The Goldsmith supremacy: London's most compelling dynasty

Are the Goldsmiths mounting a takeover of British public life to compare with the hostile takeovers that were once the speciality of the family's Big Daddy, the late billionaire businessman Sir James Goldsmith? Scanning the headlines in recent days one might be tempted to think so.

When we talk of the Goldsmiths we mean, of course, the family Sir James Goldsmith had with his third wife, Lady Annabel - their sons Zac and Ben and daughter Jemima - rather than his four children from two previous marriages or his two children by his French mistress. Earlier this week, Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative MP for Richmond Park, emerged as an advocate of new privacy legislation to replace the current confusion over super-injunctions, while last week Jemima Khan was impelled to deny having an affair with Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson after false claims circulated on Twitter saying that she had obtained a super-injunction to cover it up.

The previous week it had been Lady Annabel Goldsmith who was briefly the centre of attention. Richard Kay's gossip column in the Daily Mail suggested she had been miffed at not being invited to the royal wedding by the Duchess of Cornwall despite having been her good friend as well as a friend of Princess Diana. Not only was Lady Annabel said to have felt insulted by being omitted from the pews of Westminster Abbey but also her society friends were said to be taking her side against the Duchess.

And next week will see the cinema release of a documentary, Fire in Babylon, about the glory days of the West Indies cricket team, one of whose producers is clean-technology financier and cricketing enthusiast Ben Goldsmith. Other members of the family are believed to have helped finance the project.

Despite this octopus-like grip on media attention, are the Goldsmiths a force to be reckoned with or are they essentially a busted flush, merely living off their sizeable inheritance and howling against their dwindling social power? One indicator is their falling position in the ranks of the nation's wealthy, as evidenced by last weekend's Sunday Times Rich List. The offshore fortune bequeathed to them by Sir James Goldsmith, estimated to be worth £300million, appears to have stood still in the last year. "A big fortune, in this day and age, needs constant attention," says Rich List compiler Philip Beresford. "If you want to see it grow, you need to be intensely interested in making money, you've got to be like Nat Rothschild. The Goldsmith family would appear to have missed out on the whole bull market since Jimmy died." Beresford admits that it is impossible to be certain about the current size of the fortune, since the offshore family trust is opaque and impenetrable, but with several beneficiaries drawing incomes from it, there is little hope, he believes, of their achieving much more than capital preservation.

Sir James Goldsmith was famous for several things: his gambling and womanising, his ruthless business methods and his dabbling in Eurosceptic politics with his bankrolling of the Referendum Party in the 1990s, but most of all for his double-edged relationship with the British media. As a secretive businessman, he always resented what he saw as the impertinent scrutiny of the press, once telling a female reporter: "I live for the day when people like you choke on your own vomit." Yet he also once hankered to become a newspaper proprietor and even came close to buying this newspaper, only to find that his long-standing, obsessive campaign against the satirical magazine Private Eye in the 1970s (and in particular his effort to see its then editor Richard Ingrams jailed for criminal libel) counted against him. Subsequently, the weekly news magazine he founded, Now!, was ridiculed into an early grave by Private Eye. Later still, he funded numerous libel litigants in their lawsuits against the BBC and national newspapers.

What of the attempts by members of the family to strike out on their own and escape the shadow of Big Daddy? Zac Goldsmith has eschewed a business career and has instead followed his uncle, Teddy Goldsmith, in campaigning for environmental causes. His path to Parliament, as a Cameron protégé, was successful despite the breakdown of his marriage and the controversy over his non-dom tax status, which he swiftly agreed to renounce. He is highly intelligent and persuasive.

Following the 2010 general election campaign, Zac was taken to task by Channel 4 News over his election expenses. In a live interview he evaded presenter Jon Snow's questions and instead claimed that he was being victimised and the viewers misled. It was eerily reminiscent of his father's appearance on the BBC's The Money Programme in 1977 when Sir James sought to defend himself against the charge of being an "asset stripper" by accusing his two interviewers of lying and by starting to interview them in return. Zac's subsequent complaint to Ofcom about his treatment by Channel 4 News was roundly rejected, but his slightly cracked performance was widely discussed.

