Agnew has donated £162,250 since 2007 to the Conservatives including a £3,250 donation to Gove’s leadership campaign in 2016.

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Sir Rod Aldridge is 72 and the former executive chairman of Capita, one of the biggest beneficiaries of central and local government outsourcing. He stepped away from the company in 2006 following controversy over a £1m loan to the Labour Party.

Since then, Aldridge has been “sponsoring” academies. The London-based chain which bears his name has nine of them – educating 6,500 pupils – including a school at the foot of the Grenfell Tower in Kensington, West London.

Aldridge was reported last year to be worth £135m. A website listing his family interests highlights Aldridge Education, the academy chain, alongside a private equity business called Aldridge Wealth. “Wealth can be a force for good,” says the website of this “private family organisation”.

Aldridge has been one of three controlling members of the academy trust which bears his name. Another member is a separate charitable trust which Aldridge set up. Members have the right to appoint and dismiss trustees, although Aldridge himself stood down as a trustee of the academy trust in October. In a recent article published on the website of the private bank Coutts, Aldridge described the Aldridge Education schools as “my academies”.

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Sir Paul Marshall, a prominent Brexiter who gave £100,000 to Vote Leave, chairs another large academy chain, Ark Schools. This London-based trust has 38 schools and 26,000 pupils.

Marshall co-founded the hedge fund Marshall Wace with Ian Wace, who, like Sir Paul, sits on the overarching board at Ark, which controls appointments to the board at the academy chain. Another member is the former Conservative Party treasurer, Lord Stanley Fink. Marshall and Wace were each said to be worth £590m by this year’s Sunday Times Rich List.

Marshall had donated to Liberal Democrats on the right of the party, including Nick Clegg, David Laws and Steve Webb, until the Brexit vote when he switched to Michael Gove, paying £3,500 and £10,000 to Gove’s leadership campaigns in 2016 and 2019.

As education minister Gove appointed Marshall lead Non-Executive Director at the Department for Education in 2013. Marshall is chairman of the Education Policy Institute think-tank that hired David Laws, the investment banker turned Liberal Democrat politician who served as schools minister under the Coalition government, when he lost his parliamentary seat in 2015. The Institute’s biggest funder by far (£750,000+) is the Sequoia Trust. According to its 2018 accounts at the Charities Commission Sequoia held £174m in funds and received £50m in donations and gift aid from its trustees who included Sir Paul Marshall and his wife Sabine Marshall.

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Lord John Nash, 69, is a Conservative businessman who for nearly five years oversaw the academies programme, as a government minister.

Nash attended Milton Abbey, a boarding school in Dorset, took a law degree at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, became a barrister, then went into finance, co-founding the private equity firm Sovereign Capital. He was chair of the British Venture Capital Association in 1988-89, and is a former chair of the private healthcare firm Care UK, one of the NHS’s biggest contractors.

Lord Nash was on the board of the Thatcherite Centre for Policy Studies until his appointment in January 2013 as a Conservative peer and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools. He was appointed as a non-executive director at the Department for Education in 2010 by his friend, Michael Gove.

Nash and his wife, Caroline, a former stockbroker, together oversee Future Academies, a chain of seven schools with 3,800 pupils. Until last year, all of its schools were in central London – its headquarters are in Pimlico, not far from the Houses of Parliament. Recently it has been expanding into the home counties and is lined up to take over the chain that was sponsored in the name of yet another Tory businessman donor, David Meller, until he stood down in the wake of the Presidents Club affair last year.

Nash and his wife, Lady Caroline, not only sit on its overarching board, which Lord Nash chairs, but also chair some of the schools’ individual governing bodies, (see governance documents.)

The Nashes, who set up a charity in 2006 which controls Future’s schools, have given almost £400,000 to the Conservatives, including a £21,000 gift to the future health secretary, Andrew Lansley, in 2009 and a total of £125,000 during 2018 to Shaun Bailey, the party’s current candidate for London mayor, who sits alongside the Nashes on the board of governors of a Future academy.