Zac Goldsmith, 25, son of the late Sir James, could have been a playboy. But instead of wasting his fortune on 'Ferraris and cocaine', he is using it to save the planet. He even recycles his father's clothes. Interview by Helena de Bertodano ZAC GOLDSMITH says he is spectacularly disorganised and you have to believe him. Who else would find himself having his first baby, relaunching a magazine and setting up a new organic restaurant all in one week? "It's a nightmare. Everything's coming together at the same time." Son with a mission: 'For a long time after my father died', says Zac, 'I would go to the fax machine with an article and think "Oh sh--, there's no direct line to wherever he is" '

But the 25-year-old son of the late Sir James Goldsmith says he is thrilled, particularly about the baby, which is due today. "It's exciting beyond belief. I'm sure it will become the main focus of my life, I can't think of anything else. But I'm terrified as well - not of bringing up a child, more of the birth itself. The other day I had a nightmare that my wife gave birth to a caterpillar." In June he married Sheherazade Bentley, 25 - daughter of the asset-stripper John Bentley and Viviane Ventura, a Colombian actress who wrote a book on the art of social climbing - and says he is delighted that he has started a family so quickly. "Every man today is afraid he's firing blanks; it's becoming very much harder for humans to reproduce. According to Danish research, we now have the sperm count of a hamster." Every topic of conversation with Zac leads back to the issues at the heart of The Ecologist, the monthly magazine of which he is editor and which he is relaunching tomorrow after a three-month break to redesign it. He has made this dry, heavily academic and rather colourless journal far more accessible. "I'm not an academic or a scientist and I'm certainly not interested in editing something that can only be read by them." The relaunch issue is full of controversial pieces, from an indictment of New Labour's cosiness with big business to an article by Dr Arpad Pusztai explaining how he was silenced following his very public expression of doubt over the safety of GM foods. It also includes a lighthearted interview with a man who calls himself Agent Apple and rams cream pies into the faces of people who, in his view, harm the planet. And no, Agent Apple has nothing to do with Birgit Cunningham, the woman who brought brief notoriety to The Ecologist in February, when she planted a chocolate eclair on Nick Brown, the Agriculture Minister, saying she was acting on behalf of the magazine. "She was bogus," says Zac today. "To do it in our name without our authority was not on. I had taken her on for two months to organise an event for me but I had to end it there and then." We meet in his office in Chelsea Wharf, which looks more like a student bedsit than the working quarters of the wealthy son of the flamboyant billionaire Jimmy Goldsmith. According to the most conservative estimates, Zac has already inherited at least £10 million. His desk is littered with dirty mugs, his bin is overflowing, a black labrador is snoozing in the corner and there is a fug of smoke as he sits chain-smoking his way through a packet of Natural American Spirit organic cigarettes, flicking the ash into a mug with a broken handle. "This place is like a Swiss watch compared to my house - at least until Sheherazade moved in." According to those who know him, and knew his father, Zac looks very much like Jimmy at the same age, with the same intense blue-grey eyes and lanky frame. Zac also has his father's passion and charm, although he is less forceful. He talks for much of the time with a cigarette waggling in the corner of his mouth, ash dropping on to the brown herringbone jacket which used to belong to his father. His voice is soft with the gravelly stamp of tobacco, but he says he plans to give up smoking as soon as the baby is born. "I said I'd give up the moment it was confirmed that Sheherazade was pregnant. I tried but she begged me to start again because I was too unpleasant." Zac is reluctant to divulge details of his new organic restaurant except to say that it will be opening soon. At the moment he only eats out in restaurants that serve organic food or local produce. What happens if he goes to a friend's house and they serve him non-organic meat? "I won't eat it. I can't digest the stuff. The average pig slaughtered today is riddled with tumours. I don't particularly want a plate of grilled tumours which has come from a pig tortured under Auschwitz-like conditions." It is not his own health he is worried about, he says, but the ethics of farming animals in this way. In other ways, his life is far from healthy. "I'm sat in front of a computer, chainsmoking all day long, drinking 25 cups of coffee." Fortunately his wife is a convert to organic food. "She's an incredible cook. She used to tease me about smoking organic cigarettes and eating organic eggs . . . but now she's setting up a business called Deli Organic in Battersea, which will sell sandwiches and organic produce." There is more than a touch of the fanatic to Zac Goldsmith, which he considers a compliment. "I think whatever I was doing I would be pretty fanatical, but I find it hard to imagine how you can't be fanatical about these issues. We're facing extinction . . . and I can be driven to an unbelievable, uncontrollable anger by what's happening today." Does he feel he inherits his crusading streak from his father? "I don't know how much of it is genetic. I certainly was heavily influenced by him. He was a monumental figure in my life so it rubbed off." Not that father and son always saw eye to eye, particularly when Zac was expelled from Eton at the age of 16 for smoking marijuana. "There was a period, from 16 to 19, where we really hit the rocks in terms of our relationship. But even at the worst times, following a monumental row, you couldn't not respect him. I always saw in him - and I would have been a fool not to have seen in him - a greatness." Father and son were growing much closer in the last couple of years before his father's death from pancreatic cancer in 1997, and Zac helped him canvas for his Referendum Party a few weeks before he died. He says he still feels his father's influence. "For a long time after he died, I would still go to a fax machine with an article and would start typing the numbers in and think 'Oh shit, there's