Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall (born 1959)

Sir Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall (born 2 August 1959) is a British hedge fundmanager, philanthropist, and media baron.[1] He is the owner of UnHerd, The Spectatorand co-owner of GB News.[1] According to the Sunday Times Rich List, he had an estimated net worth of £875 million in 2024,[2] up from £630 million in 2020.[3] In 2024, he topped The Sunday Times Giving List, having donated £145.1 million over 12 months to various charities, including a £50 million donation to the London School of Economics for the eponymous Marshall Institute.[2][4]

Marshall was a member and donor of the Liberal Democrats, and in 2004 co-edited the influential Orange Book alongside a number of prominent Liberal Democrat politicians. In 2015 he left the party due to his support for Brexit, and subsequently donated to the Brexit campaign and the Conservative Party. His ownership of UnHerd and GB Newsled the New Statesman to name him as the seventeenth most powerful right-wing political figure in the UK in 2023.[5] The Financial Times described him as "an enthusiastic combatant in the UK's own version of America's culture wars".[6]

He was knighted in the 2016 Birthday Honours "for services to Education and Philanthropy".[7][8]

Early life and education

Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall was born on 2 August 1959 in Ealing, London, England, the son of Alan Marshall, managing director of the Philippine Refining Company (later Unilever Philippines), and Mary Sylvia Clucas.[9][10][11] His sister is the journalist Penny Marshall.[12]

When his parents moved to the Philippines and then South Africa for his father's job with Unilever, Marshall boarded at Merchant Taylors' School, in Northwood, London. He boarded in the Manor of the Rose while at the school.[13]

From there he went to St John's College, Oxford, to read History and Modern Languages, and subsequently took an MBA from INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France.[14]

Career

Marshall co-founded Marshall Wace LLP, now one of Europe's largest hedge fund groups, in 1997 together with financier Ian Wace,[15] and serves as chairman of the company.[16][17] At the time of its founding, Marshall Wace was one of the first hedge funds in London.[13] The company started with $50 million, half of which was from George Soros.[13]

Funds managed by Marshall Wace have won multiple investment awards[18] and the company has become one of the world's leading managers of equity long/short strategies. Marshall Wace manages over $50 billion and has offices globally.[19] Prior to founding Marshall Wace, Marshall worked for Mercury Asset Management, the fund management arm of S. G. Warburg & Co.

Marshall was lead non-executive director at the Department for Education with responsibility for the Union from 2013 to 2016.[20][21]

He is a member of the Hedge Fund Standards Board.[citation needed]

In 2017, he told the Financial Times in an interview that he had no intention of retiring.[13]

Politics

Liberal Democrats

Marshall had a longstanding involvement with Britain's Liberal Democrats party.[22] He was a research assistant to Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats in 1985 and stood for Parliament for the SDP–Liberal Alliance in Fulham in 1987. He has made appearances on current affairs programmes such as BBC Radio 4's Any Questions?.[23][24]

In 2004, Marshall co-edited The Orange Book with David Laws. Chapters were written by various upcoming Liberal Democrat politicians including Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Vince Cable, Ed Davey and Susan Kramer (neither Clegg, Huhne nor Kramer were MPs at the time). Laws, describing the pair's ambition in publishing The Orange Book, wrote "We were proud of the liberal philosophical heritage of our party. But we both felt that this philosophical grounding was in danger of being neglected in favour of no more than 'a philosophy of good intentions, bobbing about unanchored in the muddled middle of British politics'"[25] The book attracted initial controversy when launched,[26][27] but both it and the term Orange Bookers to describe those sympathetic to its outlook continue to be frequently referenced to describe a strand of thought within the Liberal Democrats.[28][29]

In 2005, Marshall gave £1 million to the Liberal Democrat-aligned think tank Centre for Reform.[30] Between 2002 and 2015, he donated £200,000 to the party itself.[13]

In 2006, Marshall told The Daily Telegraph: "I decided to devote a lot of time to the Lib Dems because I think there is a very high probability they will be in overall control in the next parliament." He also expressed concern that his spending would be equated with political influence: "Money is a major disadvantage in British politics [...] I just want to participate in a political process, a battle of ideas, in a one-member, one-vote party. I have one vote, like everybody else, and I also want my ideas to be influential."[31]

He turned away from the party from 2015 in disagreement with its support for remaining in the European Union.[13]

Brexit and the Conservative party

Marshall was a public supporter of Brexit during the European Union membership referendum in 2016.[32] He gave a donation of £100,000 to the Leave campaign.[13]

Writing for BrexitCentral in April 2017 on the UK exiting the European Union, Marshall wrote: "This is a huge opportunity for the UK. Our ambition is that the UK should be a champion of free trade, open and outward looking to the world and built on strong institutions."[33] In an interview with the Financial Times, he said: "Most people in Britain do not want to become part of a very large country called Europe. They want to be part of a country called Britain."[13]

