Goldsmith junior

After writing about Teddy Goldsmith on Thursday a profile in Prospect magazine of Zac Goldsmith, his nephew and protégé, caught my eye. Zac wants to follow his grandfather in becoming a Conservative member of parliament so is standing in Richmond, a wealthy suburb of London, at the next election. According to the article:

“Goldsmith has certainly been on an intriguing intellectual journey. In his late teens, after being expelled from Eton, he ignored university and travelled the world. Returning from one trip he remembers picking up a book given to him by his father, the billionaire businessman James Goldsmith. The inscription said it would be the most important he would ever read.

“The book, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, told of the visits of environmentalist Helena Norberg-Hodge to a primitive but beautiful corner of northern India in the 1970s, and her subsequent horror at the province’s economic development. Inspired, Goldsmith met her, worked for her organisation, and also went to work in Ladakh itself.

“Norberg-Hodge, along with Zac’s uncle Teddy Goldsmith, had a powerful effect on Zac’s thinking. Both espoused a “deep green” philosophy concerned with the preservation of natural ecology and tribal societies, and a strong scepticism of capitalism and globalisation. Such ideas, in turn, underpinned Goldsmith’s early campaigns—as editor of his uncle’s Ecologist magazine—against everything from international trade and GM food to nuclear energy and climate change.”