Robin Birley: My stepfather, my hero... how James Goldsmith rescued us from the euro

Sir James Goldsmith was an unlikely candidate to be a popular hero, yet he certainly turned into one. A billionaire Old Etonian financier with a very irregular love life, he was by no means your identikit politician.

Yet he spoke the truth, told it like he saw it, and – crucially – was willing to back up his statements with both facts and with hard cash. His brand of plain-speaking went down particularly well in Yorkshire, where the candidates of his Referendum Party were particularly welcomed for their willingness to be utterly honest about the disasters facing Britain if we abolished the pound.

When Sir James – who was my stepfather and, I'm not afraid to say, my hero – decided to set up his Referendum Party in November 1994, none of the major political parties were willing to promise a referendum on the abolition of the pound. The Conservatives were led, if that is the correct term to use for someone with no leadership qualities whatever, by John Major, the Prime Minister. To think that that man occupied the post once held by Pitt the Younger, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher is to appreciate how low Britain had been brought by the mid-1990s.

Jimmy, who already knew he had cancer but who nevertheless wanted to make one last effort to save the country he loved, regardless of the exhaustion that could only have weakened his immune system, thus probably shortening his life, decided to force Labour and the Conservatives to promise the British people a referendum on the future of sterling.

Jimmy flung himself into the Referendum Party campaign with all the gusto that characterised the rest of his life. By such means, he raised the bar on the public's understanding of Europe. Prior to 1997, the country was more or less evenly split between "pro-Europeans" and sceptics, with the latter coming off as reactionary, pipe-and-slippers types. Since Jimmy's campaign, the polling numbers on almost all EU topics have been overwhelmingly sceptical (averaging 75 per cent), with Britons now fully appreciating the threat that the EU poses to British sovereignty and self-government.

Of course the Establishment immediately attacked the Referendum Party. Michael Heseltine described referenda as both un-Tory and un-British. Roy Jenkins called them "fairly alien to our constitutional habits" and Sir Geoffrey Howe thought a referendum over monetary union would be "a formidable erosion of one aspect of parliamentary sovereignty", showing a touching regard for the very sovereignty that the Maastricht treaty threatened.

Yet the fact remained that of the previous 12 Conservative prime ministers, no fewer than 10 had at some stage in their careers either advocated or voted for a referendum. The two exceptions – Neville Chamberlain and the short serving Home – were, until John Major himself, the worst Tory failures of the century.

When Gallup polls showed Major that the Conservative Party was likely to lose up to 15 per cent of Tory voters to the Referendum Party, he suddenly completely changed his position and announced on April 17,1997, that there would have to be a referendum before Britain entered the single currency. Determined not to give the Conservatives an advantage during the general election campaign, Tony Blair then followed suit with an identical pledge from Labour, some months later.

If Tony Blair had entered Downing Street with the huge majority that he subsequently won on May 1, 1997. without a commitment to a referendum, it is absolutely certain that at some stage during his decade-long premiership he would have taken this country into economic and monetary union with Brussels, abolishing the pound sterling and adopting the euro. As it was, the referendum commitment he had been reluctantly forced to make constantly proved an insuperable obstacle for him.

Had it not been for Sir James Goldsmith, therefore, it would have been us facing the humiliation of the IMF taking over the economic direction of our country, as is today happening in Dublin, and might soon be taking place in Lisbon, Madrid and elsewhere.

So let us not forget the sheer ruthlessness of the pro-European integrationists. In the name of union, they have been prepared to throw to the jackals entire populations of fellow Europeans whose economies have fallen foul of the straightjacket of monetary union. With draconian budget cuts and no possibility to devalue, the unelected EU leadership has condemned the people of Ireland, Greece, Portugal and possibly Spain and Italy also to years of stagflation and low growth.

The fact that one single inflation rate and one exchange rate simply does not fit all economies does not matter to these ideologues one jot. This economic pain and high unemployment is all so that they could push through their pet project. Lives are being ruined because of the single-mindedness of the fanatics in Brussels.

So when the history of post-war Britain comes to be written in a rational, objective way, one man above all others will be lauded for having had the vision and determination to force the supine politicians in Westminster to listen to the people of Britain for a change. That man was Jimmy Goldsmith.

Robin Birley is an entrepreneur and businessman. he is a former operations director of the referendum Party.