Sir Paul Marshall is largely unknown to the general public but has already made a name for himself in British Conservative circles. The acquisition of The Spectator magazine, announced on Tuesday September 10, has confirmed his position as a right-wing media boss. The businessman has amassed a fortune running hedge funds and for a long time was an unconditional supporter of the Liberal Democrats. but he then veered completely to the right after backing the Brexit negotiations.

Marshall is the son of a Unilever executive and a graduate of Oxford University and the Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires (Insead). He made his first foray into the media in 2017 when he financed the news website UnHerd, which professes to be for "people who dare to think for themselves." In 2021, he invested £10 million (€11,8 million) in the launch of the GB News television channel (dubbed “the British Fox News”) and injected it with over £40 million in 2023 to wipe out its losses.

After a slow start, GB News has found its audience and has occasionally surpassed that of the BBC's all-news channel. Although TV news emissions in the UK are required to be politically neutral, the channel is unashamedly open about its affinities and has recruited leading figures of the British right as its star hosts, such as star Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former Conservative Party MP under Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage, the leader of the Eurosceptic and conservative Reform UK Party.

With the acquisition of The Spectator for the considerable sum of £100 million, Marshall has acquired conservative Britain’s most influential title. Published continuously since 1828, it is the world's oldest weekly news magazine and has served as a political springboard for a number of Conservative Party heavyweights, including Boris Johnson, who was its editor-in-chief between 1999 and 2005. The paper prides itself on being the best written in the English-speaking world, and its evening debates are the most well-attended in Westminster.

Already considered by some to be the new Rupert Murdoch, Marshall is also in line to acquire The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, which were sold at the same time by the Barclay brothers to the UAE-based RedBird IMI group (in 2023), but it was back on the market a few months later when the  British government refused to allow the newspapers to be held by a foreign organization and blocked the transaction.

The acquisition of The Spectator has already led to one departure, that of the journalist and the weekly’s editor Andrew Neil. A formidable interviewer, he has a notoriously bad relationship with Marshall and declared a few months ago that a newspaper should not be controlled by a hedge fund, to preserve its independence. However, The Spectator’s editor-in-chief welcomed the fund manager’s acquisition and told BBC Radio 4 that he had "not the slightest doubt" about the title's independence. "We are not a political project," he said.