• He helped get Brexit done.
• He owns one of Europe’s leading hedge funds.
• He built churches and transformed British evangelical Christianity.

Alongside fellow investor, Legatum’s Christopher Chandler, he owns and shaped GB News as the self-styled ‘home of free speech’ and insurgent broadcaster supplanting the BBC as the mediator of national debate.

He also owns The Spectator and UnHerd as part of his Old Queen Street Media stable and the Old Queen Street Cafe, a Westminster joint where politicians and journalists wine and dine (the UK’s new Chancellor, John Healey, was at the next table during my one and only visit a few weeks before his appointment).

His Jordan Peterson inspired Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) connects a global community of ‘traditional conservatives’ and ‘classic liberals’ though annual conferences and convenings emboldening participants to sleigh the political establishment and its orthodoxies. In his speech at ARC 2026, for example, Marshall ridiculed DEI as ‘Division, Entitlement and Indoctrination’ rather than ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ as it’s known to progressives. And he dismissed the drive to reduce carbon emissions to zero as ‘an ideology of fear and destruction’ driven by ‘climate derangement syndrome’.

A philanthropy institute, impact accelerator, and nine floor building are named after him at the London School of Economics accompanied by a series of donations of around £80 million (€95) from his family’s charitable foundation, the Sequoia Trust. His son, Islam critic and Trump enthusiast, Winston Marshall, sits on the board of the foundation alongside his wife, Lady Sabina Marshall, and former Charity Commission Chair, Sir William Shawcross.

That’s an impressive resume.

More to come

But the biggest achievement of the man who I believe is Britain’s most consequential philanthropist, may be yet to come.

If Nigel Farage becomes Britain’s Prime Minister in 2029, a new British renaissance will be upon us: that would involve such things as ending the BBC as we know it, a mass deportation bill to lock up and offload asylum seekers by the bucket load and breaking the human rights framework - and any other checks and balances - which prevent this from happening.

Britain’s radical right’s powerful social and cultural movement could not harness grievances, could not stir up discontent and could not lay them so effectively at the door of Muslims and migrants without a political and cultural milieu which gives rise to these conditions.

And Paul Marshall has done more than any man – other than Farage – to build this milieu. His philosophical vision, religious conviction and philanthropic resources have played an instrumental role in bringing the UK within touching distance of ‘re-laying the foundations of our civilisation’, as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship neatly puts it.

To date, most attention has focused on crypto and aviation billionaire, Christopher Harborne, who donated £9 million to Reform and made a personal giftof £5 million to its leader. Nigel Farage. More recently, investigative journalists have focused on Farage ally and convicted fraudster, George Cotrell, who has variously given Farage a place to stay, a security detail, social media support and trips to Montenegro. Harborne and Cotrell provide practical and tactical support and perhaps some crypto policy suggestions for good measure.

But it is the philosopher-king, Marshall, who has contributed something far more strategic: the money, space and infrastructure to build the intellectual foundations of a movement – media, policy, faith and convening – to save British civilisation from what its adherents see as the descent into decadence. And the salvation in political terms runs straight through the studios of GB News to a radical right constellation of political forces with Nigel Farage at its centre.

As such, Paul Marshall has deployed philanthropic resources to reshape Britian comparable in vision and scale to the fabled role played by conservative philanthropists in Ronald Reagan’s America.

Of course there are others in the mix. Elon Musk has amplified hard right politician and Farage rival, Rupert Lowe, and bankrolled far right activist, Tommy Robinson. And the support from Harborne and Cottrell would have been critical to Farage himself.

But Marshall’s canvass is far larger: church, state – and the fourth estate.

Liberal philanthropy

Despite this, some conservatives suggest that ubiquitous and all-powerful liberal philanthropists have captured Britain. A striking report from a new conservative think tank, Cambridge Circus, documents what it sees as a systematic effort by liberal funders to embed progressive ideology in state institutions through a network of client charities and legal activists. The report lists some of the UK's leading foundations using data from grant repository, 360 Giving, to demonstrate funding flows to migrant and climate charities which it claims are frustrating executive power and democracy itself.

There is good reason to be cautious these claims. First, the sums don’t add up. The amounts deployed by Marshall, both through his charitable foundation and through non-charitable investments, are far greater. Second, most philanthropic money – derived from building big businesses in capitalist societies – tends to the political right or status quo.

Third, while it’s true that the foundation and charity leaders are more liberal, they are hardly left wing. The political agenda of liberal funders – such as it exists – tends to focus on community building, countering polarization and making the status quo work for everyone. More recently, liberal funders are seeking routes to defend democratic ideals and institutions. But there is no discernible effort in mainstream foundations today to supplant the status quo with a left wing ideological vision. They are not trying to beat Marshall at his own game. They are not pouring millions into building the left wing equivalent of GB News. If they were, and perhaps they should be, then a political arms race would be on.

Instead, the spectre invoked by the radical right looks to me what psychologists call projection: identifying in others what is more visible in yourself. And, as of now, it is Marshall’s radical right movement which is blossoming.

Stroll down Old Queen Street and – amidst the verdant flowers - you’ll see the confident but not imposing presence of The Spectator and UnHerd offices. Go west and you’ll see Marshall’s churches; or GB News paying good money to put Reform and Conservative politicians – Farage among them – on their sofas or soapboxes to play out psychodramas about net zero and discuss whether the treatment of asylum seekers could be less permissive.

Unhappy ending

Sir Paul Marshall is an important but under-appreciated philanthropist. When you set his philanthropic activities against the political context, you can see how successfully he has bent that context to his vision of social renewal.

It’s not a vision I share or support. But the vision is clear and Marshall deserves credit for using his resources to implement it – that’s the definition of bold and effective philanthropy. To date, there are few signs of left wing philanthropists or investors building a viable alternative to GB News and Old Queen Street. And maybe we don’t want them to.

Instead, among liberal funders, a rallying cry of support for the institutions of liberal democracy is now sounding: the courts, the rule of law, the ECHR, the BBC. But as things stand, what Paul Marshall’s philanthropy and investments have helped build are so far ahead of this pack, that it may not be enough.

This is Charles Keidan’s ‘Give and Take’ column. Read an introduction tot he ‘Give and Take’ series published exclusively in World of Philanthropy. See the related articles below.