Making Media Great Again

Sir Paul Marshall​ ’s emergence as a right-wing media tycoon has been rapid. A decade ago he was a Lib Dem donor; now he owns the house journal of the Conservative Party. Immediately after he bought the Spectator for an inflated £100 million last September, its chairman, Andrew Neil, resigned, signing off with a barbed tweet about editorial independence. ‘You can have all the resources in the world,’ Neil wrote, ‘but if you don’t understand what really makes the Spectator tick then they will be as naught’ (the two had fallen out when Neil jumped ship from Marshall’s right-wing TV channel, GB News). The next day, Marshall visited the Spectator offices – just a few doors down from the offices of UnHerd, an online publication he also owns – and held a meeting with the magazine’s staff, at which he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.

Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s biggest philanthropist. He has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into schools, universities and churches. In recent months I have spoken to more than twenty people who have known Marshall at one time or another. Almost all of them asked to remain anonymous. Some described him as gentle and considerate, a committed Christian and classical liberal spurred into action by dismay at what he sees as the excesses of ‘wokery’. Others struggled to reconcile the Marshall they knew with the man who has shared Islamophobic and homophobic posts on social media. His background is stolidly upper-middle-class: childhood in West London, Merchant Taylors’ School, history and modern languages at St John’s College, Oxford, then an MBA at Insead. In 1997 he and Ian Wace launched the hedge fund Marshall Wace, with $50 million of seed capital raised from friends, family and George Soros. It now manages $69 billion in assets. Like many hedge fund managers, Marshall casts himself as a disruptive outsider. Even those who say they know him well describe him as detached, almost inscrutable. But almost all agree that his worldview has been shaped by Holy Trinity Brompton.

Marshall has worshipped at the West London church since 1997. It’s the epicentre of British charismatic Christianity, one of the few parts of the Church that’s growing in numbers. Services take their cue from US televangelism: bands, loud singing, dry ice. The Alpha course, which has been translated into 112 languages, began at HTB in the 1980s and was developed by its former vicar Nicky Gumbel. The church’s extensive outreach programme includes a community café for asylum seekers and a ‘strip club chaplaincy’ for sex workers. Where most parishes struggle to afford a curate, HTB has six sites, 38 clerical staff, an annual budget of around £10 million and a congregation that includes Geri Halliwell, Bear Grylls, the former John Lewis chair Sharon White and the multi-millionaire Conservative donor Ken Costa.

HTB’s approach is rooted less in exegesis than in religious conviction. ‘Enthusiasm is a big part of it,’ according to the writer Andrew Graystone. ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity is the only way to get to heaven. You believe that you were selected by God to govern.’ Graystone is the author of Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of the Iwerne Camps, about the child abuse scandal that led to Justin Welby’s resignation as archbishop of Canterbury late last year. Welby was baptised and married at HTB. He later fell out with Gumbel over gay marriage blessings, but during his time as archbishop the evangelical influence within the Church of England grew considerably. According to Graystone, ‘Marshall’s money set the agenda of the Church under Welby.’ (A source close to Marshall said he has no influence on the Church of England or its politics.)

Since 2018 Marshall has given £5 million to HTB through the Sequoia Trust, a charity he runs with his wife, Sabina de Balkany, a French-Hungarian antiques dealer, and his son, Winston. Marshall has also provided funding for St Mellitus College, an offshoot of HTB, which now trains nearly a quarter of Anglican ordinands. The first principal of St Mellitus, Graham Tomlin, met Marshall at university, where they formed a folk duo. Tomlin was appointed bishop of Kensington in 2015 and resigned seven years later to found the Centre for Cultural Witness, which seeks to ‘inspire a renewal in the public understanding of Christian faith’ – again with funding from Marshall. Sequoia has donated at least £10 million to the Church Revitalisation Trust, which has ‘planted’ new evangelical congregations in 185 churches across England. A source within the CRT told me that the project was ‘all about promoting an evangelical agenda to the masses. The CoE is liberal wokery. They have drunk the whole agenda, hook, line and sinker. We are the antidote to that.’

