goldsmith held, then and subsequently, were firmly to the right of centre. In 1977 he provided much of the money for the launch of another think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. Like the Centre for Policy Studies, this promoted ideas of deregulation and economic liberalism that had last been current in Britain in the 1920s.

Many commentators have noted that as the 70s progressed Goldsmith made increasingly apocalyptic utterances. In 1977 he was writing to Lord Londonderry (the brother of Lady Annabel Birley) and putting the question ‘….does he want his son growing up in a country where sewage flowing in the streets is accepted as normal?’ During this period Lord Londonderry was corresponding in a similar vein on similar topics with Sir Oswald Mosley, who, at 81 years of age, was still ‘awaiting the call’ to return and salvage Britain from its great decline. Such letters reflect the sense of national decay, impotence and impending collapse that many of the UK establishment had during this period.

The election of the Conservative government headed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and the implementation of some of the policies advocated by the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute, represented a considerable success for the political strategy pursued by Goldsmith. It is interesting that he disappeared somewhat from UK politics with the arrival of Thatcher in 1979 (his work now being complete?) and returned to the business world.

Back to politics

It was the pursuit of economic and political integration by many EU member states that brought Goldsmith back into politics. In February 1989 he financed the launch of the Bruges Group, a lobbying and organising forum, named after the Belgian city in which Mrs Thatcher had made plain her opposition to further EU integration. It was perhaps a combination of the rather motley nature of the Bruges Group and its supporters,(5) the decision by the Conservative Party to replace Margaret Thatcher in November 1990, followed by the adoption by Parliament into UK law of the Maastricht Treaty in 1993, that persuaded Goldsmith that he should play a public political role.

In May 1994 Goldsmith was elected an MEP, sitting in the European Parliament as part of a small French grouping, EDN (l’autre Europe), and quickly became President of the L’Europe des Nations parliamentary group. At the same time a number of Conservative MPs, who were either members of, or sympathisers with the Bruges Group, began acting and speaking against their own government. Standing behind them was Margaret Thatcher, the ousted leader, whom Goldsmith had helped to power in 1975. Due to their continual opposition John Major was unable to free himself from Europe as a domestic issue. The debates over further involvement with Europe via the adoption by the UK of the Maastricht Treaty were so fierce that the Conservative Party suspended the whip from 11 MP’s, all of whom had strong connections to the Bruges Group and the Goldsmith/Thatcher axis on Europe. This deprived Major of a parliamentary majority. With the European Union (as the EEC had now become) clearly moving toward further integration via the adoption of a Single European Currency, and with none of the other UK political parties taking what he considered to be an appropriate position on this issue, Goldsmith set up the Referendum Party in April 1996 – at considerable personal expense – demanding that all the major participants in UK politics should commit themselves to a referendum before the UK participated in a Single European Currency. As adequate guarantees to this effect did not appear, Goldsmith duly announced that the Referendum Party would contest any seat in the forthcoming UK general election where they felt that either the sitting MP or the prospective candidates were insufficiently robust on this issue.

The Goldsmith effect

By 1995 it seemed clear to many observers of UK politics that Tony Blair and the Labour Party, now packaged as the ‘New Labour project’, were likely to do very well at the forthcoming general election. For a range of reasons, notably the recession of 1991/2, and the forced withdrawal of sterling from the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, a fresh Conservative government with a workable majority did not seem likely to emerge from this contest. Not foreseen was the scale of the Labour victory. Perusing the results of the 1997 general election on a constituency by constituency basis, it is clear that the Referendum Party directly affected the outcome in 25 seats. Had it not been for Goldsmith’s intervention Blair would have had a smaller majority.(6) However this does not take into consideration any indirect effect amongst the electorate as a whole caused by Goldsmith, the Referendum Party and the Bruges Group from 1989 onwards, and particularly from 1993-1997. The loss of morale amongst many Conservative supporters and the subsequent failure of many Tories to vote at all is difficult to measure; but it seems reasonable to assume that the division on Europe that was openly displayed and exploited by Goldsmith cost John Major many votes. Goldsmith may have helped to cause a severe Conservative defeat in circumstances that would otherwise have resulted in a hung parliament.

