Paul Marshall buys The Spectator for £100m

The Spectator has been sold to Sir Paul Marshall for £100 million after a long-running takeover battle for the magazine and its sister Telegraph newspaper titles.
Marshall, the financier behind Marshall Wace, the hedge fund, and GB News, the television channel, has bought the magazine after its purchase by an Abu Dhabi-backed fund was blocked by ministers. The takeover was made via Marshall’s Old Queen Street Ventures, which also owns UnHerd, the online magazine, and the Old Queen Street Cafe in Westminster.
The Spectator business, which includes the Apollo art magazine, had 122,500 paying subscribers in the financial year to the end of December 2022, according to its most recent set of annual accounts, putting the price paid per subscriber at about £800. It made a pre-tax profit of £2.6 million on revenue of £20.8 million in the year.
Marshall, 65, who is a “long-term Spectator reader”, said he was delighted with the acquisition. “The plan is for Old Queen Street Ventures to make good previous under-investment in one of the world’s great titles,” he said.
Freddie Sayers, 42, the chief executive of Old Queen Street Media and editor-in-chief of UnHerd, will become publisher of The Spectator.
Andrew Neil, 75, the broadcaster and former Sunday Times editor, said on X that he was stepping down as chairman of The Spectator. “I made it clear many months ago that I would step down when a new owner took over,” he said. “That time has now come.”
He said it was his “greatest regret” not to have found a “new home guaranteed to nurture the unique chemistry” of the magazine. “We managed to stop the takeover by know-nothing Americans bankrolled by Arab potentates with their own agenda, but after that we did not have the power to choose our new owner or even influence who it was to be.”
Fraser Nelson, the editor of the magazine, said: “Had The Spectator been sold to the Emirati government, as was on the cards, we would have faced obvious questions about our operational and editorial independence. That will be protected under Sir Paul.”
The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph were put up for sale last year when Lloyds Bank seized the publications from the Barclay family, acting over outstanding debts totalling £1.2 billion.
Lloyds appointed bankers at Goldman Sachs to sound out buyers for the Conservative-leaning titles, but the Barclay family scuppered the deal by refinancing their debts with funding from RedBird IMI, a joint venture part-funded by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, who is the vice-president and deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.
RedBird IMI’s deal attracted criticism from politicians, who raised concerns about the UAE’s record on media censorship, while journalists at other UAE-owned titles revealed how the state had restricted their reporting on topics that were sensitive to the country’s ruling family.
The House of Lords pushed for an amendment to legislation to block foreign powers from owning UK newspapers and the measures were supported by more than 100 MPs. The government subsequently put in place new laws stopping overseas state ownership, influence or control of newspapers and periodical magazines, effectively blocking RedBird IMI’s bid.