Probate records published this week put Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s UK assets at £6,668,035 and her net estate, after liabilities, at £5,618,858, with most of it held in trust for two of her six children.
She died on 18 October 2025, aged 91. The two beneficiaries are her surviving children from her first marriage, to Mark Birley: the entrepreneur and political donor Robin Birley, and the artist India-Jane Birley. Per the probate coverage, the remainder of the estate was left to the pair in equal shares. Her three children from her second marriage, to Sir James Goldsmith, take no residuary share.
The reason is in the document. According to reporting on the will, a clause states that Jemima Goldsmith Khan, Zac Goldsmith and Ben Goldsmith had already been “generously provided for” by their late father, who was reported to be worth £1.2 billion when he died in 1997, aged 64, of pancreatic cancer. Obituary coverage has put that figure at £1.5 billion. Both numbers are single-sourced estimates, which is the usual condition of Goldsmith arithmetic.
So the split is not a verdict on children. It is a piece of household accounting, done once in 1997 and honoured on paper decades later. Estates like this are less about who is loved than about who has already been settled.
What £5.6m does and does not measure
Anyone reading £5,618,858 as the sum of a life spent at the centre of London society is reading the wrong instrument. Probate records the UK assets that pass under a will. Trusts, foreign holdings and anything already given away sit outside the grant, which is why a figure of this size can sit beneath a name that has been shorthand for money since 1963.
The comparison points are themselves unreliable. In 2008, The Times reported her source of income as an inheritance it put at £500 million, though no will had been published; the paper’s figure has never been corroborated, and one low-quality aggregator estimated her wealth at £20 to £30 million at her death, a number probate does not support. The document filed this week is the only audited sentence in the story.
What probate does capture, with unusual charm, is the bottom of the list. There were legacies of £20,000 to Tristram Powell, £10,000 to James Powell, £15,000 to her great-niece Maude Martel, and £10,000 each to her nieces Sophie Pilkington and Cosima Somerset. Wills are where the guest list finally gets ranked.
The two residuary beneficiaries are the survivors of a marriage that began in 1954 and ended in divorce in 1975 after 21 years. Her eldest son, Rupert Birley, went missing off the coast of West Africa in 1986 and predeceased her. Mark Birley created Annabel’s in 1963, named for his wife, and the club remains a private members’ club. She later described him to Vanity Fair as a “serial adulterer”. They spoke on the phone nearly every day until his death in 2007.
That is the part the ledger cannot itemise: a first marriage that failed publicly, produced the most famous club name in London, and outlasted its own divorce by 32 years of daily telephone calls.
The second marriage produced the political dynasty. Jemima Goldsmith Khan is a television producer and screenwriter; Zac Goldsmith went from Conservative MP to the House of Lords; Ben Goldsmith works in environmentalism. Each is now on the record, via their mother’s will, as having been provided for elsewhere. There is no evidence of any dispute, challenge or contest among the six siblings’ side of the family. The clause did the arguing in advance, which is what clauses are for.
Her social capital was never on the balance sheet either. Princess Diana found her way to Ormeley Lodge and was received there in confidence; the friendship began after a party at the house in early 1989, at which Diana and Camilla Parker Bowles had their memorable encounter. Lady Annabel gave evidence at Diana’s 2007 inquest, testifying that Diana had no intention of marrying Dodi Fayed and had told her, days before her death: “I would need marriage like a rash on my face.”
She died peacefully in her sleep, according to a joint statement from her children. Ten and a half months later, the arithmetic arrived: £6,668,035 gross, £5,618,858 net, five small legacies and one explanatory sentence about a fortune made by somebody else.
Her name is still over the door in Mayfair. That was never the part that went to probate.