The other Goldsmith

During the years that Sir James Goldsmith sought and ultimately came to have influence in mainstream politics, his brother Edward Goldsmith was highly influential in remodelling and relaunching the UK’s then tiny environmentalist movement. Prior to the emergence of Edward Goldsmith and The Ecologist in 1969-1970, concerns about population, land use, farming techniques and pollution had been the domain in Britain of a number of rather elderly and staid organisations. The most significant of these were the Country Landowners Association, the Rural Reconstruction Association and the Soil Association. Until well into the 1950s all three groups were associated with Lord Lymington. A Conservative MP 1929-1934, Lymington was extremely close to Sir Oswald Mosley, from the launch of the British Union of Fascists in 1932 until possibly as late as 1950, and had been a prominent and vocal ‘fellow traveller of the Right’, advocating a settlement with Hitler in 1937-1940. He believed that Britain should have no strong commitments to Europe. Like David Stirling, Lord Lucan, Aspinall and ‘Tiny’ Rowland later, Lymington also had very extensive farming interests in colonial Africa. After 1948 he was prominent in Kenya as an advocate of careful agricultural development. His environmental views centred around selective breeding, organic farming and a ‘back to the soil’ approach, with a strong emphasis in national self-sufficiency in food supply. During the period that Lymington was the most publicly known environmentalist in the UK, the organisations with which he was involved tended to avow policies that were not that far from the ‘blut und boden’ (blood and soil) ideas of the Third Reich.

From its formation in 1946, the Soil Association (on whose council Lymington served 1947-1950) published a journal, Mother Earth, that was edited until 1963 by Jorian Jenks, previously adviser on agriculture to the British Union of Fascists. After 1963, with Jenks dead and Lymington in Kenya, this position was held by Robert Waller, a follower of the philosophical and social theories of John MacMurray.(7) As a result the Soil Association shifted to a centrist and more human orientated position.(8)

The Ecologist published articles on the future-facing Britain if the nation continued with reckless consumerism, over-population, pollution and overdevelopment. In 1971 a collection of essays appeared, Can Britain Survive? (Sphere, 1972), drawn from articles published in The Ecologist. Among other things it called for the stabilisation of the population to help avoid ‘the collapse of society as we know it’, displaying the same apocalyptic rhetoric in the environmental field that James Goldsmith, Stirling, Aspinall and other members of the Clermont Set used in the political and business worlds.(9) A year later Edward Goldsmith announced the formation of a political party, the Movement for Survival, that would contest elections and promote the views and policies set out in these two books. There is a suggestion that the Soil Association supported him in this initiative.

In 1973, with an election in the offing, talks were held between Goldsmith’s Movement for Survival and a group of disaffected Conservatives based in the West Midlands to see if a common programme could be worked out.(10) The latter were concerned about the over-population of the UK and were supporters of the views espoused by Paul Ehrlich in his The Population Bomb (1968).(11) The group merged and formed a new party, People. With a minuscule budget and very little publicity, a small number of candidates, including Edward Goldsmith, who stood in Eye (Suffolk), his father’s former constituency,(12)contested the 1974 general elections in February and October. All lost their deposits.(13)

People changed its name in 1976 to the Ecology Party, eventually attracting members such as Jonathan Porritt, one of a number of environmentalists who contested the May 1978 local government elections in a grouping known as The Save London Alliance, and David Icke, then a prominent TV presenter. In July 1978, with Porritt, Maurice Ash, Lord Beaumont and Richard Holme, Edward Goldsmith was one of the founder members of Green Alliance, a business lobby group on environmental issues. He also stood in the 1979 European Election as the Ecology Party candidate for Cornwall and Plymouth.(14)

Between 1970 and 1980 Edward Goldsmith played a major role in rescuing environmentalism from what had often been cranky neo-fascist hands. Eventually a viable political party emerged from this work. After a remarkable result (but false dawn) when the Green Party, as the Ecology Party had been renamed, won over 2 million votes (15.5.% of those cast) in the 1989 European Election, a breakthrough eventually came in 1999-2000: following the introduction of various proportional representation voting systems, Green candidates won seats in the Scottish Assembly, Welsh Assembly and the Greater London Authority, as well as electing MEPs. It has been a long haul, but the Green Party today is a fixture of the UK electoral system, clearly within ‘mainstream’ opinion;(15) and the strand of environmentalism espoused by Edward Goldsmith and others has been adopted as part of the agenda and language of the other main parties in UK politics (even though some might consider it a purely nominal and indeed cynical acquisition). When Edward Goldsmith bowed out of day-to-day involvement with The Ecologist, he was replaced as editor in 1998 by Zac Goldsmith, son of Sir James and currently Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond-upon-Thames and a close confidante and advisor of David Cameron.

