An investigation by Hope Not Hate reported this week that Paul Marshall, owner of GB News and UnHerd and frontrunner in the race to buy the Telegraph, had repeatedly liked and re-tweeted racist and Islamophobic content. In this bonus episode, Alan and Lionel discuss who decides whether someone is fit to own a major UK newspaper, what Ofcom can do to uphold standards—and what could happen to political discourse in the United Kingdom if Marshall’s bid succeeds.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity
Alan Rusbridger:
Welcome to a special episode of Media Confidential with me, Alan Rusbridger in London.
Lionel Barber:
And me, Lionel Barber in Colorado. It’s an unscheduled episode, but one we thought was vital. It all stems from a selection of tweets liked and reposted by Sir Paul Marshall, co-owner of GB News. An investigation by HOPE not hate, along with The News Agents podcast, has revealed that Sir Paul has liked and retweeted tweets filled with racist and Islamophobic content.
Alan:
We’ll come on to why this matters shortly. Here’s just a flavour of the sort of tweets he’s endorsed. “If we want European civilisation to survive, we need not just close the borders, but to start mass expulsions immediately. We don’t stand a chance unless we start that very process soon.” Here’s another one. “It’s only a matter of time before civil war starts in Europe, the native European population is losing patience with the fake refugee invaders.”
Lionel:
Marshall seems drawn to two accounts in particular. WorldByWolf is an anti-Muslim account. So far this year, he’s liked or retweeted 16 tweets from them. Then there’s Amy Meck. Amy Meckleberg, to use her full name, was described by HuffPost a few years back as, I’m quoting here Alan, “Trump’s loudest anti-Muslim Twitter troll.” A quick glance at her profile on X reveals that her latest repost was a video clip of a public stoning. It doesn’t take long to work out what her political views are.
Alan:
Among her anti-Islamic posts, it’s one that Marshall reposted warning of the, “four stages of Islamic conquest.” When you dig deeper, you’ll see that she’s fully behind the so-called great replacement theory, which is an ethno-nationalist conspiracy theory, warning that indigenous European, i.e. white, populations are being replaced by non-European immigrants. What’s the response from Paul Marshall to the revelation that he’s been not only liking this material but spreading it? He’s been retweeting it and therefore amplifying these views. They say Paul Marshall’s account is private but is nonetheless followed by 5,000 people, including many journalists. I’m quoting from their statement. He posts on a wide variety of subjects and those cited represent a small and unrepresentative sample of those 5,000 posts. This sample does not represent his views. As most Twitter/X users know, it can be a fountain of ideas, but some of it is of uncertain quality and all his posts have now been deleted to avoid any further misunderstanding.
Lionel:
In today’s special episode, why do these controversial reposts and likes on X matter?
[music]
Alan:
What time is it there in the US, Lionel?
Lionel:
Oh, it’s 7:00 AM, Alan, but this is 24/7 news and I’m happy to join this discussion.
Alan:
Your dedication is outstanding. Look, let’s begin by explaining who exactly Sir Paul Marshall is. He was described by The Guardian as a hedge fund founder who was an early investor in GB News along with the Legatum Group based in Dubai, but he’s being touted by conservative circles as a media mogul in waiting. He’s got 45% stake in GB News. He’s worth about £680 million, according to The Sunday Times. He started out in finance with BlackRock, the investment fund, and then founded Marshall Wace, the $62 billion fund he still chairs. He also owns and runs the academy schools chain Ark. They might have some views about this content that he’s been liking and spreading. He funded the political website UnHerd in 2017 and, of course, he’s been in the news recently because he’s one of the leading candidates to buy The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph.
Lionel:
Yes, I must say that in a recent podcast with you, Alan, I was even suggesting he might be the favorite, but we’ll come to that. Anyway, let’s be very clear about what he’s done. He’s changed his X profile to a private setting, meaning he’s restricted who could view his posts. He’s renamed his profile to @aeropagus123. He’s also removed any identifying information from his profile. Incidentally, Areopagus Ventures is the name of a company he set up in 2021, and it comes from a reference to-
Alan:
Areopagitica.
Lionel:
I knew you’d know that.
Alan:
I did this for A-level English. Areopagitica.
Lionel:
Unfortunately, I didn’t do A-level English. French and German. Anyway, the serious point here is this is John Milton’s polemic in defence of free speech.
Alan:
Then he started endorsing posts, not just the anti-Islamic ones we’ve mentioned. There’s one which is really pouring cold water on the whole theory of climate change. He liked Elon Musk, not one cent more against funding the war in Ukraine against Russia. The climate skeptic posts was from a group called Wide Awake Media.
Lionel:
All this matters because a person with far-right views could be at the head of The Telegraph. He obviously aims to grow GB News into a Fox-style channel, the beginnings of a media empire. He’s aligned, at least in terms of his views, with some pretty dubious characters. I think the first point is, do these retweets and the direct association of Sir Paul Marshall with Islamophobia—it’s pretty clear from what he’s been doing and the fact that these posts have since been deleted. Do you think that disqualifies him from ownership of the Telegraph?
Alan:
As far as I remember, there’s only been one successful attempt to disbar somebody on fit and proper grounds from owning a newspaper. That was a porn operator called David Sullivan, who you may remember was stopped from owning the Bristol Evening Post in the 1990s. But no one managed to stop Richard Desmond who was also a porn operator from owning the Express. There have been a series of crooks and oddballs who have ended up owning newspapers since then.
I don’t think this is enough to stop him from owning the Telegraph, though, I think the people who have been squealing and shouting about the UAE owning the Telegraph, you might have expected some of those to say something in the last 24 hours about these views. Do you agree with that, Lionel, that it’s unlikely to stop him?
Lionel:
First of all, it’s not a criminal offence as such. Incitement to violence, if you’re liking a tweet, or reposting something which is controversial, and we’ll get into some of the nature of these retweets. I think it does put into context the campaign, which has been very effective, saying that it is completely unacceptable for the Telegraph Group to be owned by, and it’s not just the UAE, that is the Abu Dhabi, Dubai, the Gulfies, along with an American investment group called RedBird, headed by Jeff Zucker, former boss of CNN.
Alan:
The ownership of GB News matters here in two respects. One is, the guy is clearly trying to be a mini Murdoch. He wants to have a media empire and he’s succeeding at the moment. He’s got a very opinionated TV channel, which we’ll come on to Ofcom, and why Ofcom doesn’t seem to be very interested in it. He may well get his hands on the Telegraph now. Why does he want that influence in the same way that Murdoch did? I think we have to cast our minds to what’s going to happen after the election, which we assume that Labour is going to win. We can already see the bloodletting that’s going to happen in the Tory party. In the last 24 hours, we’ve had, I don’t know whether you caught this, Lionel, Truss appeared on Steve Bannon’s show. Did you see that?
Lionel:
Alan, I was watching parts of it at 6:30 this morning, preparing for this podcast.
Alan:
She accused The Economist and the Financial Times of being part of the deep state.
Lionel:
I’m former deep state then. No, I did. Of course, the association with Bannon, Alan, formerly the councillor and campaign operator who helped run Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016, far-right, alt-right, these views and certainly on, the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that western civilisation is under attack, that is straight out of Steve Bannon’s playbook. It comes back to what we were talking about in an earlier podcast, Alan, about what is actually going on in the Conservative Party and also outside it, the way it’s drifting rightwards.
Alan:
I think back to Enoch Powell in 1968 and Edward Heath sacked him from his job as Shadow Defence Minister for that famous Rivers of Blood speech. I think that sounds like songs of praise compared with the stuff that you’re now getting on GB News, specifically in these tweets that the owner of GB News has been tweeting. You’ve also had Suella Braverman writing in The Telegraph in the last 24 hours about how the Islamists are now in charge of Britain and urging a fight back, “If we’re to have any chance of saving our country from the mob.”
You’ve got a new ugly rhetoric on the right and the prospect of Sir Paul Marshall, who’s clearly in sympathy, whatever he says about this doesn’t represent his views. It’s difficult to credit that a man who’s built up a 600 million pound fortune doesn’t know that if he likes and spreads by retweeting material that people will interpret that as being what he believes and he’s going to be the ring holder in this debate.
[music]
Lionel:
This is a special episode of Media Confidential and coming up we’ll be discussing what the endorsements of Sir Paul Marshall actually means for the media industry in this country and politics as a whole. We’ll be right back.
Alan:
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[music]
Alan:
Lionel, we’ve discussed the Telegraph. We think it’s probably not enough technically to stop him from owning the Telegraph. What about Ofcom? We know that they’ve been in some views asleep at the wheel. Do you think this is going to wake them up?
Lionel:
I do. Certainly, it should do. Alan, you’ve been on this theme for weeks saying that they’ve pussyfooted around the blurring of—well, it’s the law, on due impartiality. They’ve been inviting elected politicians acting as presenters blurring the line between news and opinion with opinion coming first. Look, here on these tweets, this is opinion. It’s actually inflammatory. It’s racist. It’s Islamophobic. It seems to me if the man who is the co-owner of GB News supports these views, the idea has no influence on the content of what’s going on at GB News is for the birds. I think it’s time for Ofcom to wake up.
Alan:
I think so too. I think so far the high panjandrums at Ofcom have really positioned this as a sort of free speech issue. Whatever the law says, we don’t want to be the sort of nanny state telling people what they can and what they can’t say. I’ve always found that a difficult argument because if you look at the range of presenters which go from Jacob Rees-Mogg to Nigel Farage via Lee Anderson, Neil Oliver, Richard Tice. A kid of 15 can see that this is not an impartial spread of presenters. Nevertheless, Ofcom have so far been inclined to indulge them.