Marshall donated £3,250 to Michael Gove's Conservative Party leadership campaign in July 2016,[34] and in 2019 gave £500,000 to the Conservative Party.[35]

Right-leaning media ownership

In 2017, Marshall gave funding to the political news website UnHerd.[13]

In 2020–2021, Marshall invested £10 million into the political entertainment and opinion channel GB News.[36][37] Following the resignation of Andrew Neil in September 2021, Marshall temporarily replaced him as chairman,[38][39] before being succeeded by Alan McCormick in April 2022.[40] In 2022–23, he invested a further £41 million to stem the company's £42 million loss in that year.[41][42]

In 2023, Marshall gave £1 million to create the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an organisation associated with Jordan Petersonand Baroness Stroud, and gave a keynote address at its first conference in October–November 2023.[43][44] Until 2025 he was its only known donor.[45]

In September 2024, Marshall bought The Spectator magazine for £100 million.[1] His takeover prompted Andrew Neil to resign as chairman immediately, having previously said that hedge fund managers should not own newspapers due to potential conflicts of interest.[46] Nic Newman, senior research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, had previously said in June 2024 that Marshall's bids for The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph, in addition to his existing ownership of GB News and other media, highlighted "concern that news media are increasingly being viewed as a way to buy political influence".[47]

In May 2025, Marshall called for the BBC to be sold or broken up, calling it "an embodiment of anti-competitive market distortion" and "the propaganda arm of the state".[46] He also called for its fact-checking service to be shut down.[48] Marshall was speaking at the Pharos Foundation, an Oxford education charity that he provided with £350,000 of funding in 2023.[48] A BBC spokesperson responded that the BBC is the most trusted news provider in the UK.[46] Alan Rusbridger noted that the BBC's trust ratings are much stronger than those of Marshall's own GB News (+23, according to YouGov, versus -15 for the GB News, and 62% according to the Reuters Institute, compared to 29% for GB News), and asked rhetorically: "Are all these people who trust the BBC's approach to journalism deluded? Is Marshall the only one who can see clearly?"[49]

Engagement with far-right Twitter content

In February 2024 the advocacy group Hope not Hate called attention to Marshall's activity on his private Twitter account, on which he had almost 5,000 followers, including MPs and journalists.[50][51][52] He had liked tweets from far right and conspiracy accounts[50][53]which contained climate denialism, which called for "mass expulsions" of immigrants, and which predicted civil war "once the Muslims get to 15–20%".[52] Other tweets referred to Muslim immigration as "infiltration" that would lead to "the establishment of a totalitarian Islamic theocracy", and advocated believing in God because "the other side" is "so committed to worshipping Satan, evil, homosexuality and corrupting children".[54] One of his own tweets, referring to an interfaith ceremony conducted in a French church, said that the Christian church "has its useful idiots".[52]

Alan Rusbridger, former editor of The Guardian, said these "hateful 'likes' make him unfit to be a media mogul".[55] Ark Schoolsdefended him in a statement after he was criticised by local Labour MP Sam Tarry, [56] though he later resigned as chair and trustee of Ark.[57] A spokesperson for Marshall responded that "This sample [of tweets] does not represent his views". Every tweet and almost 300 likes were subsequently removed from his Twitter account.[52] Premier Christianity magazine quoted a friend who said that Marshall is "very repentant".[55]

Philanthropy

According to the Sunday Times Giving List in 2020, Marshall donated £106.8 million to charitable causes in 2019.[58] In the 2023 iteration of the Sunday Times Giving List, Marshall was listed as the fourth-highest donor, donating 8.36% of his wealth.[59]

Education

Marshall was the founder, and chairs the board of trustees of the independent research institute the Education Policy Institute (EPI). For more than a decade he also chaired EPI's predecessor think tank, CentreForum.[60]

He is a founding trustee of children's charity ARK, and former chairman of Ark Schools, which is one of Britain's leading providers of academies and has also played a role in developing new programmes for inner city education.[61] Other initiatives spun out of ARK include Future Leaders, Teaching Leaders, Maths Mastery, English Mastery, Science Mastery, Frontline and Now Teach. He is also a founding trustee of the charity Every Child a Chance.[62]

In April 2024, he stood down as chair and trustee of Ark Schools to focus on "other philanthropic and business commitments" after being accused of liking and sharing far-right extremist social media posts and conspiracy theories.[63][64] However, Ark Schools said he had "indicated earlier in the year his intention to step down from the Ark Schools Board".[65] He has remained a trustee of ARK.[66]

Marshall has also been a major supporter of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia, which launched in 2022.[67]

