Born into a well-established Anglo-Jewish family, he was educated at
Eton College and
Christ Church, Oxford, and is the 3rd
Baronet of Tangley Hill, a title he inherited upon the death of his uncle,
Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft in 1988. Magnus had a four-decade career in finance in the City of London, and acting as a senior adviser at the
investment banking firm
Evercore. He served as Deputy Chairman of the
National Trust between 2005 and 2013. In September 2013, he was appointed chairman of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England by
Secretary of State for Culture Maria Miller, and was tasked with dividing the organisation into two:
Historic England, which retained the statutory and protection functions, and the new
English Heritage Trust, a charity On 22 December 2022, he was appointed by Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak to the role of
Independent Adviser on Ministers' Interests, following
Christopher Geidt, who had stepped down from the position in June 2022. The role is a non-renewable five-year appointment. On 5 September 2025, his report found that
Angela Rayner, the
Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, had broken the Ministerial Code after she was found to have failed to pay enough
stamp duty on the purchase of a property in
Hove. She subsequently resigned from
the Cabinet on the basis of this report. ==References==