Marshall wrote in an article on UnHerd in 2021 that ‘liberalism has lost its moorings.’ ‘The creed of progress,’ he went on, ‘has now been pushed into every walk of life, ignoring the lessons of history and defying any biblical understanding of human nature.’ He believes that modern society’s ills can be traced back to the Enlightenment and to ‘critical theory’, ‘the bastard child of postmodernism and Frankfurt School post-Marxism’, which was ‘smuggled into the American culture via academia’ but has now ‘infected the media, publishing, newsrooms, Hollywood, football commentators, public administration, HR departments and even Big Tech’. He claims it created ‘the hierarchy of victimhood, the one to which we must now all defer; it also spawned the language of the social justice warriors.’ For Marshall, opposing ‘progressivism’ is a spiritual mission, but also an economic one: he has claimed that ‘woke capitalism’ will ‘end’ free-market capitalism. ‘Paul believes that this is a civilisational battle,’ someone who worked with him recently told me. ‘It’s what drives him.’ Others have been surprised by his increasingly muscular faith. ‘I didn’t even know he was religious, never mind evangelical,’ a former Lib Dem MP who knew Marshall in the mid-2000s admitted. ‘I don’t know to what extent his vision has changed,’ someone who served in the coalition government said, ‘or whether he was keeping his views under a bushel until he was in a position to exert influence, but the Paul I see now is very different from the Paul I saw then.’

Last year he topped the Sunday Times Giving List after donating more than £145 million in the previous twelve months. He is a trustee of Ark (Absolute Return for Kids, a term borrowed from the hedge fund industry), a children’s charity he founded in 2002 with Ian Wace, the Conservative peer Stanley Fink and the French millionaire Arpad Busson. Ark began life as a vehicle for hedge fund managers to donate to existing charities. But the founders soon decided that they could do more good running their own initiatives. ‘They didn’t want to give their money to the government, or to other charities,’ someone who worked for Ark for more than half a decade told me. ‘They thought they knew better than anyone how to spend it.’ The charity grew quickly. Elton John, Prince, Stevie Wonder and the Killers performed at opulent gala dinners. Donations rolled in.

Ark initially prioritised overseas projects, particularly in Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. A UK-focused spinoff, Ark Schools, was founded in 2004. As political support for academy schools grew, first under New Labour and then under the Conservatives, the charity’s focus shifted to underprivileged children in England. Thirty thousand pupils attend Ark’s 39 academies, in some of the most deprived parts of the country. In 2022 an Ark academy in Birmingham received a funding warning after an Ofsted inspector found that ‘some pupils, particularly those who identify as LGBT, experience repeated name-calling and prejudiced behaviour.’ An Ofsted inspector who visited Ark Alexandra Academy in Hastings last year complained that ‘the views of parents, pupils and staff are not always considered fully.’ Most Ark schools, however, are rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’. Ofsted talks of settled classrooms and excellent teachers. It helps that they have something English state schools generally lack: private money to supplement falling public funding for music, sport and other extra-curricular activities. Marshall, who has written of the importance of ‘investment in education to enable everyone to participate in the market economy’, has given Ark more than £24.5 million through the Sequoia Trust since 2018.

Marshall stepped down as chair and trustee of Ark Schools last April, after the campaign group Hope Not Hate reported that his locked X account, @aeropagus123, had repeatedly liked or reposted far-right, homophobic and Islamophobic tweets. One of the tweets Marshall endorsed, according to Hope Not Hate, said that Muhammad was ‘one of the worst men to ever live’; another declared: ‘If we want European civilisation to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately.’ He also retweeted a post that appeared to group homosexuality with ‘worshipping Satan, evil [and] corrupting children’. Former Ark employees were shocked. ‘The staff were really surprised and angry,’ someone who has worked with Marshall for more than two decades said, adding that he ‘seems to have spent a lot of time in a [social media] bubble’. When Hope not Hate contacted Marshall for comment, a spokesperson responded:

Paul Marshall’s account is private but is nonetheless followed by five thousand people including many journalists. He posts on a wide variety of subjects and those cited represent a small and unrepresentative sample of over five thousand posts. This sample does not represent his views. As most X/Twitter users know, it can be a fountain of ideas, but some of it is of uncertain quality and all his posts have now been deleted to avoid any further misunderstanding.

