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12 April 2016: Zac Goldsmith takes part in a London mayoral debate.
‘When the London result came in, Goldsmith declined to shake Sadiq Khan’s hand. Maybe he was worried Khan would infect him with ‘extremism’, or have his watch off him.’ Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images
‘When the London result came in, Goldsmith declined to shake Sadiq Khan’s hand. Maybe he was worried Khan would infect him with ‘extremism’, or have his watch off him.’ Photograph: Niklas Halle'N/AFP/Getty Images

So many lowlights from the life of Zac Goldsmith – so hard to choose

This article is more than 7 years old
Marina Hyde

The Richmond Park debacle follows a colourful pattern of errors and failures. He is like a gambler addicted to losing

I don’t think you can overestimate the negative effects of Kate Bush coming out for the Tories in a week this bad for the governing party. Endorsement-wise, she could be our Barbra Streisand. Perhaps I’m missing an essential lobe, but I simply couldn’t muster the sense of personal betrayal that for some attended Kate’s love song to Theresa May. In fact, I haven’t been so irrationally amused since my beloved Richie Benaud revealed that his favourite television programme was Hollyoaks. You’ve gotta laugh.

For Zac Goldsmith, alas, the giggles are in shorter supply. “I am a punter,” he once claimed, inevitably sounding rather more like John Aspinall than someone feeding their benefits into a roulette machine in William Hill. “And a punter does not punt unless he has a chance of winning.” As I say, probably hasn’t spent time in many betting shops.

Either way, the erstwhile Richmond Park MP has contrived to pull off a stunning shitshow accumulator this year. In May Goldsmith lost the London mayoral election. And on Thursday night he lost his parliamentary seat, having forced the byelection when the third Heathrow runway was announced, then stood as an independent unchallenged by his own Tory party, in a move so bogglingly cynical that even I couldn’t fully get my head round it. The Spectator’s Fraser Nelson fairly described Goldsmith’s resignation play as a “hissy-fit” election. In the wake of the result, Zac’s younger brother, Ben, made a self-aware sortie on to Twitter to accuse the Richmond Park electorate of a “Brexit tantrum”. Let’s hear much, much more from the Goldsmith family about the stupid toddler voters, please.

Unlike the opposition leader of the free world, Tim Farron, I can’t get overexcited about the significance of the Richmond Park result. Furthermore, the idea that the voters there were rejecting Goldsmith’s racist mayoral campaign as opposed to revoicing their overwhelming opposition to Brexit is total and utter wishful thinking. Still, let’s not be fussy. Instead, let’s argue about what to include in the farewell montage of Zac’s best bits.

First, a big shout-out to that mayoral campaign against the eventual victor, Sadiq Khan, which misunderstood the city to a degree possible only in someone essentially insulated from it. Richmond doesn’t have a London postcode; Zac Goldsmith’s house may even have its own postcode.

It’s hard to pick a lowlight from those few weeks in spring. Peter Oborne classed the Tory strategy against Khan as sufficiently ghastly to warrant comparison with not just the openly homophobic effort against Peter Tatchell in Bermondsey in 1983 but the daddy of them all: the 1964 Smethwick campaign, in which the local Tory party warned voters: “If you want a n***** for a neighbour, vote Labour.” You do have to doff your hazmat suit to the leaflet Goldsmith sent to British Indians, in which he claimed Sadiq Khan was basically after their jewellery. As he put it, with sledgehammer emphasis: “His party SUPPORTS A WEALTH TAX on FAMILY JEWELLERY.” Mate, at least he’s into the idea of tax. You were a non-dom, and only gave your status up when someone found out about it during your campaign to be MP. When the London result came in, Goldsmith declined to shake Khan’s hand. Maybe he was worried Khan would infect him with “extremism”, or have his watch off him, or something.

In the immediate aftermath of that campaign, there was only one debate: was Goldsmith too wet to say no to a racist campaign imposed on him, or was he simply a racist? His sister appeared to hint toward the former, “sad that Zac’s campaign did not reflect who I know him to be – an eco-friendly, independent-minded politician with integrity”. But a few months later Goldsmith insisted it was all him, and offered a classic drive-by statement of regret. “Of course I regret the portrayal of the campaign,” he said, suggesting “portrayal” – aka the media – was entirely to blame. I guess you just can’t win against the famously leftwing British press, as those heroically doomed Tories so often find.

And so to the unconvincing pose of being an independent this time round. It is fair to say that Zac Goldsmith has always been a rebel very much in the “self-styled” category. “In 10 years’ time,” he mused in 2000, “I might be an eco-terrorist. But I’ll take the most effective path, whatever that is.” Mmm. You might be an eco-terrorist. But as it turns out, you’re going to be a Tory MP for Richmond Park. It’s that classic fork in the road, isn’t it? A bit like when Chuck D could either have ended up in Public Enemy or as an accountancy trainee at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Back then, Goldsmith was at least prudent enough to shy away from the idea he was a man of the people. “I do not need a career in this world,” he reflected loftily of his vast inherited wealth. This was much more convincing than the kind of pose to which he would eventually graduate – telling one radio show in May that “I’m hoping to do a Leicester City and zoom in from behind to win.” They’d been top since January.

As for “the most effective path”, forcing the byelection in protest at the runway decision was the exact opposite of that. One of the orthodoxies about Goldsmith was always that he was “an effective campaigner”, and yet his decision entirely took the pressure off the government. The Lib Dems have always been opposed to the third runway, so the issue didn’t even get any airplay in the campaign.

Only time will tell what he’ll do next. Maybe he will be an eco-terrorist. Maybe he’ll steal his daddy’s cue and make a living out of playing pool. Maybe he’ll wonder why this keeps happening, in which case I have a theory. If we may end in the betting shop, where we didn’t quite begin, it is often said of gamblers that they are not addicted to winning but to losing, since that is mostly all they know. Persisting is a form of self-loathing. As a man who has now asked his constituents to vote for him twice in six months, in such remarkably self-harming fashion, Zac Goldsmith may even wonder what it was that he really wanted.

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