Peter Michael Ainsworth (16 November 1956 – 6 April 2021) was a British Conservative politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for East Surrey from 1992 to 2010.
Following his retirement from politics, Ainsworth was appointed UK chair of the Big Lottery Fund and, later, chairman of the Churches Conservation Trust.
On leaving university, he became a researcher to the former Conservative Member of the European Parliament, Sir Jack Stewart-Clark, and then in 1981 became a merchant banker. He worked as an investments analyst for Laing & Cruickshank Investment Management (bought by UBS in 2004) from 1981 to 1985, and then in corporate finance for S.G. Warburg Securities (bought by UBS in 1994) from 1985 to 1992, where he became a director from 1990 to 1992.
Political career
From 1984 to 1986, Ainsworth was a Member of the Council at the Bow Group, a conservative think tank. He was elected as a councillor to the London Borough of Wandsworth in 1986, and at the 1992 general election, was elected to Parliament for the safe Conservative seat of East Surrey, succeeding Geoffrey Howe. He remained a Wandsworth councillor until 1994.
On 5 January 2010, Ainsworth announced that he was to stand down at the forthcoming general election. The Conservative majority in East Surrey was 15,921 in 2005.
Shadow Cabinet
In 1998, following his party's general election defeat the previous year, 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 the party's new leader David Cameron in December 2005 as Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The post had heightened importance given the Conservatives' new emphasis on environmental policies under Cameron's leadership.
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 be taken seriously." Ainsworth was notable as the only member of the Shadow Cabinet to have voted against the war in Iraq.
Ainsworth lost his position in the Shadow Cabinet in the January 2009 reshuffle when Nick Herbert took the post of Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. From 2009 to 2010, Ainsworth was chairman of the Conservative Arts and Creative Industries Network, and from 2010 to 2012, he was chairman of the Conservative Environment Network. In 2005, Ainsworth became chairman of the Elgar Foundation, a role he held until 2013. In 2019, he became chairman of the Heritage Alliance. of a heart attack, on 6 April 2021, aged 64.