Nick Edward Coleridge Boles (b1965)
NICHOLAS Edward Coleridge Boles was first elected as the Conservative MP for Grantham and Stamford in May 2011.
Brought up on a Devon sheep farm, he was a scholar at Winchester College before spending a year out in Zimbabwe teaching English and Bible studies.
He read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, then won a Kennedy Scholarship to study for a Master’s in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Nick spent the first 10 years of his career in business. He worked as a merchant banker for a few years in Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe, helping state owned industries prepare for private ownership.
In 1995, he co-founded a small DIY supply small business—Longwall Holdings Limited—of which he is non-executive chairman, having served as the chief executive until 2000.
In 1998, he was elected to Westminster City Council representing Mayfair and Soho.
During much of this time, Boles flat-shared with fellow Conservative activists Michael Gove and Ivan Massow. He and Gove, along with fellow Westminster Conservatives Ed Vaizey, David Cameron, George Osborne and Rachel Whetstone, are sometimes referred to as the ‘Notting Hill Set’ an influential group of relatively young Conservatives.
He founded the think tank Policy Exchange in 2002 and served as the Director until 2007.
He failed to win as Tory candidate for Labour-held marginal Hove for the 2005 General Election. He was a candidate in the Conservative primary for the London mayoral election, 2008, but withdrew through illness.
Boles was appointed as the Chief of Staff for the new Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson for a period of three months in 2008.
He is a member of the Cambridge-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society, which advocates a pro-active approach to the spread of liberal democracy in the world.
Following his election, he took a part-time job as a Political Fellow with the Institute for Government.
He was elected Grantham and Stamford MP in 2010 succeeding Quentin Davies, who had defetced to Labour before standing down.
In November that year, he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Nick Gibb MP, the Minister of State for Schools. He was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Planning in September 2012.
He became Minister of State jointly for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Department for Education in July 2014, and was particularly active in promoting apprenticeships.
He returned to the backbenches when Theresa May was appointed Prime Minister in 2016.
In May 2011 Boles entered a civil partnership with Israeli Shay Meshulam. They lived at Hungerton before moving to Stamford.
He angered many constituents in 2012 firstly by saying pensioners benefits such as heating allowances and TV licences should be means-tested. Then when it was disclosed he had spent £678.80 of taxpayers money to study Hebrew.
He was re-elected to the Grantham & Stamford seat in 2015 and again in 2017. Boles resigned from his local Conservative Association on 16 March 2019 citing differences with his local party.
On 1 April 2019, he resigned the party whip, accusing the party of failing to compromise on Brexit. He then sat as an Independent Progressive Conservative until the dissolution of parliament on 5 November.
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