Theodore Thomas More Agnew, Baron Agnew of Oulton, DL (born 17 January 1961) is a British businessman, Conservative life peer, and former Minister of State at the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury. He is the founder and current chairman of the board of Inspiration Trust, an academy trust in Norfolk and Suffolk.

He was born in Norfolk, the 6th of 7 children, brought up in Oulton near Aylsham and educated at Beeston Hall School and Rugby School. After school, he worked in Canada and Australia between 1978 and 1988, initially in farming but later buying and selling a variety of businesses.^[1]

After working in Australia, he returned to the UK and founded Town & Country Assistance in 1989,^[2] later becoming WNS Assistance.^[3] He grew the business to annual gross revenues of £40 million. Selling it to Warburg Pincus in 2002, he became a co-founder of WNS Global Services. This company was floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 2006.^[4]

In 2004, he became Chief Executive of Jubilee Managing Agency Ltd, a Lloyd's insurance business managing £130 million of premiums. He resigned in 2011 after it was sold to Ryan Specialty.^[5][6]

In 2006, he founded the Public Interest Foundation, a grant-giving charity primarily focused on education and communities.^[7]

He was chairman of the Norfolk Community Foundation between 2007 and 2013.^[8]

In 2006 he became a trustee of Policy Exchange, a Westminster-based think tank, and remained on the board until 2014.^[9][2]

Agnew is the founder and chairman of the Inspiration Trust, a multi-academy trust that runs seventeen schools in East Anglia. The Trust was founded as the East Norfolk Academy Trust on 14 August 2012, changing its name to the Inspiration Trust on 27 January 2013.^[10][11] He returned as chairman in 2022 after serving in the Government^[10][12]

Agnew was a board member of the Education Policy Institute, a Westminster-based research institute, between 2015 and 2017.^[13]

He was appointed a director of National Institute of Teaching in 2022. The aim of NIOT is to boost the quality of teaching and school leadership by carrying out research applying these insights to its professional development programmes, and sharing findings with the sector.^[14][15][16]P

Theodore Agnew joined James Goldsmith's Referendum Party sometime before the 1997 General Election and attempted to get elected as their Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for the Ipswich constituency.

Agnew donated a total of £134,000 to the Conservative Party between 2007 and 2009.^[17]

He endorsed Kemi Badenoch in the July 2022 Conservative Party leadership election.^[18]

Agnew was a non-executive board member of the Department for Education from 2010 to 2015. He was chairman of its Academies Board from 2013 to 2015.^[19][2]

He was appointed lead non-executive board member of the Ministry of Justice in July 2015 until September 2017.^[19]

Agnew was appointed a deputy lieutenant (DL) of Norfolk in 2013.^[31] He was made a Knight Bachelor in the 2015 New Year Honours "for services to education".^[32][33][34]