While the coalition pushed its green agenda, Goldsmith's stock continued to rise. But thanks to austerity and the unforeseen departure of the Environment Secretary Chris Huhne, the environment has been pushed to the bottom of the government's priority list, leaving Goldsmith isolated and disillusioned. He has voted against the government 19 times in two years. He even threatened to resign and trigger a by-election if the government reneges on its promise not to allow a third runway at Heathrow, under whose flightpath Richmond lies.
Like his father, founder of the anti-EU Referendum Party, Zac Goldsmith has little patience with the way politics is done in Britain. He argues for what he calls "direct democracy": local referendums on matters citizens deem important (local councils apparently being insufficiently democratic); and for "recalling" unpopular or corrupt MPs and forcing them to stand for re-election. He was angered by the government's failure to include a recall bill in the Queen's Speech last month. His support for a referendum on UK membership of the EU cost him a plum job as Cameron's green envoy. However, some of his campaigns are bearing fruit. Despite its promise to abolish quangos, not create more of them, the coalition last month committed itself to the creation of a Groceries Code Adjudicator (Ofspud?) to force supermarkets to treat suppliers "fairly", as proposed by Goldsmith in his 2009 book The Constant Economy.
He loathes the tabloid press, perhaps understandably after the Sun ran a front-page story headlined "£300m Tory's bedding a pal of his wife". Goldsmith subsequently left his wife Scheherezade, with whom he has three children; the divorce is reported to have cost him £20 million. He now lives with Alice Rothschild. However, he blew an opportunity before the Commons committee on privacy and injunctions last December. Asked to comment on the argument that newspapers need celebrity coverage to survive, he replied: "Nobody is saying Auschwitz should have been kept open — it created jobs." Any message he hoped to put across was lost in the resulting furore.
Where does Goldsmith go from here? He admits he has no chance of ministerial preferment. He deserves praise for his independence, but it remains to be seen whether he has the patience to stay the course as a backbencher with little to show for his tireless campaigning, or whether the parakeets of Richmond Park will still be around long after he has left the local scene.
