THE chairman of struggling, sensationalist right-wing propaganda TV channel GB News, Paul Marshall, is also spending around £1.6 million of his own money every year to keep a far from sensational political commentary website called UnHerd going.

Marshall is a hedge fund boss with an estimated £630m fortune who likes to use his money to play politics.

He is one of the main investors in the GB News TV channel. When Andrew Neil walked out of GB News, realising its mix of farcically bad production and crass right-wing politics was making him look like an idiot, Marshall became GB News chairman.

It seems clear to me that Marshall and the other leading GB News investor, Legatum, both put money into the television station as a political initiative.

They want the station to use “culture war” themes to generally encourage the right. I think they are really more interested in Thatcherite, free-market deregulation politics than the post-Brexit “socially conservative” themes of GB News, but saw the latter as more popular and so the best way to generally promote the right.

Marshall also founded and funds the UnHerd website. Marshall subsidises UnHerd by lending the website money — although I very much doubt he will ever get the cash back.

The latest accounts show Marshall lent UnHerd £1.6m in 2021, bringing his total loan to his own website up to £5,649,999.

UnHerd doesn’t have much more income. It doesn’t carry advertising and a recently introduced partial paywall isn’t going to raise much.

So UnHerd’s 11 staff rely heavily on Marshall’s “loan.” UnHerd’s many freelance contributors also rely on Marshall’s bank account.

Readers of, and contributors to, the UnHerd website might find the fact the man behind GB News is also UnHerd’s “sugar daddy” surprising.

The website does not have the loudmouth, would-be sensationalist, cartoon-villain right-wing feel of GB News.

Instead it often seems padded out with dull, mainstream product, with a tendency to pick up articles from minor media personalities that often look like something they couldn’t get in their usual outlets.

There is a general awkwardness about UnHerd, from the name on — it’s a pun on views that are “unheard” and not being part of the “herd,” although far from being unheard, most of the copy is very similar to that in other right-wing or centrist comment sites, like the Spectator or the Times.

For extra weirdness, UnHerd originally had a cow as a motif because, the founding editor said, “A cow, like our target readers, tends to avoid herds and behaves in unmissable ways as a result.”

Cows of course gather in, rather than avoid, herds but this odd claim did create a nickname for UnHerd — “the unmissable cow website.”

But UnHerd fits in with Marshall’s other political practice. It seems very like a project to push liberals to the right, towards a kind of “post-liberal” conservatism.

It mixes a lot of banal centrist commentary with some wildly right-wing stuff. UnHerd regularly lapses into complaints about “wokeness,” or “woke bullies” forcing “show trials” on the public or the ills of critical race theory or why Black Lives Matter is bad.

It also includes fully unhinged pieces like “Does the Chinese Communist Party control Extinction Rebellion” or a Qanon-style conspiracy theory that one of the women arrested at the Sarah Everard vigil on Clapham Common was a “crisis actor” — a fake protester who deliberately staged a media event.

UnHerd is somewhere moonlighting liberal “Guaridan-ish” writers can express their personal right-wing bugbears, alongside people who are very right-wing all the time.

Marshall is in some ways like an amateur Rupert Murdoch, with GB News as his Sun, UnHerd as his Times — with the emphasis on amateur. These media products are not thriving. They rely on Marshall’s hobbyist funding.

In this way UnHerd is a bit like Marshall’s most successful political intervention: Marshall was a long-term Lib Dem funder and in 2004 he funded a set of Lib Dem policy essays written by Nick Clegg and others called the Orange Book.

Marshall’s book was, like UnHerd, designed to pull liberals rightwards. His book set out to divert Lib Dems away from what contributors called “soggy socialism and corporatism” towards more pro-market “reforms” like public service privatisation.

According to the Orange Book, the “private sector providers are more efficient than the NHS” which is a “second-rate, centralised, state-monopoly service.”

As well as arguing for “more competition within the NHS,” Orange Book authors called for more private prisons and the privatisation of local government and Royal Mail.

With Marshall’s backing the Orange Bookers came to dominate the Lib Dems, leading to their enthusiastic coalition with David Cameron’s Tories.

Ultimately this nearly destroyed the Lib Dems, but it made sure the free-market approaches that hedge fund bosses like Marshall love, still dominate government policy.

So UnHerd is a bit like the Orange Book, designed to push liberals rightwards.

Like GB News, it uses some “culture war” themes, although I think Marshall is mostly interested in free market politics and sees the “social” issues as a way to drive them forward.

It also lacks a bit of focus because Marshall is both a hobbyist and himself a little unfocused.

In a long and pretentious essay on UnHerd, Marshall tries to declare a credo: he argues that politics should be driven by “classical liberalism” — crucially “opening the economy to free trade” but it is being misdirected by “the belief in progress” and the loss of a “biblical understanding of human nature” leading to too many people demanding their rights.

It might seem like a boring comment website, but UnHerd is part of Marshall’s peculiar political project to reject too much “progress.”