Rothschild girl ditches Zac’s Tories for Greens
Could banking heiress Kate Rothschild be cocking a snook at her former brotherin-law Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for Mayor of london?
I can reveal that the ex-wife of Zac’s financier brother, Ben, has switched her allegiance from the Tories to become the Green Party’s biggest donor.
In happier times, Kate, Zac and then-husband Ben were Conservative donors, jointly giving thousands of pounds to the Tories in the run-up to the 2010 General Election.
Ahead of this year’s election, however, Kate — an adviser to environmental charity EcoPeace — bankrolled Natalie Bennett’s Green Party to the tune of £23,000.
According to new Electoral Commission records, she made nine donations of £2,500 to prospective Green MPs from West Cornwall to the Wirral in April this year, plus a further £500 donation to the leeds candidate.
Another of Kate’s donations went to Brighton MP Caroline lucas, who increased her majority by 11 per cent, retaining the Green Party its sole seat in the House of Commons.
Zac Goldsmith is Kate’s local MP in Richmond, Surrey, so the change of heart seems even more of a snub.
But then the Rothschild and Goldsmith families have never been free of acrimony.
Kate had a very public fall-out with Ben after she ran off with the New orleans rapper Jay Electronica and the couple divorced in 2013. She revealed recently that when she met the u.S. musician, the pair were ‘leading separate lives’.
Kate’s younger sister Alice, meanwhile, had an affair with Zac while he was married to Sheherazade Goldsmith, before becoming his second wife in 2013 in an ecofriendly ceremony at the london Wetlands Centre.
The Green Party was embarrassed this week after its foreign affairs spokesman falsely accused Kate’s cousin, financier Nat Rothschild, of funding Islamic terrorism through an oil company called Genel Energy.