Credentials

Background

Sir Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall is a multi-millionaire hedge fund manager and media mogul who is the owner of right-wing media outlets UnHerd³ and The Spectator,⁴ and part-owner of GB News,⁵ with a 41 percent stake in its parent company.⁶

His personal wealth was estimated at £875 million as of September 2024.⁷ He is considered one of the UK’s most influential philanthropists, topping the Sunday Times Giving List 2024, having donated £145.1 million in 12 months to charities.⁸

In addition to his media ownership, Marshall is a financial backer and co-founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a radical right-wing network fronted by climate denier Jordan Peterson. ARC has the backing of the Legatum Group (founder of the Prosperity Institute is a subsidiary), which co-owns GB News.⁹ Marshall donated £1 million to ARC in 2023 via his charity the Sequoia Trust.¹⁰ ARC’s advisory board includes a number of outspoken climate crisis deniers such as Vivek Ramaswamy, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, and former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott.

Between 2020 and 2023, Marshall donated £890,000 via the Sequoia Trust to Policy Exchange,¹¹ a think tank co-founded by former Conservative minister Michael Gove. Policy Exchange has previously received money from ExxonMobil and was credited by former prime minister Rishi Sunak for helping to draft laws that have cracked down on climate protests.¹²

Marshall co-founded the hedge fund Marshall Wace in 1997, which DeSmog revealed had at least $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) invested in fossil fuel firms and services as of June 2023, including in Shell, Equinor, and Chevron.¹³ A major shareholder in Marshall Wace, the American private equity firm KKR¹⁴ has a large investment portfolio in fossil fuel projects dubbed “carbon bombs” by campaign groups.¹⁵

In September 2024, Marshall put in a bid to buy the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph.¹⁶

Marshall was previously a major donor to the Vote Leave campaign for the UK to exit the European Union,¹⁷ and donated £500,000 to Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party in 2019.¹⁸ Prior to that, he was a long-time supporter of the Liberal Democrats, having run unsuccessfully for office in Fulham on an SDP-Liberal Alliance ticket in 1987, and donated close to £200,000 from 2002 to 2015.¹⁹ However, he left the Liberal Democrats over their support for membership of the EU.²⁰

His previous X/Twitter account @areopagus123, attracted criticism from the anti-hate campaign group Hope Not Hate for liking and retweeting far-right posts expressing a wide variety of anti-Muslim views, calling for “mass expulsions” of refugees, and quoting leading climate science denier Patrick Moore.²¹

Responding to Hope Not Hate, a representative for Marshall said: “He posts on a wide variety of subjects and those cited represent a small and unrepresentative sample of over 5,000 posts. This sample does not represent his views.”

Marshall is an evangelical Christian.²² He told the Financial Times in an interview in February 2025 that he believes “faith and politics do not mix well”, and are “a dangerous combination”.²³

In 2016, he was knighted for services to education and philanthropy, having been a lead non-executive board member at the Department for Education.²⁴

Before founding Marshall Wace in 1997, he worked for the asset management giant BlackRock.²⁵

Stance on Climate Change

February 18, 2025

In a speech at the 2025 ARC Conference in London, Marshall claimed that countries around the world, particularly those in Europe and the Anglosphere, “are being infected by an ideological zeal” that has led them to develop net zero plans.²⁶

He argued that this “climate derangement syndrome” was a “luxury belief”.

“We fall for fashions that we can’t afford” he said, claiming that net zero policies are leading countries to “sacrifice our economic prosperity and our people’s livelihoods all for the sake of making some fractional changes to the level of CO2 in the atmosphere”.

He claimed that while most countries in Europe have 2050 net zero goals, they won’t have their desired outcome because “climate change policy is the mother of all collective action problems”, and countries such as China and India have been “allowed to set much later dates” out of a “misplaced sense of guilt” in the West.