Now you’ve got an insight into Sir Paul Marshall’s mind, his preoccupations, some you might even say his obsessions, HOPE not hate worked out that it was about a quarter of his tweets this year have been from extremist organisations. He’s been retweeting people like Britain First, which is a sort of reincarnation of the National Front. Once you’ve got a sense of this guy’s mind, and the content that he is happy to see on GB News, surely that puts a different context on his ownership and his purpose in owning that channel and for allowing it to take the shape that it has.
Lionel:
Alan, obviously, you can’t say that television or newspapers, radio shouldn’t be debating the right levels of immigration in a country that obviously can be disturbing to communities. If there is an imposition on social services, these kinds of questions are legitimate for debate. If you’re talking about mass expulsions, civil war, that takes it into a hugely different realm. It could be construed as an incitement to violence. It’s playing on people’s paranoia. Actually, it places Sir Paul by association with the views of far-right groups elsewhere. Look at the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen, although she’s moved a bit in France, and obviously, Mr. Salvini in Italy. That’s where he is now.
Alan:
Eric Zemmour in France, a quasi-fascist pretender to power there, who is a great fan of this great replacement theory, which Marshall seems keen to promote.
Lionel:
In his early days, he was associated with the Liberal Party. Obviously, he’s interested in education. That’s why he’s sponsoring those academy schools. The key point is that in his, if you like, intellectual evolution, in his desire to be more influential in the media space, it matters a great deal what he thinks. If he’s espousing or supporting groups, or the views of groups that are on the far right, that’s extremely concerning. The fact that these tweets were deleted, I think speaks volumes.
Alan:
What do you think of his defence, that the fact that he retweets and likes his stuff doesn’t mean that he agrees with them?
Lionel:
That’s weasel words, really, isn’t it? Look, I do use Twitter and even X. I think the service has declined in terms of quality. You use it, you’ve got twice as many followers, I think something 220,000 or so compared to my little mini 112,000. We won’t get into numbers here. The serious point is, when you like something, and certainly if you repost something, then that is akin to supporting the view, that you’re sympathetic to that view. That’s what liking means.
Let’s not forget, Alan, people applying for jobs—I’ve been involved in appointments, including a couple in foundations in America, senior appointments, one of the things they do is go through the social media record to see if there’s anything which is deemed inflammatory, racist, displaying a poor lack of judgment, all these things, it matters in employment.
Alan:
If you were a betting man, do you think that Ofcom will now pay more attention to this?
Lionel:
I’m not a betting man. I don’t have a lot of faith in the leadership at Ofcom right now. If they don’t feel that this story sheds light on the views of the co-owner of GB News, and don’t think that this is relevant, I think they really are falling down on their job. I do think that with a new government, if there is a new government, we mustn’t never presume that obviously, the Labour Party’s lead is very significant. I think you might well see some changes at Ofcom.
Alan:
I was going to say that the Labour Party seems to have been silent on this in the last 24 hours. I haven’t seen any follow-up in the mainstream media. Does that surprise you? I’m trying to read who’s on what side in terms of this bid is requires a sort of PhD in newspaper ownership studies. Does it surprise you that no one’s really picked up on this? Then The News Agents did a terrific podcast on this yesterday afternoon.
Lionel:
We’ll have to wait for the Sunday newspapers, I think, on this. My inclination as an editor would be to do a proper profile of Sir Paul Marshall because now we know more about what his views are and the state of his mind. That might stimulate further debate and certainly shed light on who these people are seeking more influence on the British media scene.
Alan:
Look, thank you Lionel for getting up early for this special edition. Watch the space. The battle for The Daily Telegraph has just got twice as interesting. I think if Ofcom doesn’t regard this as a shot in the arm in terms of waking them up and paying attention to what’s going on at GB News and the reasons for the kind of channel that it’s become, then Ofcom should be shut up and closed down. Thank you for joining us in this brief and unplanned appearance. Lionel, you go back to bed and I’m going to go and walk the dog.
Lionel:
Thanks Alan. I’m up fresh, incredibly stimulated by this conversation, looking out on some snowcap mountains here in Aspen. I will be reflecting further on this story and perhaps thinking about what I would be doing or what you might be doing if we were covering this story in our old jobs as editors. Big point. Next week, I have that feeling, that editor gut feeling that we’re going to be returning to this story.
Alan:
I think we will. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. Remember, you can contact us at mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk or get in touch with us on X, formerly Twitter. Our accounts are open unlike Sir Paul Marshall’s, and we are @mediaconfpod.
Lionel:
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts. We’ll see you next week.