Goldsmith’s legacy

A decade after his death it is interesting to reflect on the legacy of Sir James Goldsmith. He campaigned successfully in 1975-1979 for the rise of Thatcher to national predominance, surely the most significant event in British politics in recent years. He then helped create circumstances in 1995-1997 which ensured that Britain would not commit itself to participating fully in the EU, perhaps the most significant non-event in recent years. The success of both these projects and the landscape they have created in the UK shows just how significant money can be in an under-regulated democratic political system if it is used judiciously to obtain carefully demarcated goals.

What of the wider Clermont Set? Some of the right-wing opinions held by various members of the Clermont set (particularly Aspinall, Lucan and Stirling) no longer seem so outrageous. For example, the complicated schemes devised by David Stirling in the 1950s to promote power-sharing arrangements in Africa as an alternative to exclusively African control (and later implemented by Ian Smith in Rhodesia after 1970) no longer look extreme or even regrettable in the light of the debacle of Mugabe’s rule in Zimbabwe since 1980.(16)

In addition, even if Stirling et al lost their battle to preserve the supremacy of white settler rule in some parts of Africa, it does not follow that Goldsmith, Birley, Rowland and others gave up their strategic and economic interests on the continent. Note that the attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea in 2004 was allegedly funded by Ely Calil, a one time associate of Sir James Goldsmith and Mark Birley, and according to its jailed leader, Simon Mann, also involved Mark Thatcher.

We may also reflect on the related issue of immigration, which in the ‘60s and ‘70s was mainly from the Commonwealth. Given the rather limited numbers of persons from overseas either arriving or resident in the UK at that time, the Clermont Set were clearly mistaken in holding Powellite views (or, in the case of Aspinall, worse than Powellite views) about how many people from abroad should be allowed to live in the UK. But in 2008 the holding of such opinions, expressed in moderate language, no longer seems quite as extreme or objectionable as was once the case. There is now a view, held and articulated across the political spectrum, that a small heavily populated country such as the UK cannot cope with, and should not be asked to cope with, continual and very large immigration from outside the EU.

Whatever one thinks of their political and social views it is the environmental concerns of Aspinall, Birley, the Goldsmith brothers and Gianni Agnelli – pro-conservation, anti-growth, in favour of a managed population, using carefully husbanded natural resources – that look very farsighted. They were strikingly prescient at a time when most were ignorant. The campaign to deflect the human race away from wrecking the Earth may well turn out to have been the crowning achievement of Sir James and Edward Goldsmith. Though noble, this remains contingent on the rapid implementation of many changes in how society is currently ordered by a political system that – except in extreme wartime circumstances – is not known for acting rapidly.

