It was around 1980 that Paul Marshall, a keen Christian undergraduate at Oxford, went to a presentation by the evangelical aid agency Tearfund. He was so impressed by the call for Christians to help the world’s poorest people that he committed £10 a month to the charity. Within a few years he had lost his faith, so he cancelled the standing order.
Now, aged 64 and having returned to faith, Marshall is one of the UK’s most generous philanthropists. Last year, according to the Sunday Times Giving List, he gave over £5.5m a month to charities. His money buys influence in the media, in education—and in the Church of England. His philosophy of faith-based philanthropy is simple. He seems to believe that he has been blessed by God and called to use his enormous wealth to change the culture of the UK.
Marshall is co-owner of the hedge fund Marshall Wace, which he founded almost 30 years ago with Ian Wace. In 2017 the firm made £19m by shorting the beleaguered outsourcing giant Carillion, effectively betting that the company’s share price would plummet. Carillion was chaired by fellow evangelical Christian philanthropist Philip Nevill Green. Carillion collapsed, with the loss of thousands of jobs, but Marshall Wace carried on growing. In the year ending February 2022 it reported revenues of £1.5bn, with profits amounting to £720m (though the figures for the following year were slightly lower).
For one so astonishingly rich—he is worth around £800m, according to the Sunday Times Rich List—Marshall lives relatively modestly. Public filings appear to show him living in a Grade II listed house in southwest London with his wife Sabina, a French-Hungarian antiques dealer whom he met 40 years ago while studying for an MBA near Paris. (Their children include former Mumford & Sons band member Winston Marshall.)
Marshall is not interested in accumulating money for its own sake. He wants to change the world. Over the past 10 years it has become increasingly clear what he means by that—and how he does it, by using his money to leverage influence across swathes of British society.
Marshall is worried by the displacement of the Christian ethic in society. He has said that “traditional British liberalism rests on the Judeo-Christian understanding that we are all, in moral terms, fallen creatures… Somewhere amid the arrogance of the Enlightenment, we lost this sense of fallenness” that is ultimately the consequence of the sins of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On this view, we are all sinners, redeemed only by Christ’s death for us, so anything we have is an undeserved gift from God. What we do with our time, money and talents is a response to what God has done for us. This outlook reminds me of what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 12:48: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”
It is here that Marshall’s philosophy of religion and his philosophy of philanthropy meet. If you believe your success is due to your own hard work or virtue, he suggested in a lecture in 2019, you may feel a sense of personal entitlement to any wealth you accumulate. But if you feel instead that your wealth and status are gifts from God, it makes for a kind of personal modesty—an understanding that, by the grace of God, you have been called to do special work for Him.
Marshall is gracious, gentle and softly spoken. He makes no secret of his motivation. “The root is my faith,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Evening Standard. “I am a committed Church of England Christian, I believe we are all made in God’s image, that we all have gifts and that education is the key to realising our potential.” A 2019 event at the LSE Marshall Institute—the clue’s in the name—opened with the line: “If you care about philanthropy, you have to care about faith.”
When he left Oxford in the 1980s, Marshall believed that the way to change the world was through politics. He became a research assistant to future Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy, and in 1987 stood for parliament for the SDP–Liberal Alliance in Fulham. With fellow Liberal David Laws, he co-edited The Orange Book, which was a plea for a return to the core liberal philosophies of choice and freedom. But he became disaffected with the Lib Dems’s position on Europe, and in 2015 left for the Conservative party. In May 2016 he donated £100,000 to the official Brexit campaign, Vote Leave, and was knighted the following month. He has since donated at least half a million pounds to the Tories.
In recent years, he has also made multi-million-pound investments in education through Ark (Absolute Return for Kids), a children’s charity that he co-founded in 2002 and still chairs. Ark now runs 39 primary and secondary academies across the UK, many of them in areas of deprivation and ethnic diversity. The schools set high expectations for their students, matched by robust discipline. They are modelled on the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Programme), whose philosophy Marshall imported from the US. Michael Gove praised Ark’s academy schools throughout his spell as education secretary, and Marshall reciprocated with generous donations to Gove’s 2016 Tory leadership campaign fund.
Indeed, Gove and Marshall have enjoyed a long and mutually supportive relationship. In 2011, Gove announced a plan to place a free, leatherbound copy of the King James Bible in every state school in the UK, at a cost of £370,000. The Bibles would bear the inscription: “Presented by the Secretary of State for Education.” When David Cameron refused to back Gove’s plan with government funds, Marshall was among the philanthropists enlisted by Gove to bail out the scheme.
More recently, Marshall has turned his attention to the media. In 2017 he launched UnHerd, a web-based magazine with a private members’ club attached that is based conveniently on Old Queen Street, between the House of Commons and Conservative party HQ. UnHerd was initially edited by the former Times comment editor Tim Montgomerie, a friend who shares Marshall’s Christian faith.
At the start of 2021, Marshall invested £10m in GB News, taking over as interim chair when Andrew Neil—who had been the founding chairman—jumped ship. The following year, with the station in financial and technical chaos, Marshall stepped in with a further multi-million-pound investment and gained, with others, significant control of the company. Most of the rest is owned by Legatum Ventures, a private equity firm and cousin of the right-wing Legatum Institute, which at the time was headed by Conservative peer and evangelical church leader Philippa Stroud. GB News has so far declared losses of £76m in two and a half years. All Perspectives Ltd, the company owned by Marshall and Legatum, is owed £83.8m by the channel.
Now, Marshall is lining up a bid to take over the Telegraph and the Spectator through his UnHerd Ventures group. While the asking price for the Telegraph might be a stretch even for Marshall, he is being supported by fellow hedge fund manager and Christian philanthropist Ken Griffin. If the bid is successful, Marshall will be among the most powerful media owners in the UK. Even more importantly, he will have forged a role as kingmaker for the Conservative party for a generation.
But the driver of all of this activity is not simply a desire for political power, or even a straightforward commitment to pay it forward. It is Marshall’s evangelical faith that lies behind it all.
Read it all in Prospect
