Paul Marshall, the hedge fund tycoon who co-owns the right-wing television channel GB News, has acquired Apollo magazine, one of the UK’s most established art journals. It is part of a £100m deal completed earlier this week for The Spectator magazine by Marshall’s company Old Queen Street Ventures (OQS).
“Alongside The Spectator, renowned international art magazine Apollo will also join the OQS Media portfolio. Founded in London in 1925 and published monthly, Apollo is one of the world’s oldest and most respected magazines on visual arts,” says a statement issued on behalf of OQS
The Spectator and Apollo, along with The Telegraph, were put up for sale by the Barclay family in June last year. Marshall is also reportedly in the running to buy The Telegraph.
“OQS Media, which is owned by British entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Paul Marshall, will prioritise investing in journalism, talent and the latest technology, with the aim of building a strong future for The Spectator and supporting it to reach new audiences,” the statement adds. OQS was contacted for comment regarding its future plans for Apollo, whose editor is Edward Behrens.
Doing something different
OQS Media also owns and operates the online magazine UnHerd, which according to an online statement “tries to do something different—and harder. We are not interested in contrarianism, or opposition for its own sake; but we make it our mission to challenge herd mentality wherever we see it.”
Freddie Sayers, the editor-in-chief of UnHerd and the chief executive of OQS Media since 2019, will remain CEO of the expanded group and become publisher of The Spectator and Apollo. The company says The Spectator and UnHerd “will remain fully separate titles, with independent editorial and governance structures”.
In last year’s “right power list” compiled by The New Statesman, Paul Marshall was ranked number 17. The left-leaning journal reports: “Marshall went into the City in the 1980s and amassed a huge fortune from Marshall Wace, the hedge fund he founded in 1997 with Ian Wace. Today the fund manages over $60bn of assets. Marshall was a Liberal Democrat until, having backed Brexit in 2016, he became increasingly involved in conservative politics. He likes Michael Gove, free schools, Jordan Peterson and evangelical Christianity.”
Andrew Neil announced earlier this week on X (formerly Twitter) that he will step down as chairman of The Spectator (he also oversaw Apollo). He said: “My proudest recollection will always be the fact that, at a time when legacy print publications were relentlessly cost-cutting and regularly making huge numbers of good people redundant, I did not preside over a single compulsory redundancy in 20 years.”
