It takes us through his career, from researcher to Charles Kennedy in Kennedy's days as an SDP Alliance MP, via his own candidacy in the 1987 general election to his take over of the party's ailing think-tank Centre for Reform. He relaunched this as CentreForum, with a far more right-wing agenda.
Then it's on to The Orange Book, which Geoghegan, unlike many of its critics and adherents, appears to have read:
Many Lib Dems still remember Marshall primarily for The Orange Book, the controversial collection he edited in 2004 with David Laws, then a rising star on the Lib Dem right. The Orange Book is less incendiary than its reputation might suggest.
Although the book was billed as a response to ‘nanny-state liberalism’, most of the essays are standard social democratic fare: Vince Cable making the case for financial reforms, bromides from Nick Clegg about the need for transparency in the European Union.
Other chapters, however, suggest an effort to move the party to the right. [David] Laws proposed replacing the NHS with a French-style social insurance system. Another MP, Mark Oaten, contributed an essay about cutting crime titled ‘Tough Liberalism’. (He later admitted that it had been written by a researcher.)
It was David Laws' chapter, which he reportedly included without informing the other authors, that led to a row at the Liberal Democrat conference and to the whole publication being seen as an attack on Charles Kennedy's leadership.
As to an attack on nanny-state liberalism, The Orange Book contained the purest expression of that creed I've ever read. It was largely a cuttings job (and cuttings from the Daily Mail, if I recall rightly) by the normally sound Steve Webb and a researcher.
Those cuttings were full of horror stories about the effects of bad parenting. I suppose the idea was that if the lower orders could be persuaded to raise their children properly, then there would be less need for public spending and it would be possible to cut taxes for the middle classes.
It was all a long time ago, but you can read my Liberator review of The Orange Book on this blog.
Then it's on to Brexit. Geoghegan says of Marshall:
In the aftermath of the referendum he attacked the Bank of England for being anti-Brexit, donated £500,000 to the Tories under Boris Johnson and funded the Alternative Arrangements Commission on the Irish border question. The AAC looked like an official government body but was in fact run by a private think tank. It was dominated by right-wing Tory MPs such as Steve Baker and Suella Braverman who opposed the 'backstop' that would have kept Northern Ireland in the single market.
Money well spent? It doesn't sound like it
After he was done with Brexit, Marshall founded the Unherd website. It's tone is the sort of world-weary Toryism you once found in the Spectator and for which I have a weakness myself. And it's a clever name, though many of its contributors have long been heard elsewhere and few of their opinions lack a herd that already follows them.
None of this tone was to be found in his next media venture GB News.
Geoghegan dwells on Marshall's financial career, his membership of the influential and fashionable congregation of Holy Trinity Brompton and, in education, his funding of his own multi-academy trust.
But I am left wondering, for all his money, how much political nous Marshall has if he thought the SDP and then the Liberal Democrats could be wrenched away from their instinctive support for pan-European institutions.