Marshall then shifted to praise the United States, which he said played the “smartest game” on climate action. He argued that even though former U.S. vice president Al Gore was warning the public in 2009 that “the North Pole would be ice free by the summer of 2014”, the U.S. “never stopped drilling” for oil and gas. He added that “now just at the point when many Western countries have swallowed the net zero ideology” the U.S. is “moving on to leave us like a half-dead fish flopping on the riverbank”.

He said:

“Just like wokery and DEI, America launched a set of luxury beliefs on the world, watched as those beliefs gained traction, only to discard them in their own land just before they reached the point of fatal destruction”.

Addressing the “thousands” of Americans in the room, he claimed they “understand the foundations of wealth creation, and don’t take them for granted. Sadly we have a much weaker immune system so we are powering ahead in full self destruction mode”.

He called Britain and Germany the “two standout zealots” on the clean energy transition, and said they were “gambling” on battery technology improving enough to address “Dunkelflaute”, the German word for times when power cannot be generated from wind or solar.

He singled out UK’s net zero transition as a “problem”, warning that “you don’t need to be a climate change denier to be very fearful about where British net zero policy is leading”.

He argued that the plan for emissions reductions in the UK is being “pushed to its extreme limits by an ideological Labour government” and that the UK is “leading the way in wrecking our industrial base”, “impoverishing our people”, “sacrificing our energy security,” and “sacrificing our ancient rural landscapes”.

He concluded by attacking the government’s then Net Zero and Energy Security Secretary Ed Miliband, claiming he has a “cunning plan to gamble with the British economy and British livelihoods” by building “lots and lots of windmills” and “more than a billion solar panels across the countryside”.

February 15, 2025

In an interview with the Financial Times, Marshall urged the Labour government to repeal the Climate Change Act and expand UK oil and gas exploration or risk Britain “going bust”.²⁷

He claimed that Britain has the “most expensive industrial electricity costs on the planet”.

Marshall also called the transition to clean energy among European countries “unilateral economic disarmament”.

On the topic of environment, social, and governance (ESG), he expressed approval that U.S. Republican states are “much more activist about this”, and that the relationship to “woke” policies has been “shifting very fast”, citing the “blacklisting” of BlackRock by the U.S. state of Texas over the company’s policies on ESG. He argued the “shift” started “well before Trump was elected”.

Funding

Paul Marshall is the co-founder, chief investment officer, and part-owner of Marshall Wace, a British hedge fund. In 2023, Marshall Wace was considered one of the world’s largest hedge funds with around $63 billion (£51.9 billion) in assets under management.²⁸

KKR, a U.S. private equity giant with more than $500 billion in assets under management, bought a 25 percent stake in Marshall Wace in 2015 and increased its shareholding to 39.9 percent in November 2019.²⁹

KKR’s investment “turbocharged” the hedge fund’s growth, according to the Financial Times.

An analysis by the investigative group Private Equity Climate Risks, published in April 2024, suggested that KKR had a large fossil fuel portfolio, with 188 assets in 21 countries, including oil, gas, and coal.

Marshall Wace claims on its website that “sustainable investing is an organisational focus” and that the firm is “committed to achieving positive social and environmental impact”.³⁰

According to DeSmog’s analysis of Marshall Wace’s filings with the U.S. financial regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the fund owned shares worth $2.2 billion (£1.8 billion) in fossil fuel firms as of June 2023. This included companies that specialise in extracting, refining, transporting and distributing fossil fuels.

In its SEC filing Marshall Wace reported a $213 million (£175.6 million) shareholding in the oil and gas supermajor Chevron, as well as stakes in Shell, Equinor, and 109 other fossil fuel companies.

The value of Marshall Wace’s stake in Chevron, the world’s eighth largest fossil fuel company, more than doubled from $105 million (£86.6 million) to $213 million (£175.6 million) in two years.

Marshall Wace held shares in 112 fossil fuel companies as of June 2023. Two years earlier, in June 2021, the hedge fund held shares in 50 of these firms. The value of the stakes in these 50 firms almost trebled over the period, from $565.4 million (£466.1 million) to $1.4 billion (£1.15 billion).

Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder and owner of the hedge fund Citadel, was reported in September 2023 to be joining a consortium led by Marshall to prepare a bid for The Telegraph media group.³¹

Key Actions

March 6, 2025

The Guardian reported that Marshall had met with senior figures from prominent right-wing British media outlets to discuss how to fund a new generation of journalists.³²

September 27, 2024

In September 2024, when he was concurrently buying The Spectator magazine, Marshall made a bid in an auction to buy the right-wing newspapers the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.³³

September 7, 2024

Marshall bought right-wing UK magazine The Spectator for £100 million.³⁴

After purchasing The Spectator, he appointed Michael Gove as editor-in-chief. Gove is a former Conservative Party MP and founder of the think tank Policy Exchange, which Marshall donated £890,000 to in 2020,³⁵ and which has been credited for helping to draft laws that have cracked down on climate protests.³⁶

The magazine’s former chair Andrew Neil, who briefly served as the founding chairman of GB News, immediately resigned as The Spectator’s chair, and suggested that Marshall might try to impose his agenda on the magazine.

On announcing his resignation, Neil said:

“I regarded it as my prime responsibility for 20 years to ensure [editorial independence] […] even from proprietors. I cannot tell if the new owners will have the same reverence for editorial independence since they have not shared their thinking”.³⁷

February 4, 2024

On his previous X/Twitter profile @areopagus123, Marshall liked³⁸ a post from Wide Awake Media that shared a video of Patrick Moore giving the 2015 annual lecture for the UK climate science denial organisation the Global Warming Policy Foundation.³⁹

In the video accompanying the post, Moore, a prominent climate science denier, stated:

“There is no definitive scientific proof that CO2 is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the last 300 years, but there is certainty beyond a reasonable doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth, and that without its presence in the global atmosphere… this would be a dead planet.”

2023

Marshall, along with Jordan Peterson and senior partners at the Legatum Group, founded the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.⁴⁰

Records from the UK’s Companies House register show that Marshall created the legal entity that became the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Limited on 12 December, 2016 under the name of Prosperity UK Limited 2017, until the name was changed on 20 January 2023.⁴¹

The group held its first conference in October 2023. A number of speakers voiced anti-climate views, including then-Conservative Party MP Miriam Cates who said “epidemic levels of anxiety and confusion” are being caused by teaching children that “humanity is killing the Earth”.⁴²

The same five individuals who own GB News’s parent company were listed as directors of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Limited, including Alan McCormick, Richard Douglas, Mark Stoleson, and Christopher Chandler of the Legatum Group.⁴³

December 31, 2020

In 2021, Marshall became one of the founding investors in the right-wing broadcaster GB News, which launched in June of that year, after he reportedly invested £10 million.⁴⁴ In August 2022, he joined the Legatum Group in a £60 million capital injection and buyout of GB News’s other major investor, Discovery.⁴⁵

A DeSmog investigation found that one in three GB News hosts had broadcast climate science denial in 2022, while nearly half had attacked the UK’s net zero emissions targets.⁴⁶ Reform UK leader Farage, deputy leader Richard Tice, and MP Lee Anderson have also worked as presenters on GB News.

On the announcement of the buyout, Marshall said: “This is more than a financial investment. As investors we’re proud of what GB News [sic] doing for media plurality in the UK, bringing fresh perspectives to the national conversation on issues that matter to real Britain.”⁴⁷

Marshall has defended GB News’s output on the basis that “in a world of too much groupthink”, the broadcaster provides a “space for genuinely independent thinking”.”⁴⁸

In April 2024, he stepped down from the board of GB News’s parent company, All Perspectives Limited, but said at the time that he would continue to be “very engaged” as co-lead investor.⁴⁹

2020-2023

Between 2020 and 2023, Marshall donated £890,000 via his charity Sequoia Trust to Policy Exchange,⁵⁰ a think tank co-founded by Michael Gove that has previously received money from ExxonMobil and was credited by former prime minister Rishi Sunak for helping to draft laws that have cracked down on climate protests.⁵¹