The most and possibly only surprising thing about hedge fund manager Paul Marshall’s purchase of the Spectator was the anguished public resignation of the magazine’s chair, Andrew Neil – not the fact of it, more his rationale. Neil voiced outrage in a statement on X that the sale became necessary in the first place, the title having gone, in his account, from a £20m valuation two decades ago to receivership, after the “proprietors had used us as collateral for massive debts unrelated to us (without ever telling us). They then failed to pay these debts.”
This is a rather familiar story of the late-capitalist privatisation model. For instance, it’s how Thames Water went from zero debt in 1989 to more than £15bn today. To be fair to the Spectator, the publication hasn’t been a straightforward cheerleader for these kinds of financial wheezes, and some of its writers vocally hate what corporations get away with; but it’s surprising to hear this great supporter of the free market so amazed that the scorpion actually stung him.
Neil went on to be astonished that none of the journalists who created that value – from £20m, through zero, to the estimated £100m that Marshall bought it for – “get to share in it”. That truly is an old-fashioned notion, that the value of an asset should be shared to reflect the hard work of those who built it. You might even call it Marxist.
But most dated of all was Neil’s concern that Marshall might not understand what makes the Spectator “tick” – namely, editorial independence. You only have to look at GB News, in which Marshall is a major investor, to know exactly what makes Marshall tick, and that his project does not set out to excel in ratings and profits, and its impact can’t be measured in those terms.
To recap: GB News has been investigated and sanctioned by Ofcom many times, mostly for breaches of impartiality rules (apart from an exchange between Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox, which saw the first suspended and the second sacked over misogynistic remarks made by Fox). The channel often doesn’t even seem to be pretending to strive for the basic balance that is required by the broadcasting code. Take the Tory politicians Jacob Rees-Mogg, Esther McVey and Philip Davies acting variously as newsreaders, interviewers and reporters. Or that interview with then prime minister Rishi Sunak in February that gave him a “mostly uncontested platform to promote the policies and performance of his government”, in the words of Ofcom.
You might think biased TV would get its comeuppance in poor viewing figures, and you’d be right. In terrestrial terms, the channel only had a 0.45% share of linear TV, according to figures released in March (BBC One has 20%, ITV1 13%). However, that doesn’t matter, because money is no object: GB News posted a £42m loss for the year to May 2023, its latest figures. There are so many ways it could lose less money. It doesn’t have to pay big bucks to Nigel Farage, for example (he’s recently denied being paid almost £100,000 a month for presenting on GB News, saying a recently reported figure included VAT and “media consultancy” work).
This isn’t about making money or winning ratings. The only purpose of this output is to open up the wider conversation to hard-right talking points over the long term – whether that’s Lee Anderson asking which Muslim friends Sadiq Khan has sold London to, or Farage wondering whether we’re being told the whole truth about the killings in Southport.
So what does this mean for the Spectator? The title has a peculiar immunity from charges that it agitates for the hard right – it’s almost passé to say it, because it’s been going on for so long. Taki, its High Life columnist for nearly 30 years, wrote infamous and revolting columns; indeed, he was almost protected by the extravagance of his prejudices, so vaudeville that they couldn’t possibly be taken as sincere. Boris Johnson, in 2003, performed a kind of Taki-lite tribute as editor and columnist, when he wrote about colonialism in Africa, saying the problem with the continent was that Britain was no longer in charge.
What difference can it possibly make, then, that the Spectator has been bought by a proprietor whose agenda is seemingly to say the unsayable? Broadly, the same difference it’s made to X (Twitter), having been bought by Elon Musk. There were already far-right provocateurs on the platform, there were already failures of moderation. But where previously those were bugs, since Musk’s takeover, they are now that massive site’s standout features.
We’re looking at a buyer with a record of providing a platform for hard-right narratives, which have then had significant, observable success in dominating mainstream debate, even if much of that mainstream was just agog, asking: “Did Lee Anderson really just say that?” So the fact of the Spectator’s long history, publishing a range of views, only some of which have been hate-speech-adjacent, is no grounds for complacency for any fair-minded readers of this country’s most influential rightwing weekly.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
