He may have been schools minister for 14 months, but it’s only really been in the past few weeks that Lord Agnew has started making headlines.

Slow off the mark, maybe, but he is now (intentionally or otherwise) generating stories with extraordinary regularity - including over possible conflicts of interest with Inspiration Trust, which he set up.

Agnew has particularly strong views on education funding, it would seem, recently explaining that Department for Education commercial deals are “pants” and accusing schools of fiddling their figures to balance their budgets.

And then last week, he went even further: he explained to a bemused Schools and Academies Show that he would bet any school “a bottle of champagne” that his team could find savings in its budget. The response from the sector was, well, gobsmacked.

Setting to one side the fact that this statement is nearly as tin-eared as chancellor Philip Hammond’s comments last month about finding a bit of spare cash to help schools with the “little extras”, Agnew’s comments do tell us something interesting about his modus operandi.

‘Hands-on’ approach to academies

And that is that the schools minister seemingly believes he would be better at running every multi-academy trust in the country than its current management, and probably every school.

For months now, I’ve been hearing stories of how Agnew enjoys nothing more than sitting in his large DfE office going through MAT trustee board minutes and budgets, then demanding to see whoever was in charge. He also likes to hold very regular meetings with groups of MAT CEOs.

This hands-on management style was, I understand, one of the chief reasons behind the decision of Sir David Carter, the national schools commissioner, to step down from the DfE in the summer.

To be fair, Agnew, together with Dame Rachel de Souza, set up one of the more successful, if hugely controversial, MATs in the country. But this does not necessarily justify this “command and control” approach (the words of one MAT CEO) to management.

It is clear that Agnew, who made hundreds of millions in the private sector before setting out to fix schooling in Norfolk, does genuinely think he might be better at running the nation’s schools than those currently doing the job.

One Westminster insider put it like this: “He wants to be chair of the board for every MAT in the country.”

It is not without irony that Agnew, a Conservative politician and long-term Michael Gove supporter, appears to be so unenthusiastic about the autonomy that academies were supposed to enjoy as a result of years of Conservative reform.

Ed Dorrell is head of content at Tes