Since his arrival at Westminster he has made a modest impression on the House. "When he stands up to speak, people are interested," says Quentin Letts, the Daily Mail's sketch-writer. "He sits in an area of the chamber favoured by independent types, not where the lickspittles congregate, and he has criticised the Government over green issues. He's fairly sparing with his oral contributions, though not timid, and he doesn't speak for too long and get shut up by the Speaker. I would say he's got the hang of it." At the same time, Letts doesn't think Zac will stick with being an MP for very long.

Given her father's track record with the press, it is surprising that Jemima Khan has chosen to pursue a career as a writer and campaigner. We first got to know her as a society beauty, then as the bride of Pakistan cricketer Imran Khan, mother of his children and Muslim convert; then as the girlfriend of Hugh Grant. (She can apparently mimic both Imran and Hugh with spooky accuracy.) Lately, we have seen her champion WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and act as one of his bail guarantors, all in the name of media openness, and serve as guest editor of the New Statesman to boot. Despite being mocked as a "socialite", her edition of the New Statesman turned out to be clever and newsworthy, and her interview with Nick Clegg significant.

She also secretly yearns for recognition as a screenwriter and is already developing her own screenplay for a rom-com - though Grant will likely be too old to play the male lead. Says Richard Ingrams, her father's arch-enemy: "I've corresponded with Jemima, who seemed quite friendly, slightly to my surprise. She strikes me as rather like Bianca Jagger - desperate to be taken seriously on political matters Good luck to her!"

Lady Annabel, too, has taken up writing and campaigning since her husband's death. Before her marriage to Goldsmith, this daughter of an Anglo-Irish viscount was married to Mark Birley, who named his Mayfair club after her and gave her three children. Tragically, one son drowned off the coast of Africa, while the other son was disfigured as a child after being mauled by a pregnant tigress. Her autobiography, Annabel: An Inconvenient Life, in 2004, was followed by a ghost-written autobiography of her pet dog Cooper. In 2000 she launched her own Eurosceptic campaigning organisation, the Democracy Movement, which has since been wound down.

Ben Goldsmith is the quiet force of the family. A sweeter-looking version of his handsome old brother Zac, Ben-Ben, as he is affectionately known, is believed to be a key figure in looking after the family finances. He is one of the founding partners in WHEB Ventures, which provides venture capital for the European clean-technology sector. It's still too early to say whether he will emerge as a titan in his own right.

A keen environmentalist like his brother, he supported Zac in his election campaign but also the Green Party's victorious candidate in Brighton, Caroline Lucas. He is a swashbuckler (five-figure betting sums at the races are not unknown and he did buy part of a bookie's) but also a man who likes a punt on a new eco start-up as well as a blue chip FTSE100 safe bet.

Above all, the Goldsmiths are a clan, a gold standard tribe who take no prisoners. They have their own humour, their own take on life, and their partners have to get this glamorous G-spot. Keep up with their wit and wiles or exit.

They may not be the Windsors and they may not be the Kennedys but nonetheless, says social commentator and branding expert Peter York, they offer an antidote to the colourless industrialists and entrepreneurs who choke the Sunday Times Rich List. "They're an exciting blend of robber-baron wealth (Sir James), established upper-class style (Lady Annabel), global exoticism (Sir James's Anglo-French and Jewish background as well as Jemima's conversion to Islam), good looks (Zac and Jemima), political involvement (Lady Annabel and Zac), and environmentalism (Zac and Ben). They catch one's imagination hugely. After all, there are lots of billionaires but we don't want to know anything about them. Enough already! With the Goldsmiths you somehow keep wanting to know more about them.