Notes

1. An earlier version of the Clermont was the Hamilton Club, frequented by Ian Fleming, which until 1962 moved from one venue to another. It eventually settled at Hamilton Place, W1, as Les Ambassadeurs. Parts of the films Dr No and A Hard Day’s Night were filmed on its premises.
2. The Fiat Corporation was the largest industrial concern in Italy. Agnelli was often seen at the Clermont in the company of his mistress, the actress Anita Ekberg. He provided funding for the Club of Rome through the Agnelli Foundation. The Club of Rome published its first major report , The Limits of Growth, in 1972. It continues to be active and influential today, but has few UK members. <www.clubofrome.org/>
3. King was credited with discovering DDT. He later thought this a mixed blessing as it had greatly increased world population. After 1978 he was active in Green Alliance.
4. But did Goldsmith’s people actually debug Wilson? Later claims were made that a house that Wilson had occupied in the 1970s had been found to contain numerous hidden devices and that he was bugged throughout his premiership. Who installed these devices?
5. Initially they included Alan Sked, who later split from it to launch the UK Independence Party. Sked, who began his political career as a parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Party in 1970, eventually left the UK Independence Party in 1998. He is an historian and published Britain’s Decline (1987) an extremely gloomy look at the UK post-1945.
6. One feature of the 1997 campaign was the furious denunciation of Sir Edward Heath by Goldsmith over the ‘real’ nature of the EU.
7. MacMurray was a prominent philosopher in the 1930s and ‘40s whose work has enjoyed a recent resurgence due to the influence it is said to have had on Tony Blair.
8. A major step in this direction was the appearance in 1973 of Small is Beautiful, a key environmentalist text, by E. F. Schumacher, then the President of the Soil Association. It was published by Anthony Blond, who had been at Oxford with James Goldsmith and John Aspinall.In March 2008 the Soil Association held a glittering fund-raising dinner (‘The Feast of Albion’), entrance at £1000 per ticket, at the London Guildhall, presided over by Jonathan Dimbleby and attended by various Goldsmith children, as well as Sir Mick Jagger.
9. It was followed in 1972 by A Blueprint for Survival (Penguin Special, 1972), a reprint of Vol. 2 No. 1 of The Ecologist, which offered a set of solutions (not that many at the time would have seen them as such or would have regarded them as either attractive or achievable).
10. This group was led by Tom Whittacker, a former Conservative councillor. It was later joined by Keith Hudson who would go on to serve on the Liberal Party National Executive in 1975 and the Organising Committee of the SDP in 1982.
11. In the UK a 1971 paperback under the joint imprint of Ballantine and Friends of the Earth. This had been serialised in Playboy and promoted the idea that in the near future the number of people on the planet would grow so rapidly that the Earth’s resources would be overwhelmed, thus leading to global catastrophe. Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, bought the Clermont Club from Aspinall in 1972. Does this make Hefner an environmentalist? The current owner of the Clermont is Quek Leng Chan, a Chinese/Malaysian billionaire. He acquired it in August 2006 defeating two rival bids headed by Zac Goldsmith and Damian Aspinall (son of John). Annabel’s (which had counted David Blunkett MP as a member for some years) was sold by Robin Birley in June 2007 to Richard Caring, a prominent funder of the Labour Party. Robin Birley is now married to Lucy Ferry, ex-wife of Brian Ferry, and is thus stepfather of Otis Ferry of Countryside Alliance and fox-hunting fame. Apparently Otis rides with a hunt in David Cameron’s constituency.
12. John Aspinall sent the membership of his gaming club to canvass for Edward Goldsmith.
13. Francis Goldsmith, father of James and Edward, had been Conservative MP for Stowmarket 1910-1918 before abandoning British politics for a business career as a major hotelier across Europe. Three of the candidates put forward by People managed to get a vote into four figures but none of them affected the result in the constituency where they stood.One of the participants, Derek Wall, now a prominent member of the Green Party, describes this period at <http://another-green-world.blogspot.com/2006/10/short-history-of-green-party-of.html>
14. Edward Goldsmith is a friend of James Lovelock, the advocate since 1988 of the view that the Earth should be viewed as an organic whole with interacting components – the ‘Gaia Theory’. Reading Lovelock’s current book The Revenge of Gaia (2006) one is struck throughout by the extreme nature of some of his opinions. Which is not to say that in the long run (whatever that turns out to be) that they might not be mainly accurate. For instance, he scorns the gradualist approach of a number of other environmentalists, particularly Green Alliance figures such as Jonathan Porritt and Lord Taverne (both of whom are named in this respect), who argue that with judicious planning we might yet avoid a catastrophe. In Lovelock’s view the population of Earth is now totally unsustainable and we should ‘aim at a population one-sixth of the present’. The Revenge of Gaia is published by Penguin Books, with a forward by Sir Crispin Tickell, a patron, with Paul Ehrlich and Jonathan Porritt, of the Optimum Population Trust. The OPT recommends a UK population of no more than 17 million. One of their trustees is Sue Birley, sister of Robin.
15. Although having limited success in electoral terms, current membership of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other related groups is far in excess of that of conventional political parties.
16. The Capricorn Africa Society was set up to promote Stirling’s ideas but had no discernible impact on British politicians and policy makers at the time. Stirling was married to the niece of Lord Salisbury who founded the Monday Club in 1961 to lobby against MacMillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ intention to leave the UK’s African colonies as quickly as possible. The brother of Lord Salisbury was killed fighting in Rhodesia in 1978. What is striking, even during the comparatively short period of time that it took the British to leave their African colonies, was the lack of interest shown in how Britain should decolonize, and in particular, whether the French method of passing on power might be a better model. France left most of its African colonial possessions in 1960-1961. Aid and assistance thereafter was conditional on those territories retaining French civil servants in commanding positions within their governments. France also kept army, air and naval bases across Africa to police these arrangements and ensure stability. Britain simply pulled out between 1957 (Ghana) and 1968 (Swaziland) and left very little behind, whilst continuing to send modest amounts of aid to the former colonies each year.It is arguable that there have been fewer coups, civil wars and deaths in ex-French Africa than in ex-British Africa since independence. In addition to this France did not decolonize large parts of its colonial possessions in the West Indies and Pacific – these are now part of the EU. In these areas Britain decolonized almost everything and the small nation states that have emerged from this are often weak, unstable and at the risk of international crime and money laundering etc .