no direct line to wherever he is.' " Zac's childhood was unconventional. His father somehow managed to run three different families in conjunction. He was still married to his second wife, Ginette Lery, when Zac was born, and once he had divorced her and married Zac's mother, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, he started another family with Laure Boulay de la Meurthe in Paris. There was never any secret about this and the women in his life seemed to accept it. Did he ever resent his father's long absences? "It was normal. I considered other people's families to be slightly odd. I certainly never resented it, because I get on so well with my brothers and sisters, from the youngest, who is 10, to the oldest who is 45." I ask him if he plans to have a more conventional approach to family life. "If that means staying within this particular family unit, then I hope so, yes." He grew up in a large house in Richmond with his two full siblings, Jemima, 26, now married to Imran Khan, and his younger brother Benjamin, 19. He says that seeing Jemima with her two young sons encouraged him to become a father. "They're phenomenal children. It's wonderful to see how much they've enriched her life and how much they've cemented that marriage." Zac says he gets on well with Imran. "He's a very strong and honest man. He's not your best friend overnight. You have to earn his smiles but when you've got a warmth from Imran you know that first of all you've earned it and secondly that it's a genuine one." Did Goldsmith worry about bringing a child into this world which he feels is destined for disaster? "Actually, I did put a lot of thought into that. I've often felt slightly guilty at the prospect of bringing a child into this hideous world but I think there are enough people out there who want the world to change. If I didn't think there was room for optimism, I wouldn't be doing the magazine anyway. Maybe the child will be a great warrior. Who knows?" They do not know what sex their child will be, although Zac says he has a hunch it will be a girl. Nor have they decided on any possible names. "I don't want to decide until it's born. You can get a name very badly wrong. Sheherazade's name could have gone very wrong if she'd turned out differently." Sheherazade, also 25, makes a brief appearance in the office from their house around the corner. She is a pretty, slight girl who does not look or act like someone who is nine months pregnant. She offers to take the dog, Tashi [which means "auspicious" in Ladakhi], for a walk. After the baby is born, the family want to to spend some of their time in Devon, where Zac has recently bought an old farmhouse with 200 acres of land, which he plans to farm organically. He had scoured the country to find somewhere far removed from "nuclear danger areas". The nearest threat is Hinckley Point outside Bristol, which he thinks is far enough. "The prevailing wind - as long as global warming doesn't happen too quickly - is westerly so if the thing goes up, it's going to bypass us, which is a very selfish way of seeing things, but I don't want to bring up a child in an area that could be affected." Even as a child, Goldsmith showed hints of his future concerns. When he was eight, he put up Free Your Bird posters around Richmond, encouraging people to let their caged birds experience freedom in a ramshackle aviary he built in his garden. "I had three budgies which were handed over by disgruntled neighbours and a dove which couldn't fly because it had been in a cage for too long. I was obsessed with them." After gaining four A- Levels from a Cambridge sixth-form college, Goldsmith spent three years travelling the world before settling down to work at The Ecologist, founded by his uncle Teddy Goldsmith in 1969. His interest in ecology had been sharpened by his father who had become increasingly concerned about ecological issues in the latter years of his life and who had given his son a book called Ancient Futures, by Helena Norbert-Hodge. "He scribbled in the cover, 'This will change your life'. And it did. Reading that book is the reason I'm here now." Teddy Goldsmith, who now takes a backseat role on the magazine, says his nephew is his natural successor. "He has his father's great strength and determination and the family trait of championing ideas that don't appeal to people." During his editorship Zac has managed to double circulation although the magazine still only occupies a very small niche in the market, with a worldwide circulation of 25,000. Goldsmith gets irritated when he sees it described as a green Tatler, which it manifestly is not. "If they want to classify me as an 'ecotoff', that's fine . . . I think if you're lucky enough to be born with ample resources, then it's your responsibility to put something back." He props up the magazine financially, injecting cash and drawing no salary himself, although his eight staff are salaried. Goldsmith claims he has no interest in material acquisitions and once said he had only ever bought one pair of shoes in his life. "That's doubled now. These are probably the ones I was referring to," he says, pointing to his battered brown loafers. "It's not a moral choice; it's just I can't be bothered to buy clothes. I've got my Dad's." As for a car, he drives a "smashed-up old black Golf". Zac says that he tries to shake off the concerns of The Ecologist when he leaves the office but does not always succeed. "It's very very depressing. Occasionally I spend hours pacing backwards and forwards in the sitting room, racking my brains and wondering how the hell we're going to get out of this hole." Luckily Sheherazade shares her husband's concerns, he says, or life chez Goldsmith could be a mite dull. "She reads every issue of The Ecologist before it is published and makes changes to it. Her instincts are spot on." Goldsmith says he is impervious to those who attack him for being a radical. "Our message is incredibly conservative. We're talking about enabling life to continue. If that's a radical stand, then okay, I'm a radical . . . I wonder what sort of criticism I would get had I put the same amount of money into buying Ferraris or taking cocaine. I would probably become a playboy figure of the gossip columns and be quite popular." For information about The Ecologist, call 01795 414963 or e-mail ecologist@gn.apc.org

29 September 1998: 'My father was a fanatic and so am I' [interview with Zac Goldsmith]





