Lady Annabel Goldsmith - Activism and Philanthropy

Activism and Philanthropy

Lady Annabel is president of the Richmond Park branch of The Royal Society of St George, a patriotic outreach society aimed to motivate youth. She is a donor and supporter of the Countryside Alliance, an environmental charity called The Soil Association, and African Solutions to African Problems (ASAP), which works to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa. As an animal lover, she is also one of the patrons of the Dogs Trust and a supporter of the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, along with being Vice President of the British Show Pony Society. She had early interest in journalism but declined a low-level position at the Daily Mail at age 19 to get married instead. She has since contributed opinion editorials to national newspapers such as the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, among others.

Inspired by Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy's radio address during the Hungarian Revolution, in November 1956, she and Mark Birley volunteered with the Save the Children organization in Vienna. She organized charitable donations and traveled daily to look after refugees who crossed the Austrian border into the frontier town of Andau. In May 1997, she campaigned with her second husband in Putney, the constituency unsuccessfully contested by Goldsmith for his Referendum Party. She continued to support her husband's ideas, like the single currency referendum, after his death as part of the Referendum Movement, which was headed by Paul Sykes and Lord McAlpine and of which she became honorary President.

In January 1999, she launched the Democracy Movement, of which she was President and her son Robin was chairman until 2004. Starting from 12 January 2001, the organization launched a £500,000 advertising and leafleting campaign to expose the parliamentary votes of pro-Brussels candidates in 120 "target" seats before the May general elections. The Democracy Movement released two million pamphlets carrying gloom-ridden headlines about a European state and published full page local newspaper advertisements in the constituencies of 70 Labour MPs, 35 Liberal Democrats, six Conservatives and three Scottish National Party candidates. Describing the campaign as an effort "in memory of Jimmy", she said:

On 17 December 2007, she testified at the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, where she denied the perception that the princess was in love with and/or pregnant by Dodi Fayed. "She was in love with Hasnat Khan. I felt she was still on the rebound from Hasnat Khan... She might have been having a wonderful time with him, I’m sure, but I thought her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant that she was not serious about it", Lady Annabel told the jury. She also participated in a demonstration outside Downing Street in November 2007 to protest against President Pervez Musharraf's imposition of a state of emergency in Pakistan.