Peter Ainsworth

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Peter Michael Ainsworth (born 16 November 1956) is a British politician of the Conservative Party, the Member of Parliament for East Surrey and the Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The son of a naval officer, he was educated at the Ludgrove School in Wokingham; Bradfield College and Lincoln College, Oxford, he graduated in 1979 with a MA in English Literature and Language.

He became a researcher to the former Conservative Member of the European Parliament, Sir John Stewart-Clark and on leaving University and then in 1981 became a merchant banker and married Claire Burnett, with whom he had a son and two daughters.

He was elected as a councillor to the London Borough of Wandsworth in 1986 and was elected at the 1992 General Election for Surrey East succeeding Sir Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons.

In 1994 he became the Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Jonathan Aitken, and in 1995 became PPS to the Secretary of State for National Heritage, Virginia Bottomley. He was promoted by John Major in 1996 to the Whips' Office. When the Major government fell the following year. he remained a Whip in Opposition and was promoted to Deputy Chief Whip by William Hague. In 1998 he entered the Shadow Cabinet, shadowing the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and from 2001 the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Ainsworth resigned from Iain Duncan Smith's frontbench for family reasons in 2002. From 2003 he chaired the Environmental Audit Select Committee, before rejoining the Shadow Cabinet under David Cameron in December 2005 as Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The post has a much heightened importance given the new emphasis being given to Environmental policies by the Conservative leader David Cameron.

Speaking in March 2006 Ainsworth set out the possible new direction for Conservative policy stating that "Achieving a sustainable world and combating the threat of climate change will require some really fresh ideas and radical thinking. We cannot expect to meet the challenges of this century by toying with the structures and technologies we have inherited from the past, and the concept of Decentralised Energy should to be taken seriously."^[1]