Over time, Marshall’s donations have become more political, aided by the UK’s capacious definition of charitable good. The Sequoia Trust has given £890,000 to Policy Exchange, the influential conservative think tank where Rishi Sunak once worked. Policy Exchange doesn’t disclose its donors, or what it does with their money, but Marshall’s contributions coincided with its production of a number of papers and projects devoted to culture-war issues such as free speech in universities, which were often cited approvingly by Conservative government ministers. In 2022 Sequoia gave £18 million to Ralston College, a private, unaccredited liberal arts college in Savannah, Georgia. Ralston has just seven academic staff and a handful of students; its chancellor is the psychologist and self-styled ‘professor against political correctness’, Jordan Peterson. Marshall’s son, Winston, has given guest lectures at the University of Austin in Texas, a new university that claims to focus on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of truth’. Until 2021 he was a member of the folk-rock band Mumford & Sons; he quit following the backlash to the tweet he posted praising the book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy by the right-wing social media personality Andy Ngo. ‘Winston being cancelled is a big part of why Paul is the way he is now,’ someone who works in Marshall’s media empire told me.

In 2023, Marshall gave £1 million to another new project fronted by Peterson, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or Arc. Marshall has described this as a response to ‘an elite class in the West scaring the daylights out of us; always looking for the bad in things; undermining our self-confidence by trying to make us fearful of the future or ashamed of our history and our culture’. Arc isn’t explicitly religious, but its leadership attests to the mingling of faith and politics on the fringes of the right. Its CEO, Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer, is married to David Stroud, founder of the charismatic megachurch network Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection an ‘inside job’; the former Australian prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott; the Blue Labour founder, Maurice Glasman, who attended Trump’s inauguration and in January told Steve Bannon’s podcast that progressives are ‘the enemy … because they despise faith, they despise family, they despise love’; and the Spectator associate editor Douglas Murray, who once called Islamophobia a ‘nonsense term’ because ‘a “phobia” is an “irrational fear”.’ One of Arc’s directors works for Legatum, a Dubai-based global investment firm ‘with an ambition to improve people’s lives by increasing prosperity across the world’, which is bankrolled by New Zealand hedge fund billionaire Christopher Chandler. At Arc’s second ‘global conference’ in London last month, the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, warned that unless the Tories renewed their policies and ideas, ‘our country and all of Western civilisation will be lost.’ The Arc conference, she said, was ‘part of finding those answers’. There were also appearances by Nigel Farage (who was interviewed by Peterson), Murray, Peter Thiel and the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts. Tickets cost £1500.

Marshall​ maintains that his political views have remained ‘remarkably stable’. A well-placed source said that he ‘continues to see himself as a classic liberal; it is the context which has changed.’ He certainly started out in different circles. After university he became a research assistant to Charles Kennedy, then an SDP MP. Marshall himself stood in Fulham on an SDP-Liberal ticket in 1987, but finished a distant third. He kept up an interest in politics, founding a City branch of Liberal Democrat supporters in the mid-1990s and paying for party pamphlets, but only re-emerged in Westminster in the early 2000s. By then Marshall Wace was on the up, as were the Lib Dems. But the party was a hand-to-mouth operation. Its sole think tank, the left-leaning Centre for Reform, founded in 1998, was already on the verge of bankruptcy. Marshall stepped in, underwriting an injection of £1 million. He quickly set about transforming the think tank in his own image. It moved from a room rented from the Wildlife Trust to a suite of penthouse offices. Staff were recruited from Goldman Sachs and Thatcherite think tanks, and in 2006 it was renamed CentreForum. Reports on drug legalisation gave way to publications making the case for slimming the state. CentreForum was strongly opposed to a Tobin tax, a levy on financial transactions that would have hit hedge funds. After a group of wealthy fans dubbed the ‘Red Knights’ failed in a £1 billion bid to buy Manchester United, Marshall wrote a paper for CentreForum arguing that fans should be allowed to buy football clubs. He had been one of the Red Knights.

Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest. Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union. Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.) Marshall himself wrote a chapter on pension reform. The book sparked a revolt from the social liberals who comprised the bulk of the parliamentary party. ‘It was the biggest internal fight since Jo Grimond defeated the Hayekians [in the 1960s],’ the former Lib Dem MP David Howarth told me. ‘The whole thing was in aid of a right-wing takeover of the party.’

The Orange Book was a public relations disaster. The Labour Party accused the Lib Dems of being clandestine Thatcherites. Kennedy, by then party leader, was forced to publicly disown a book for which he had written the foreword. But Marshall was now considered a significant political player. A fawning article in the Telegraph in 2005 suggested that that he and his fellow ‘modernisers’ in the Lib Dems and the Tories should work together more closely, perhaps even in a coalition. The author of the article, George Trefgarne, now runs Boscobel and Partners, the PR firm that represents Marshall. When I asked to speak to Marshall for this piece, Boscobel and Partners told me that ‘Paul isn’t giving interviews at the moment.’

The ideas in The Orange Book helped to lay the groundwork for the Lib Dems’ decision to form a coalition government with the Tories in May 2010. Laws, who became chief secretary to the Treasury, wrote that, without The Orange Book, ‘it is much more difficult to imagine’ the coalition ‘being formed and sustained’. Marshall became an enthusiastic supporter of austerity: he called for even deeper cuts, ‘otherwise the bloated state will forever impose a ruinous and job-destroying tax burden on our nation’s businesses.’ But he found himself increasingly estranged from his party. He had paid for a dedicated campaigner to work on Clegg’s campaign during the 2007 leadership election. But he complained that between 2010 and 2015, the years of the coalition government, Clegg spoke to him only once, to ask for advice about where to send his child to school (an Ark academy was their nearest secondary school). In the meantime, Marshall had found a kindred spirit in Gove. As education secretary, Gove allocated significant funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of Education. ‘When we got into office Paul Marshall was a Lib Dem man,’ a former Lib Dem MP told me. ‘By the time the coalition was over, he was a Gove man.’

Marshall had never been the big Lib Dem donor portrayed in the media. In all, he gave the party less than £200,000 over more than a decade; the Conservatives’ biggest recent donor, Frank Hester, gave more than £15 million in the year and a half leading up to the 2024 election. Marshall didn’t need to be more generous: his wealth and his patronage of CentreForum were enough to grant him access and influence. His last donation was in 2015. The next year he received a knighthood. By then he had signed open letters endorsing Brexit and donated £100,000 to Vote Leave. He also helped deliver a key figure to the campaign. According to Tim Shipman’s book All Out War, Gove decided to back Brexit after a phone call with Marshall in February 2016. (When David Cameron resigned in the aftermath of the referendum, Marshall gave money to Gove’s unsuccessful leadership bid and wrote in the Times that only Gove could reform a capitalism which had ‘become detached from its moral moorings’.) Marshall’s support for Brexit surprised some former colleagues. ‘Paul never really talked about Europe,’ according to a Liberal Democrat who worked alongside Marshall at CentreForum. ‘I think it was once Europe got involved in regulating capitalism [after the financial crisis], and regulating his business, that he started to change.’ Perhaps he also thought political turbulence would be good for business: in his book 10½ Lessons from Experience, published in 2020, Marshall wrote that ‘the greatest opportunities always occur around change.’

Brexit was a turning point for Marshall. ‘He felt vast numbers of people weren’t being listened to,’ a source close to him told me. In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the ‘backstop’ that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.

It was after the Brexit vote that Marshall began investing in the media. UnHerd was launched in 2017 ‘to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it’. At first the website read like a more sedate version of the Telegraph’s opinion pages and struggled to make an impact. But since 2019, when ConservativeHome founder Tim Montgomerie was replaced as editor by Freddie Sayers (now also publisher of the Spectator), it has become harder to pigeonhole. If anything defines UnHerd, it’s a general disquiet with modernity and a political sensibility broadly in line with Blue Labour’s blend of cultural conservatism and scepticism about neoliberalism. The website shares its proprietor’s hostility to the ‘woke’ – cancel culture in universities is a recurring theme – but is hardly a straight reflection of Marshall’s worldview. Sayers has said that it doesn’t have ‘a political ideology. I prefer to think of it as a mood: sceptical, anti-establishment, heterodox.’ One journalist told me he had stopped writing for UnHerd after being pushed to include irrelevant attacks on ‘liberal elites’ in his copy (a source at the site said that ‘sounds very unlikely’, pointing out that Terry Eagleton and Yanis Varoufakis are regular contributors.)

