Paul Marshall, the man who pumped millions into GB News, has landed the Spectator at a hugely inflated price. The hedge-fund tycoon paid £100m for the magazine. This seems a lot to pay for the Tory party’s parish magazine, and a contact with knowledge of the deal tells me it’s a good £20m more than Rupert Murdoch was prepared to pay. But for a man on a Napoleonic campaign to challenge Murdoch’s primacy over Britain’s right-wing media, the Spectator is a necessary trophy asset (and, according to accounts filed at Companies House, it makes a modest profit).
Marshall already owns UnHerd (coincidentally, just a few doors down from the Spectator’s current HQ, on Old Queen Street in Westminster). And rumour has it that the former Lib Dem member turned Brexiteer (he donated £100,000 to the Leave campaign) is still in the market for the Spectator’s sister titles, the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, as that protracted sale rumbles on.
The process has been long and mired in controversy. The United Arab Emirates tried to buy the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph (former chancellors George Osborne and Nadhim Zahawi advised the Emiratis in their bid). But by March this year the House of Lords had voted through a law banning foreign states from holding any direct stakes in British newspaper assets – scuppering the UAE’s aspirations. The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson celebrated parliament’s successful thwarting of the UAE’s attempted “autocratic acquisition”.
Within minutes of Marshall’s takeover becoming public, Andrew Neil – the former editor of the Sunday Times – quit as Spectator chairman. It’s unsurprising: Neil has long made it clear he would step down as ownership changed hands (and he had a rather acrimonious departure from the Marshall-backed GB News in 2021). In his resignation letter he wrote about his commitment to protecting the Spectator from commercial and political pressures, before adding: “I cannot tell if the new owners will have the same reverence for editorial independence since they have not shared their thinking.”
There have been no signs that Fraser Nelson will leave following the deal. Talk is that Michael Gove was offered the editorship but it never came to pass. Meanwhile, Freddie Sayers, the CEO of Old Queen Street Media and editor-in-chief of UnHerd said in a statement this morning that UnHerd and the Spectator, despite their physical proximity, will remain “fully separate” owing to their “distinct politics, interests, formats, audiences and atmospheres”.
Note: This is an item from Alison Phillips’s Media Notebook, which appears in the 13 September issue of the New Statesman
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble