The Paul Marshall Plan

Marshall's extremist views are a perfect fit for The Daily Telegraph, yet the rest of the media ignore them or cling to a nostalgic idea of a paper that's surrendered to its most lunatic fringe...

Previously: Furrowed brows at the Clown College
Political journalists did a bad job of pretending farcical scenes in Parliament didn't delight them.

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For a man who co-owns a prominent news channel (GB News), runs an increasingly influential political website (UnHerd), and founded a chain of academy schools (ARK) as well as co-founding and chairing one of Britain’s biggest hedge funds (Marshall Wace with $50 billion under management) and being a leading bidder in the auction for The Daily Telegraph and Spectator, Paul Marshall ducks most genuine scrutiny. Perhaps learning from Rupert Murdoch, the media tyrant he seems keen to mimic, he rarely makes himself available for interview and tends to communicate through bland bromides in corporate press releases.

Marshall’s most prominent social media presence was on Twitter/X but in September 2023, he scrubbed all personally identifying information from it and renamed it. Using a locked account, now called Areopagus123 — a name likely inspired by John Milton’s prose polemic Areopagitica, which argued for the freedom to print opinions without a licence — Marshall must have assumed he’d be able to slip under the radar despite counting journalists among his nearly 5,000 followers. He did until The News Agents podcast and Hope Not Hate published an investigation into his tweets this week.

Over the past five months, Marshall’s account has liked or retweeted multiple posts calling for the expulsion of refugees and migrants, advocating Islamophobic theories, and decrying homosexuality. One tweet declared that “it’s a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe. The native European population is losing patience with fake refugee invaders.” Another, like by Marshall, said, “If we want European civilisation to survive we need to not just close the borders but start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a chance unless we start the process very soon.”

The activity logged by the researchers shows Marshall was a big fan of a prominent anti-Muslim account, which he liked or reposted 16 times this year, as well as a well-known pro-Trump figure whose version of the Great Replacement Theory trope (with a warning of the so-called “the four stages of Islamic conquest… [which will lead to] the establishment of a totalitarian Islamic theocracy”) he reposted.

Marshall also retweeted a message that elided homosexuality with Satan worshipping and “corrupting children”, referring to LGBTQ+ people and allies as “demons”. He also liked a post from another far right account praising Viktor Orbán as a “true leader” for his anti-refugee and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies.

UnHerd exists as part of a right-wing ecosystem of people, think-tanks, and publications that cosplay as outsiders while having access to the people at the heart of power and often having had access to the levers of power themselves at some point UnHerd cries that no one listens to it, while holding a hedge fund boss’ golden megaphone. And its free thinkers just happen to say exactly what that Brexit-obsessed big boss likes to hear.

— From the archives: The weird history of the cow site: Why Unherd shouldn't be seen as 'respectable', 28 July 2020

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Following the publication of the story, the likes and retweets were scrubbed from the account and a statement of Marshall’s behalf was provided to The News Agents. It said that his account is “private’ and that the likes and retweets are “a small and unrepresentative’ sample of his posts that does not reflect his views. Hope Not Hate claims a quarter of the material Marshall liked or retweeted was on the same topics and represented the same political views.

The News Agents used this revelation to ask, with hands clasped to their cheeks, if Marshall is a “fit and proper person” — a legal definition which has been treated very loosely by successive governments — to own The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. Lewis Goodall, his voice and demeanour increasingly morphing him into a miniature Robert Peston, opened the podcast episode with a solemn monologue:

Is someone who has amplified the voices of extreme — indeed far-right — content and conspiracy theories a ‘fit and proper person’ to own one of our biggest and most influential newspapers?’ … over the last few months, Sir Paul, has been, through a private account, liking and retweeting content which is on the most extreme end of political opinion, about Islam, expulsion of migrants, about homosexuality… Will this disqualify him from the ownership of the Telegraph?

The underlying implication is that the Daily Telegraph and Spectator are better than those views, that they don’t already platform them on a daily basis, and are not so desirable to Marshall precisely because they reflect those positions already.

On the same day that Goodall and his co-hosts, Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel, were wringing their hands to the bone about Marshall’s suitability to own the Telegraph, the paper was leading with a piece from the former Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, whose headline howls Islamists are bullying Britain into submission. The Telegraph news report promoting the op-ed went even further — Suella Braverman: Islamists are in charge of Britain now. In the piece, Braverman writes:

The truth is that the Islamists, the extremists and the anti-Semites are in charge now. They have bullied the Labour Party, they have bullied our institutions, and now they have bullied our country into submission.

Her rhetoric — which is in line with her previous comments about “invasion’ while still in the cabinet — was swiftly echoed by her colleague and GB News host ‘30p’ Lee Anderson in an interview on the channel:

I don’t actually believe that these Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is that they’ve got control of Khan, they’ve got control of London. He’s actually given our capital city away to his mates… If you let Labour in through the back door, expect more of this, expect our cities to be taken over by these lunatics.

