Paul Marshall

Sir Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall (born 2 August 1959) is a British hedge fund manager.

Paul Roderick Clucas Marshall was born on 2 August 1959 in Ealing, London, England, the son of Alan Marshall, managing director, Philippine Refining Company (later Unilever Philippines), and Mary Sylvia Clucas, daughter of T. S. Hanlin.

His sister is the journalist Penny Marshall.

When his parents moved to the Philippines and then South Africa for his father's job with Unilever, Marshall boarded at Merchant Taylors' School, in England.

He boarded in the Manor of the Rose while at the school.

From there he went to St John's College, Oxford, to read History and Modern Languages, and subsequently took an MBA from INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France.

He is the co-founder and chairman of Marshall Wace LLP, one of Europe's largest hedge fund groups.

He was a research assistant to Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats in 1985 and stood for Parliament for the SDP–Liberal Alliance in Fulham in 1987.

He has made appearances on current affairs programmes such as BBC Radio 4's Any Questions.

Marshall Wace was founded in 1997 by Marshall and Ian Wace.

At the time, Marshall Wace was one of the first hedge funds in London.

The company started with $50 million, half of which was from George Soros.

Funds managed by Marshall Wace have won multiple investment awards and the company has become one of the world's leading managers of equity long/short strategies.

Marshall Wace manages $50 billion and has recently opened an office in China.

Prior to founding Marshall Wace, Marshall worked for Mercury Asset Management, the fund management arm of S. G. Warburg & Co.

He is a member of the Hedge Fund Standards Board.

Marshall had a longstanding involvement with Britain's Liberal Democrats party.

Between 2002 and 2015, Marshall donated £200,000 to the Liberal Democrats.

Marshall was a member and donor of the Liberal Democrats, and in 2004 co-edited the influential Orange Book alongside a number of prominent Liberal Democrat politicians.

In 2004, Marshall co-edited The Orange Book with David Laws.

Chapters were written by various upcoming Liberal Democrat politicians including Nick Clegg, Chris Huhne, Vince Cable, Ed Davey and Susan Kramer (neither Clegg, Huhne nor Kramer were MPs at the time).

Laws, describing the pair's ambition in publishing The Orange Book, wrote "We were proud of the liberal philosophical heritage of our party. But we both felt that this philosophical grounding was in danger of being neglected in favour of no more than 'a philosophy of good intentions, bobbing about unanchored in the muddled middle of British politics'" The book attracted initial controversy when launched, but both it and the term Orange Bookers to describe those sympathetic to its outlook continue to be frequently referenced to describe a strand of thought within the Liberal Democrats.

In 2015 he left the party due to his support for Brexit, and subsequently donated to the Brexit campaign and the Conservative Party.

Marshall's ownership of UnHerd and GB News, as well as potential purchases of the Daily Telegraph and The Spectator led the New Statesman to name him as the seventeenth most powerful right-wing political figure in the UK in 2023.

He left the party in 2015 over its policies on the European Union and its support of continuing British membership.

Marshall was a public supporter of Brexit during the European Union membership referendum in 2016.

He gave a donation of £100,000 to the Leave campaign.

In July 2016, Marshall donated £3,250 to Michael Gove's Conservative Party leadership campaign.

Writing for BrexitCentral in April 2017 on the UK exiting the European Union, Marshall wrote: "This is a huge opportunity for the UK. Our ambition is that the UK should be a champion of free trade, open and outward looking to the world and built on strong institutions."

In an interview with the Financial Times, he said: "Most people in Britain do not want to become part of a very large country called Europe. They want to be part of a country called Britain."

In 2017, Marshall gave funding to the political news website UnHerd.

In 2019, Marshall gave £500,000 to the Conservative Party.

According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, he had an estimated net worth of £630 million.

In 2020–21 Marshall invested £10 million into the political news and opinion channel GB News.

Following the resignation of Andrew Neil in September 2021, Marshall temporarily replaced him as chairman, before being succeeded by Alan McCormick in April 2022.

In 2022–23, he invested a further £41 million to stem the company's £42 million loss in that year.

Working with Jordan Peterson and Baroness Stroud, Marshall helped create Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, giving a keynote address at its first conference in October-November 2023.

In February 2024 he was criticised by Hope not Hate for his Twitter activity.

On an anonymous account, he liked tweets which contained climate denialism, which called for "mass expulsions", and which predicted civil war "once the Muslims get to 15-20%".

One of his own tweets said that the Christian church "has its useful idiots", in reference to an interfaith ceremony in a French church.