I offered Zac Goldsmith £50 to stay 20 feet away from me

I once tried to bribe Zac Goldsmith with a £50 note, but he didn’t bite even back then. He was about 15 years old, and the reason for the hush money was pure self-preservation. He was already good-looking and I knew he’d be even more so at 20, so I offered him 50 quid to stay 20 feet away from me for the next 15 years if he saw me talking to a girl. My bribe worked with his younger brother Ben, who grabbed the loot and never kept his side of the bargain. That was in 1997, when Jimmy Goldsmith formed the Referendum party and I covered its first conference as Atticus in the Sunday Times. (Jimmy got very suspicious when he saw money being given to young Ben, until I told him the reason. He then advised Ben to take the money and ignore the deal.)

I’ve always thought that Jimmy’s idea of offering the British people a vote on whether to stay in or out of Europe was a brilliant democratic coup, except that it didn’t best please the politicians and the media. Eighteen years later, we’re right back where we were. Except that we know a bit more about how deeply rotten and undemocratic Brussels really is. I went down to Putney with Jimmy, Zac and Jemima for the ’97 election-night results. When David Mellor got up to concede defeat to Labour, he turned instead against Jimmy, repeating the world ‘hacienda’ time and again. I was slightly under the weather, and yelled a horrible insult at him. I believe it made Zac flinch. Perhaps I was wrong, but hearing Mellor echo Michael Heseltine’s class-warfare slur against Jimmy outraged me. Especially as Jimmy was as self-made as Hezza and Mellor, except that he bought far better furniture than they did.