The Marshall Institute

In April 2015, it was announced that Marshall would donate £30 million to the London School of Economics to establish the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship, alongside Sir Thomas Hughes-Hallett.[68] Marshall and Hughes-Hallett had previously collaborated on the Philanthropy Review, where they identified a lack of comprehensive research into the efficacy of private contributions to public welfare.[69] Their vision was to create a "world-class centre of teaching" to fill that gap by advancing research into enhancing philanthropic impact, studying how charities can be more effective, and nurturing the next generation of philanthropic experts.[70]

In 2017, the Marshall Institute launched an MSc in Social Business and Entrepreneurship.[71]

In 2021, Marshall donated an additional £50 million to the Marshall Institute to establish the Marshall Impact Accelerator to "provide a new platform for scaling promising social ventures to help tackle global challenges."[72]

Publications

Marshall has written widely about education. In 2012, he edited a book on improving the education system called The Tail: how England's schools fail one child in five – and what can be done. Contributors included Labour MP Frank Field, Professor Chris Husbands of the Institute of Education and Stephen Machin of the London School of Economics. He is also co-author of Aiming Higher: a better future for England's schools with Jennifer Moses (2006), and author of Tackling Educational Inequality (with Sumi Rabindrakumar and Lucy Wilkins, 2007).[73]

Marshall's other publications include: The Market Failures Review (Editor – 1999), Britain After Blair (co-editor with Julian Astle, David Laws, Alasdair Murray) and Football and the Big Society (with Sam Tomlin, 2011).[73]

In 2020 he published 10½ Lessons from Experience: Perspectives on Fund Management,[74] a personal reflection on lessons learned from a career in fund management. The Times described the book as "a bit of a gem"[75] and a Bloomberg review welcomed its examination of cognitive bias, the use of data and systematic strategies by successful fund managers.[76] Marshall wrote, "Machines have not won yet. Machines typically do not fare well in a crisis. They are not good at responding to a new paradigm until the rules of the new paradigm are plugged into them by a human."

Personal life

Marshall is married to Sabina de Balkany, a French national, who owns an antique shop on the King's Road in Chelsea.[13][77]Marshall is father of former Mumford & Sons band member Winston Marshall and musician Giovanna Marshall.[78]

He describes himself as a "committed Church of England Christian".[79] He worships at Holy Trinity Brompton, an influential evangelical church in Knightsbridge known for its wealthy congregation.[67][79] The Church Times describes him as "a key figure in Conservative Christian circles in the UK".[54] He was a founding member and donor of the St Mellitus College, and sits on the board of St Paul's Theological Centre.[54] Marshall has given at least £10 million to the Church Revitalisation Trust to plant new churches in the Holy Trinity Brompton network, which as of 2024 has over 100 churches.[54][43] A source inside the CRT described it as "promoting an evangelical agenda to the masses", and as an "antidote" to the "liberal wokery" of the Church of England.[43]

Political views

He describes himself as a classical liberal.[80][81] The Financial Times described his ownership of GB News and creation of the ARCConference as a turn towards right-wing politics, and said that Marshall's politics had been "called into question" by his liking and retweeting of far-right content on Twitter.[82]

In 2021, Marshall wrote that liberalism had "lost its moorings".[67] Where classical liberalism had, in his view, been grounded in Christian faith, these roots had been "poisoned" when Enlightenment ideas diverged from the Christian worldview. He contrasted the Christian belief in fallenness against the Enlightenment belief in rationality and progress. Furthermore, he said that the empiricism of David Hume and Adam Smith was compatible with this Christian belief, but recalled the views of Friedrich Hayek, who he said claimed that the "rationalist epistemology" of René Descartes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau could lead to "totalitarian democracy".[83]

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This book was too late to stop Trump's fierce assault on American democracy

Katherine Stewart's new book seems to suffer from the unfortunate timing, writes reviewer Marilyn W. Thompson

U.S. Vice President JD Vance, right, reacts as President Donald Trump meets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House in Washington Feb. 28. (OSV News/Reuters/Brian Snyder)

BY MARILYN W. THOMPSON

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April 7, 2025

Pri

Maybe it was unwise to crack open Katherine Stewart's latest treatise, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy on the day of President Donald Trump's smackdown of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. After watching accounts of the Feb. 28 foreign policy debacle, it was clear that American democracy was under a fierce assault that had taken hold more quickly than anyone predicted. We were witnessing its destruction in real time, with no real plan for fighting back.

Stewart enticed me with her promise to show with journalistic rigor "how an anti-Democratic movement took hold in America." Her theory was that the revolt of the right was not sudden at all, but deeply rooted in societal changes, including economic dislocation, dating back half a century.

Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy

Katherine Stewart

352 pages; Bloomsbury

$29.99

An investigative journalist who once worked with the legendary Village Voice muckraker Wayne Barrett, she promised to "bring receipts" and described her reporting style as "look first and theorize later." Clearly, after devoting 15 years to her subject and producing two previous well-received books, Stewart has become an important voice on the evolution of right-wing, Christian nationalist, pro-fascist thinking.

