On the morning of 8 July, 2019, Kate Rothschild woke up feeling ‘in a slightly down mood’. It was the 23rd anniversary of the passing of her father, the banking scion Amschel Rothschild, who had died by suicide when she was just 13, so this despondent feeling was not exactly a surprise. Kate, now 39, the oldest of Amschel’s three children, had always found the day a strange one, bittersweet given that it is also the birthday of two of her nieces. 

But there was much to be positive about. Life was moving forward again, after a few turbulent years. In 2012, Kate had found herself splashed all over the papers when her marriage to Ben Goldsmith, himself part of a big banking family, had dissolved. They had been married when she was just 21, he 23, bringing together two formidable families and creating the ultimate society power couple. They had three children together – Iris,  Frank and Isaac – and it was a matter of much interest to gossip columnists when the marriage ended, not least because her younger sister, Alice, married Ben’s older brother, Zac Goldsmith, shortly afterwards, creating a tabloid-ready tale of blue-blooded intrigue. 

‘It wasn’t a great time,’ Kate tells me now, typically understated. But by the summer of 2019, Ben had remarried (to the former model turned caterer Jemima Jones), and Kate had begun a new relationship with Paul Forkan, an ethical entrepreneur. She was also working in a job she loves, managing artists for the record label Roc Nation. 

On that morning in 2019, she woke up in her home in Somerset, just down the road from her ex-husband’s farm. ‘The boys were with me, and Iris was at Ben’s,’ Kate tells me now, when we meet in her other home in Barnes, south-west London.

‘I got up, and I went over to see Iris at Ben’s house. I went into her room, and she was there with a friend. I made her a cup of tea, because she had a sore chest.’ Kate pauses, and strokes her arm, a gesture of comfort that she will repeat throughout the interview. ‘Which was kind of weird anyway. She told me that she’d seen a ghost the previous night. It was the first time she had ever said anything like that. It was really very un-her.’ Iris was 15, studying for her GCSEs, and was extremely bright and sociable. ‘She said to me, “Mum, I saw a girl my age, sitting on my bed with a towel on her head. I swear to God I wasn’t dreaming!” And we chatted about it, and then I had to go back to London.’