In the last few years UnHerd has built a substantial audience. It gets more than twice as much traffic as the New Statesman, and half as much as the Spectator. Many of its readers are in the US, where it has just hired a new editor. Its YouTube channel, which is followed by more than 450,000 people, posts videos of talks and debates, many of them broadcast from the UnHerd Club, a two-room venue in its Westminster offices kitted out in tasteful Farrow & Ball colours and cosy furnishings. When I visited before Christmas, there were books by Eric Hobsbawm and Quinn Slobodian on the shelves. A framed pen drawing showed a red face with bouffant hair (it could be Marshall or Donald Trump) blowing away the word ‘snowflake’. Despite styling itself ‘a new home for free thinkers’, the UnHerd Club has a reputation as a favourite spot for young fogies whose politics range from centre-right to Reform-curious.

When GB News launched in 2021, promising ‘a new approach to how news is done – stories that really matter to people’ – Marshall’s initial investment was reported to be £10 million. The following year he and Legatum bought out the other shareholder, Discovery, and committed to providing an additional £60 million. The money was badly needed: GB News declared losses of £76 million in its first two years and owes the holding company, All Perspectives Ltd, £83.8 million. The channel is easy to mock. Andrew Neil, briefly its chairman, said it looked like it was filmed in North Korea. Ofcom has found it in breach of the rules a dozen times. It broke impartiality rules in 2023 when its presenter Martin Daubney, a former Brexit Party MEP, introduced a discussion on asylum policy by declaring that the government had ‘lost the plot on illegal immigration’, before interviewing the then Reform UK leader, Richard Tice. Throughout the interview, ticker tape at the bottom of the screen asked: ‘Should we declare a state of emergency to tackle Channel crossings?’ More recently, it was fined £100,000 by Ofcom for broadcasting an hour-long interview with Sunak in February 2024 that didn’t present ‘an appropriately wide range of significant viewpoints’. When I worked in television, we lived in fear of an Ofcom investigation. At GB News, they seem to be courted, as though offering proof of an establishment stitch-up. The channel has also repeatedly breached impartiality rules by allowing sitting Conservative MPs such as Jacob Rees-Mogg to act as presenters, interviewers or reporters on news programmes. Farage presents his own twice-weekly show, for which he has been paid more than £250,000 since he was elected as an MP last July. A Labour-led parliamentary committee is currently looking at whether to prohibit MPs being paid for media appearances.

Marshall’s allies say he has little direct involvement in the channel. ‘I’d be surprised if he watches an hour of GB News a month,’ one said. Former staff say they never saw him in the office. But GB News doesn’t have to produce the sort of content Marshall enjoys to achieve his aims. In November the channel’s ratings overtook those of Sky News for the first time, luring viewers with coverage that addresses far-right talking points, from small boats to the dilapidation of ‘left-behind’ towns and cities. GB News is particularly successful on social media, where its accounts tend to promote the channel’s most extreme content. Elon Musk’s interest in English grooming gangs seems to have been sparked by seeing GB News reports on X.

Marshall’s emergence as a media magnate has surprised many. ‘I totally get UnHerd. That’s who Paul is,’ one person I spoke to said. ‘But I can’t see the purpose of [owning] the Spectator or GB News. Maybe it’s just ego.’ Marshall’s self-definition as a politically homeless classical liberal hardly fits with the man who has spent a fortune on right-wing media outlets. His own views have also become headlines. Shortly before the recent Arc conference in London, the Financial Times ran an interview with Marshall reporting that he was ‘urging’ the UK to repeal the Climate Change Act and exploit its oil and gas reserves. Opposition to net zero has been a staple of GB News’s coverage. While Marshall’s politics often align with his business interests – Marshall Wace lists investments in Shell, Chevron and ExxonMobil in its portfolio – he is interested in more than his own financial advantage. It’s not surprising that those who know him say he’s done with making donations to parties. There are more effective ways to shape the political agenda.