But Stewart's latest volume suffers from incredibly bad timing. By its publication day, Trump had triumphantly returned to power, and her insights into the movement that enabled it no longer feel prescient. Trump's early moves toward authoritarian control — both globally and domestically — weakened the impact of Stewart's analysis, and her call to action came much too late. Money, Lies and God now joins a catalog of nonfiction that will offer little more than reference material for scholars trying to understand what Stewart dubs "the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War."

Stewart, who breaks down complicated ideas into soundbites, offers an organizational framework for the "diverse and complicated" antidemocratic movement. She divides it into the Funders, the Thinkers, the Sergeants, the Infantry and the Power Players. Understanding the intersections and tensions among these groups are key to understanding the current American crisis, she writes.

She then provides a compilation of virtually every investigative piece written about the right over the last 20 years by enterprising reporters at outlets that include the National Catholic Reporter and The New York Times. Her research is extensive, offering the insights of observers like NCR's Heidi Schlumpf and Tom Roberts on the evolving power dynamics of the Catholic Church.

Stewart's investigative reporting often feels like a polished retelling of discoveries made by others. She brings no new insights on wealthy reclusive Chicago funder Barre Seid, for example, or the Federalist Society's court influencer Leonard Leo. Her work on the ground brings no breathtaking surprises like author Isaac Arnsdorf provided on the MAGA movement's implementation of the "precinct strategy" promoted by talk show host Steve Bannon. Arnsdorf's book, Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War on Democracy (which, as his former editor and friend and I had the chance to read before publication) sent a chill down the spine as the 2024 election season approached because so few journalists had taken the time to penetrate the MAGA grassroots.

Stewart infiltrates right-wing gatherings, picks up materials, interviews participants in hotel lobbies and offers well-turned descriptions of their appearances and provocative comments. But it feels like she is observing with distance and clear disapproval. It's difficult for a reporter from the left to penetrate right-wing events, and one wonders how Stewart gained trust or elicited honest feedback. Some of her excursions give her valuable insights. She witnesses the emergence of John Eastman, then dean of a small California law school, when she hears him speak at a World Conference on Families in Verona, Italy in 2019. Wisely, Stewart taped his mostly forgettable remarks. By 2023, Eastman surfaced as an alleged co-conspirator in Trump's aborted effort to reverse the results of the 2020 election.

Some of Stewart's most lively writing comes after she tires of U.S. right-wing politics and moves to England for family reasons. Stewart admits she was burned out after producing The Power Worshippers, a book about the Christian nationalist movement that inspired a documentary. "I felt lighter and more carefree. London was my escape," she writes.

On a Sunday morning, she wanders into a neighborhood Victorian church that turns out to be an outpost of the California-based evangelical megachurch GraceLife Community Church, which has just dispatched two new U.S. ministers to London. She befriends a naive parishioner, then steps back to explain the massive global expansion of Grace and other evangelical churches that are spreading the "politico-religious ambitions of reactionary religion."

As promised on her book jacket, Stewart follows the money in the U.K. to look at wealthy hedge fund manager Paul Marshall. Marshall is investing in an effort to place a Bible in every state school in the U.K. and to establish more conservative theological training. His influence shows up in the U.S. through his investment in tiny Ralston College of Savannah, Georgia, which spreads the word through its vigorous online presence. The school’s chancellor is culture warrior Jordan Peterson.

Stewart stops by a pub that night and chats with locals who float conspiracy theories exported from far-right corners of the U.S. Stewart realizes her London move will not offer "quite the kind of escape I had anticipated."

By the time Stewart offers her conclusion, she has dropped any pretense of journalistic objectivity. She offers a liberal to-do list that is wildly unattainable. To recapture control, she urges grand political reforms, like a reexamination of the Electoral College, an end to race-based gerrymandering and a rescue of the Supreme Court and federal judiciary. Not exactly easy goals in the current political climate.

She makes a passionate case that separation of church and state is a "good idea that should be tried." Tighten campaign finance laws to stop tax-exempt houses of worship from political involvement. Stop siphoning off public education money for religious schools. "Under the inaccurate name of 'religious liberty,' we are moving step by step toward a system in which government funnels money to religious groups, and those religious groups in turn deploy their spiritual hold over congregations to keep their favorite political party in power," she says.

Stewart's last bit of practical advice is to learn from the success of the right in building unexpected coalitions, investing in groups and candidates that support leftist ideals and building networks of local poll watchers, school board and town council candidates. It's similar to the strategy Bannon preached to rally Republican masses. "Put down this book and get to work now!" Stewart urges.

Again, Stewart seems to suffer from the unfortunate timing. It may already be too late.

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