This isn’t an outlier in any way. Here are some recent examples:

In November 2023, piggybacking on civil unrest in Dublin, Allison Pearson wrote a column published under the headline Politicians have created a multicultural monster beyond control. Who gets the blame? We do. She concluded:

I don’t know about you, but I stand with the Irish mammies guarding their communities like lionesses. “The likes of the toerags coming into this country – they’re not vetted and are causing havoc. When we do things peacefully we get ignored,” one mother said after the Dublin riots that an Irish government, which has recklessly endangered its own citizens, tried to blame on far-Right thugs. Here’s the thing: all of us are “far-Right” when our loved ones are at risk of being stabbed by someone who shouldn’t be in our country. 

In January, Nick Timothy — Theresa May’s former chief of staff, a fellow of the frequently Islamophobic Policy Exchange think-tank, and a prospective Tory parliamentary candidate — published a Telegraph column headlined Multiculturalism is becoming a Trojan horse for Islamist domination. He wrote:

Extremists are turning our schools – and other public institutions – into a battleground. But instead of confronting them, the authorities are appeasing and encouraging them. Our laws, especially equality and human rights laws, allow extremists and activists to play the state and society like a fiddle, while workplaces and public services have succumbed to political correctness and American critical race theory. 

Pick any of Sunday Telegraph editor Allister Health’s paranoiac, apocalyptic, and casually bigoted Telegraph columns and you’ll see how comfortable many at the paper would be with the views Marshall amplified. Last week, he published the latest version of a column he’s written many times over. Headlined For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished, it featured him ranting:

An Englishman’s home was his castle, making a huge difference to our national psyche, until our deliberate policy of rationing new housing at a time of mass immigration robbed the under-40s of the chance of owning anything of their own. “This is a free country”, we used to maintain when presented with another idiotic proposal to control us, but that too is over, killed off by the woke war on free speech, the jailing of Christian preachers, the sugar tax, the surveillance society and the Covid lockdowns. 

Go back a few weeks and you’ll find him offering another Great Replacement Theory variation with a column headlined Western civilisation is being destroyed from within by forces we can’t control. He wrote:

… the more extreme green zealots are woke authoritarians who want to wage war on meritocracy, individualism, rationality, capitalism and even modern democracy. Climate change is just a pretext to foment a broader upheaval. This is why so many hardcore greens aren’t interested in technological solutions to decarbonisation. 

Similarly, take a look at the Telegraph’s LGBT story tag and you’ll find a steady stream of negative stories and scaremongering opinion pieces. How does Ella Whelan going into bat for trans conversion therapy or Miriam Cate’s fire and brimstone rhetoric on “radical gender ideology” differ from the positions that Marshall liked and retweeted? Or, for that matter, the many articles on these topics published on UnHerd?

The Spectator, where Taki wrote in “praise of the Wehrmacht” and defended Greek fascists Golden Dawn; Rod Liddle has belittled domestic violence, mocked disabled people, trafficked islamophobia, racism, and homophobia and written that he could not be a teacher because he’d have fucked the children; Toby Young peddles his pantomime antics; and Douglas Murray spews Islamophobic sewage, is hardly going to worry if Marshall becomes it proprietor.

In an environment where another former Home Secretary, Priti Patel, shamelessly promoted Marshall’s interests at the Tory Party conference, effusively thanking her “friends at GB News” for “all the work [they] do”, there is zero chance of his interest in the Telegraph being blocked. If the Abu Dhabi-backed bid is stopped — as is likely — Marshall remains in pole position. If he succeeds in buying the Telegraph titles, he has an instant media group with broadcast, online, and print properties.

Appearing on GB News with presenters Ben Leo, erstwhile producer of the Dan Wootton show, and Pip Thomson to talk about Braverman’s Telegraph article, Michael Walker of Novara Media took the opportunity to comment on Marshall’s tweets:

Walker: I have a problem with Islamist extremism, I also have a problem with far-right extremism… 

GB News presenter Ben Leo: 90 percent of suspects on the terror watch list in this country are Islamist extremists… 

Walker: So, two MPs have been killed in the past decade, one by a far-right extremist, one by an Islamist extremist… one problem with Islamist extremism is that it has led to more acts of terrorism. My problem with far-right extremism is that it has way more access to power. And, I have to say, GB News is an example of this; there was an exclusive yesterday, actually, from Hope Not Hate / sort of showing what tweets your owner had liked and retweeted… 

Leo: That was a load of nonsense / You know what? Half those tweets the majority of normal thinking people in this country would agree with. And by the way, Hope Not Hate call themselves an anti-extremist organisation, they are some of the most extreme far left agitators… 

Walker went on to read a selection of the tweets on air, prompting the presenters to defend Marshall (“He didn’t write those tweets!”, “He’s not here to defend himself!”), culminating in Leo clumsily reading the hedge fun boss’ statement. “Is he not entitled to an opinion?” asked Thomson, swinging open the Overton Window for the man who at least partially pays her bills.

The door is not just open, the horses have not just bolted, the stables have been demolished entirely and a barracks is being built from the rubble. Look at all the commentators and columnists that are treated as ‘fit’ and ‘proper’ on a daily basis; Marshall is perfectly placed to be their new king and the tear-stained centrists of today will be the ones accepting it as ‘just the way it is’ this time next year.

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