Dolly 4 Zac 4 Ever

I found his Twitter handle in 2011, two years after his marriage broke up, and from that point on, all bets were off — even though I knew he had already moved on to his current wife, Alice Rothschild.

For me, his appeal is threefold. The first part is physical: the milky-blue doe eyes. The kind, open face. The soft, tousled hair. The coy, naughty smile. He’s Just William meets James Bond. He’s cricket whites and loosened tie. He looks like a man who would save a baby bird with a broken wing in your garden; but he also looks like he could stay up all night talking, while rakishly draped across your sofa, drinking Laphroaig straight from the bottle.

The second strand to the narrative of my obsession is that he’s a sort of bad-boy hippie. He’s passionate about the environment and animals, which makes me think he’s a sensitive soul in a Savile Row suit. When I read that he used to smoke rollies, I had to have a lie-down in a dark room.

The third reason — and I haven’t spent hours in the therapist’s chair over this bit, but here’s my amateur Freudian guess — is because he’s a Tory. In the darkest corner of my soul, I hope he is an entitled, arrogant Etonian to offset that soft, rollie-smoking, cardigan-wearing do-gooder thing. There is a part of me that would like to shout at him. And my God, there’s a part of me that would like to be shouted at by him.

I am not alone in my curious obsession with the member for Richmond Park and North Kingston: I am one of many Zacistas. Beth, 30, entered Zac’s sphere when she tweeted, “Noooo Zaaac whyyyy?” to him in 2012, when his engagement was announced. “He’s a nicer Rupert Campbell-Black come to life,” she tells me. “Pots of money, popular at parties, yet prefers Labradors to people.”

Phoebe, 24, also goes weak at the knees for his good boy/bad boy duality: “He looks like he might be very bad for you in a Daniel Cleaver kind of way, but you could still bring him home to meet your mum.”

Although she has never met Goldsmith, she has vivid fantasies in which she imagines how it would work: “He lives in Barnes and I live in Oval, so he’s a bit out of the way, but I envisage him ordering me a cheeky private car to get over there a couple of nights a week, and then claiming it on expenses.” But it’s not a straightforward crush. It’s not a simple pleasure. You pay a price in the morality stakes when you fancy Zac, and, “How could you fancy him? He’s such an awful Tory”, is often shouted at you at dinner parties.

My friend and fellow journalist Helen Nianias was once a Zacista, too, and on more than one occasion we got in a tussle for his attention on Twitter — but her crush has been quashed by his mayoral campaign: “He reminds me of the Eton boys I could never have snogged as a teenager — blond, smokes Marlboros, blue striped shirt worn untucked over navy tracksuit bottoms,” she tells me. “Westminster’s answer to Charlie from Busted. But there’s a terrible element of born-to-rule in there that I find simultaneously compelling and repulsive. And I’ve thought his campaign was lazy and cynical.”

While Helen is now firmly anti-Zac, Beth says she considered voting for him to see his face on the front of the London Evening Standard every night. “Who knows which will win at the ballot box?” she ponders. “The head or the heart?”

I am somewhere in between Beth and Helen. Although I would never vote for Zac, his slightly dodgy campaign tactics have not been enough to dampen my feelings for him. But perhaps nothing would. On Thursday, I will be voting for Sadiq Khan on my ballot slip, but in every other way, Zac Goldsmith gets my vote. He is, and always will be, the mayor of my heart.

Zac facts
Born in 1975 with a silver spoon in his mouth, he’s the middle child of Sir James Goldsmith, whose family have been bankers since the 16th century, and Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart, who lent her name to the famous Annabel’s nightclub.

Frank is his first name. Zacharias is his middle name. So is Robin. The posh can never have too many middle names.

£200-£300 million is the amount he inherited when his father died in 1997 — a mere snip of the family’s reported £1.2bn estate.

Sheherazade Ventura-Bentley was his first wife. They have two daughters and a son. They divorced in 2010 after ‘an admission of adultery’ — presumably his, because he then…

Married his brother’s sister-in-law (do keep up) Alice Rothschild.

The in-laws are even richer: the Rothschild family is worth a reported $1 trillion. Alice and Zac married in 2013 and their daughter, Dolly, was born later that year, with a son, Max, born last year.

Paris Hilton is now his wife’s sister-in-law, as Alice’s brother, James, married Paris’s sis, Nicky Hilton, last year.

Old Etonian, expelled after cannabis was found in his room. Still claims it wasn’t his. Honest.

Brother of Jemima Khan and Ben Goldsmith, whose marriage to the banking heiress Kate Rothschild ended in the infamous Twitter divorce of 2012, after her affair with the rapper Jay Electronica.

Number 17 on Tatler’s list of People Who Really Matter. Ant and Dec are at number two. Just so you know.

An EastEnders fan, he correctly named the first landlord of the Queen Vic in a recent quiz — but failed to name a stop on London’s Central Line.

Frozen — he knows all the songs from the Disney film.