Goldsmith heir weds ex-lingerie model
Just two years after his Rothschild heiress wife dumped him for rapper...
IT was one of the most bitter and acrimonious divorces in recent memory between the scions of two of Britain’s wealthiest dynasties.
So angry was financier and environmentalist Ben Goldsmith, 34, when he discovered lurid text messages on his wife Kate Rothschild’s mobile phone from the rapper Jay Electronica, that he is said to have slapped her and kicked a toy at her, resulting in a formal police caution.
To compound the couple’s subsequent split, the pair then engaged in a very public and undignified spat via the social media site Twitter.
But two years on from the unpleasant saga, Goldsmith – brother of Tory MP Zac and Jemima Khan – has found happiness with another woman. Yesterday, he married his girlfriend of two years Jemima Jones, 27, a former lingerie model turned caterer to the stars.
The bride wore a dress by Valentino and the pair chose Lord’s cricket ground in St John’s Wood to hold their nuptials, as the groom is a passionate cricket fan. A reception was held afterwards at nearby venue One Marylebone.
Among the 30-strong wedding party were Ben’s mother Lady Annabel Goldsmith, sister Jemima, brother Zac and half-brother Robin Birley, as well as Ben’s three children by Kate: Iris, ten, Frankie, nine, and Isaac, six. Other guests included his aunt Lady Jane Rayne and her partner Robert Lacey, Kate’s cousin Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and Lady Carina Frost, widow of broadcaster Sir David Frost, and her three sons, Miles, Wilfred and George.
‘Saved my life in many ways’
But of Kate, who divorced Goldsmith in April last year, there was no sign. Goldsmith had branded her ‘appalling’ for her infidelity with the exotically monikered rapper, whose real name is Timothy Elpadaro Thedford, telling her to focus on their children. Miss Rothschild responded by accusing him of cheating on her during their tenyear marriage and of being ‘irrational’.
Kate said: ‘Deep down he’s shallow.’ Electronica later warned Goldsmith that he would ‘come see’ him. Accusing him of giving untrue stories to the newspapers, the rapper said: ‘ You wanna go public, I’ll go public and you ain’t gonna like it. Stop acting like a bitch.’
Despite saying the New Orleans rapper had ‘saved my life in many ways’, Kate’s relationship with Electronica hit the rocks this summer and he has returned to America. She is living in a cottage next to the Georgian mansion of her former mother-in-law, Lady Annabel.
Her relations have clearly improved with Ben, as her address would testify, and in October the newly contrite Kate took to Twitter to send her ex-husband a gushing birthday greeting: ‘I’d be lost without you, thank you for being a wonderful father and an even better friend. Lots of love xx.’
Just last month the pair were spotted skating together with their children at Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park.
When Kate married Ben in 2003, it was a union of two of Britain’s wealthiest families. She inherited £18million on the death of her banker father Amschel Rothschild, who hanged himself in a room at the Hotel Bristol in Paris in 1996.
Goldsmith, the son of finan-cier Sir Jimmy, inherited as much as £300million. Their wedding, held at St Mary’s Church in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, was billed as t he society event of the year.
The 600 guests in attendance included Prince and Princess Michael of Kent.
In a curious twist, just as Ben was granted a divorce from Kate last year, his older brother Zac married Kate’s younger sister, Alice Roth-schild, joining the two wealthy dynasties again.
The Goldsmiths have plenty of experience of marriage breakdowns. As well as the late Sir Jimmy’s legendary infidelities (‘When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy,’ he famously said), Ben’s sister Jemima divorced cricketer Imran Khan in 2004 and later had high-profile rela-tionships with Hugh Grant and Russell Brand.
So who is the new Jemima Goldsmith? Miss Jones, 27, is the daughter of respected architect Edward Jones CBE, a former visiting professor at Harvard, Yale and Princeton, and she and her sister Quen-tin, a film-maker, grew up in Primrose Hill.
Miss Jones was signed to the Select model agency at 15, and studied media and film at Oxford Brookes University.
After graduating she moved to New York and became per-sonal assistant to an actress.
She moved back to London around t hree years ago, saying: ‘I missed healthy living – there was a lot of partying in New York – it gets exhausting.’
Last year Miss Jones joined Tart London, a catering c o mpany for high - end photographic shoots and com-mercials set up by a friend.
Their clients include Stella McCartney, Kate Moss, Lady Gaga, Penelope Cruz and Rob-bie Williams.
Miss Jones met Ben on a ‘very romantic’ Greek getaway and he proposed this August with a single solitaire diamond bought f rom an antiques dealer. Unlike her new sister-in-law and namesake, she has no designs to change the world but has ambitions to open a restaurant.
Jemima Khan admitted in October: ‘I don’t fancy being “the other”, “the big” or “the older” Jemima Goldsmith.’
It seems she’d better get used to it.