Sir James Goldsmith’s tale is a warning to those tempted to use the law to intimidate, says Geoffrey Bindman
Lord Gnome, the legendary proprietor of Private Eye, frequently required the services of his solicitors Messrs Sue, Grabbit and Runne. I was lucky enough to occupy that role for the real life editor, Richard Ingrams, for some 15 years in the 1970s and 1980s. A highlight of the period was the prolonged litigation between the magazine and the late billionaire entrepreneur Sir James Goldsmith.
In 1976 Goldsmith attracted the interest of Private Eye. One of its stories linked him, through his solicitor Eric Levine, to the criminally convicted former leader of Newcastle City Council, T Dan Smith, and another to some alleged skullduggery involving the well known City finance house of the day, Slater Walker. A third claimed that Goldsmith had attended a lunch for friends of Lord Lucan, who had recently disappeared following the murder of his children’s nanny. Private Eye suggested that Lucan’s friends had met to discuss how they could help him to escape the clutches of the law. However, it later emerged that
