Over a July lunch at Marshall Wace’s London headquarters, the hedge fund manager’s co-founder Sir Paul Marshall invited US billionaire Ken Griffin to join a consortium of investors preparing a bid for the Telegraph Group. 

The proposal to buy the UK newspaper publisher struck a chord with Griffin, founder of US hedge fund Citadel and a staunch advocate of free expression who in 2020 paid $43.2mn for a rare first printing of the US Constitution.

“It’s important to me to maintain the ethos of freedom of speech in the US and the UK as a model for the rest of the world,” Griffin told the Financial Times. “Paul’s passionate about this and I’m happy to support him.”

The pair are among the favourites to acquire the Telegraph newspapers and Spectator magazine when they are put up for sale by Lloyds Banking Group in the next few weeks, in a deal that could fetch more than £500mn on the upper level of newspaper valuations. 

Marshall, who holds a 45 per cent stake in upstart broadcaster GB News and owns digital media group UnHerd, is the latest in a long line of wealthy individuals to turn media baron.

Ownership of the Telegraph, the largest nationally important UK newspaper to be sold in almost a decade, would propel the Brexit-supporting self-styled classical liberal into the public spotlight. The plan marks the latest iteration of the financier’s efforts over the past four decades to influence and shape the national conversation through involvement in politics, education, philanthropy and media.

Born in London in 1959 and educated at an English boarding school after his parents moved overseas, Marshall is not the first in his family to pursue media interests.

While his father worked for Unilever, his mother Mary was a freelance journalist — family lore has it that she was the first woman to use a four-letter word on the BBC, discussing a book she had written on the origin of swear words. His sister Penny Marshall is a correspondent at ITV News.

Studying for a history and modern languages degree at Oxford university, Marshall was taken by the liberalism of William Gladstone and Winston Churchill, particularly the early 20th-century reforms that laid the foundations for the modern welfare state. 

After graduating, Marshall stood for parliament in Fulham in 1987 on an SDP-Liberal Alliance ticket. It was only when he failed that he turned to finance, working for SG Warburg & Co’ s fund management arm Mercury Asset Management.

He and Ian Wace, who had been SG Warburg’s youngest ever director, set up their eponymous firm in 1997 when the European hedge fund industry was in its infancy. Launching with $50mn in assets, half from financier George Soros and the rest from friends and family, the firm has grown to a peak of $64bn having carved out a position as Europe’s answer to US giants Citadel and Millennium Management.

“The best thing we ever did was recognise that Paul’s interest was in markets and my interest was in business-building, and that we allowed each other to develop in those spaces,” Wace told the FT earlier this year. 

The sale of a 24.9 per cent stake in Marshall Wace to KKR in 2015, which the US alternatives giant has since increased to 39.9 per cent, has helped turbocharge growth. Assets are split across its quantitative business, which accounts for two-thirds of assets and grew out of its Tops proprietary trading system that analyses broker recommendations, and Marshall’s Eureka fund that makes up the remaining one-third. 

The Eureka fund has delivered average annualised gains of 11.8 per cent since its 1997 launch, while the Tops Market Neutral fund has recorded an average annualised gain of 9.2 per cent since its November 2007 inception.

But performance this year has been more pedestrian. The Eureka fund was up 3.3 per cent in the first nine months of this year, while the Tops Market Neutral fund was up 4.4 per cent.

Marshall donated about £200,000 to the Liberal Democrats between 2002 and 2015, when he quit the party in part over its support of continuing EU membership. Unlike Wace, who avoids the spotlight, Marshall backed Brexit in the 2016 referendum and they each gave £100,000 to the opposing campaigns. He stands by his support for Brexit, although believes it has been poorly executed.

Some rival Telegraph suitors have raised questions over whether Marshall is as focused on making money for his investors as he is on building a media empire. But people familiar with his thinking say he wants to realise both a financial return and a societal benefit.

Behind the scenes, his camp is at pains to reassure the hedge fund’s investors that he is fronting the bid in a personal capacity.

People close to Marshall point out that the bid will be made through UnHerd Ventures media group, whose leadership team includes editor-in-chief Freddie Sayers. Lord Theodore Agnew, a former government minister who has worked with Marshall since both served as non-executives at the Department for Education more than a decade ago, recently joined as chair.

If successful with the bid, Marshall has signalled that he will not seek a seat on the Telegraph Group’s board or be involved in its editorial agenda, according to the people, who said his day-to-day focus will remain Marshall Wace. He stepped back from the hedge fund from 2005 to 2008 to focus on politics and philanthropy before returning to it full time.

With a deep Christian faith, Marshall’s belief in equality of opportunity not of outcomes has driven his philanthropic efforts to reform British education. In 2006 he and Wace set up Ark, a charity that aims to transform children’s lives through education that has grown from working with just one school into a network of 39 across the UK. A decade later, Marshall was knighted for services for services to education and philanthropy.

Agnew told the FT he shared the hedge fund entrepreneur’s desire to champion different viewpoints in the media and concerns over the impact of a degradation in the media on society.

People familiar with Marshall’s thinking say UnHerd, his first media foray soon after his estrangement from the Lib Dems, was a response to his frustration with the mainstream media, which he believes has become tribalised with little room for heterodox views.

Marshall has experienced the collateral damage wrought by “cancel culture”. His son Winston quit folk rock band Mumford & Sons following controversy and an online backlash around his support for Unmasked, a book decrying the leftist antifa protest movement.

Meanwhile, Marshall’s involvement with GB News, where he started as a small investor and has no editorial control, stemmed from his perception that a leftwing bias among the dominant UK broadcasters — the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky — leaves a business opportunity for a right-leaning rival. 

GB News, which has raised £120mn, is yet to make a profit and reported a £30.6mn loss last year, will require fresh funding at some point, according to chief executive Angelos Frangopoulos. 

A scandal last month at the broadcaster, which counts prominent Brexiters including Conservative party deputy chair Lee Anderson and former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg among its hosts, prompted the sort of headlines that Marshall will want to avoid as he prepares a Telegraph bid. GB News has suspended Dan Wootton, one of its most popular hosts, after airing sexist comments by actor Laurence Fox about a female political journalist. 

Rival bidders predict Marshall will now have to work even harder to convince Lloyds that he is the right owner for the newspaper. But Ian Whittaker, an independent media analyst, does not believe the bid will be derailed by the furore.

“You work in finance and set up a hedge fund, you are not a shrinking violet,” Whittaker said. “His backers would have been aware of his links and there is an argument for saying GB News if anything has been decisive in sacking Fox and suspending others.”

Marshall’s interest in the Telegraph lies in a view that the newspaper is “a British heritage brand that has not yet realised its full potential, particularly in an international context”, according to one person close to Marshall’s thinking. 

Recommended

Digitalisation gives it the opportunity to reach the whole of the Anglosphere, something publications including the FT, Economist, Guardian and Mail have all taken advantage of. From a standing start, roughly a third of UnHerd’s audience is based in North America.

One person close to the sale of the Telegraph said the Marshall camp “think that there is a Fox News-style void that the Telegraph can fill here, and that can be taken back to the US as a newspaper brand”.

Marshall is seen by analysts as one of the most credible owners of the Telegraph, alongside other bidders such as Lord Rothermere’s DMGT. Claire Enders, a media analyst, said this was in part because Marshall would be one of a “handful of media owners acceptable to the Conservative government”.

Any successful bidder will need to pass competition tests, which will not be an issue for Marshall, and a public interest assessment that could lead to objections in Whitehall.

Griffin would give his bid “real US conservative firepower”, Enders said, adding: “Paul Marshall wants to influence wider culture.”