Sawt Falasteen - Paul Marshall: Britain's anti-woke media baron

The 65-year-old added to his impressive stable last autumn when he purchased The Spectator magazine, viewed as the bible of Britain's Conservative Party, for £100 million ($135 million).

He already co-owned brash current affairs television channel GB News, a sort of British Fox News, and is the owner of respected centre-right-leaning news and opinion website UnHerd.

Marshall -- who himself has been on a journey from supporting centrist politics to more right-wing causes in recent years -- got into media after making a fortune in finance.

He is worth more than £850 million ($1.1 billion), according to this year's edition of the Sunday Times rich list.

During a recent lecture at Oxford University, Marshall said he became a press baron "in an almost unplanned way".

"I was a frustrated consumer," he said, denouncing what he called a "biased mainstream media" where "truth was sacrificed and trust was lost".

During his media journey, he says he has "discovered a set of illiberal practices and a dominating mindset which I believe need to be challenged."

- 'Generating influence' -

Born in Ealing, London, in August 1959, the public-school-educated Marshall studied history at Oxford before enrolling at the prestigious French business school INSEAD.

He made his wealth as a successful hedge fund manager, co-founding Marshall Wace.

Along the way, he was a donor and member of the Liberal Democrats, a pro-European, social democratic party that usually finishes third in UK general elections.

But Marshall left the Lib Dems in 2015 and donated to the Leave campaign in the referendum on European Union membership the following year.

He told the Financial Times in 2017: "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."

"He's different from Murdoch, who used his media empire to make money," Matt Walsh, head of the journalism school at Cardiff University, told AFP.

"Marshall was rich before acquiring his media," Walsh added, noting his outlets are currently loss-making.

"It's about generating influence, presenting his view of the world."

Marshall "was a right-wing Lib Dem but gradually shifted further to the right", he said.

Marshall donated once to the Conservative Party and founded UnHerd in July 2017, a website "for people who dare to think for themselves".

In 2021, the financier shook up Britain's TV news ecosystem when he helped found GB News, the country's first new news channel since Murdoch's Sky News launched in 1989.

The channel, whose logo adopts the colours of the British flag, is proudly anti-woke, and its presenters regularly rail against immigration and net zero climate policies.

GB News has on several occasions fallen foul of Britain's broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, which says its use of politicians as interviewers breaches impartiality rules.

But the provocative channel is growing in popularity. TV rating agency Barb found that in November 2024 GB News overtook Sky News for monthly live viewings for the first time.

- 'Under-represented views' -

According to Barb, GB News enjoyed an average of more than 3.1 million monthly viewings in the year to April.

Its accounts published in February show that despite doubling turnover to more than £15.7 million, GB News made a pre-tax loss of £33.4 million for the year ending May 31, 2024.

"He is keen about the promotion of what he sees as underrepresented ideas and viewpoints," a source close to Marshall told AFP.

The mogul largely shuns publicity, as his communications team reminded AFP, declining a request for an interview.

Marshall is a committed Christian who was knighted in 2016 for services to education and philanthropy.

He launched ARK School in 2002, which has helped nearly 30,000 students from modest backgrounds. Marshall has also donated more than £80 million to the London School of Economics.

His wife is French and their son Winston played the banjo in Mumford & Sons before leaving the folk-rock band after reportedly falling out with bandmates over his conservative views.

In 2022, Marshall co-founded the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an international conference of conservative lawmakers and right-wing influencers.

To the Hope Not Hate organisation, Marshall is far right. Last year, it uncovered an anonymous account on X in which he had liked tweets calling for the mass deportation of immigrants.

A spokesman for Marshall said then the tweets did not "represent his opinions".

O.Farraj--SF-PST