Theodore Agnew

Theodore Agnew was the minister of state for efficiency and transformation from 2020 to 2022.

Britain’s bureaucratic bloat, debating surrogacy & is smoking ‘sexy’?

From our UK edition

40 min listen

This week: The Spectator launches SPAFF The civil service does one thing right, writes The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons: spaffing money away. The advent of Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US has inspired The Spectator to launch our own war on wasteful spending – the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or SPAFF. Examples of waste range from

My impossible task as ‘minister for efficiency’

From our UK edition

I am delighted that The Spectator is launching a campaign to highlight the grotesque levels of financial waste in government. Of course public sectors worldwide have always defaulted towards profligacy – but we are in different territory now. Our GDP per capita is declining: through immigration, the population is growing faster than the real economy