1. Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles was born on 2 November 1965 and is a British politician who was the Member of Parliament for Grantham and Stamford from 2010 to 2019.
38 Facts About Nick Boles
1. 2.
Nick Boles was a member of the Conservative Party until 2019.
3.
Nick Boles was elected to the Grantham and Stamford constituency in Lincolnshire at the 2010 general election.
4.
Nick Boles served as Minister of State for Skills from 2014 to 2016.
5.
Nick Boles resigned from his local Conservative Association on 16 March 2019 citing differences with his local party.
6.
Nick Boles was born on 2 November 1965, the son of Sir Jack Nick Boles, who was later Director-General of the National Trust from 1975 to 1983.
7.
Nick Boles is the great-nephew of Conservative MP Dennis Boles.
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Nick Boles was privately educated at Winchester College before studying philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford where he was an undergraduate student at Magdalen College, Oxford.
9.
Nick Boles then was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to study for a master's in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
10.
In 1995, Nick Boles founded a small DIY supply business, Longwall Holdings Limited, of which he is the non-executive chairman, having served as its chief executive until 2000.
11.
Nick Boles was chairman of the council's housing committee from 1999 to 2001, before stepping down in 2002.
12.
Nick Boles was considered one of a group of young Conservatives, aligned with David Cameron and George Osborne, described as the Notting Hill set.
13.
Nick Boles founded the think tank Policy Exchange in 2002, and served as its director until leaving the organisation in 2007.
14.
Nick Boles was the Conservative Party candidate for the Labour-held marginal seat of Hove for the 2005 general election.
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Nick Boles shunned help from the local mainly older Conservative members and instead relied on younger people from London who had little rapport with the local electorate.
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Nick Boles received media attention during the election by being an openly gay Conservative candidate for a winnable seat.
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Nick Boles was a candidate in the Conservative primary for the 2008 London mayoral election, but withdrew after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.
18.
Nick Boles recovered from his illness, and in October 2007, was selected as the prospective Conservative candidate for Grantham and Stamford, then occupied by Quentin Davies, who had switched allegiance from the Conservatives to Labour earlier in 2007.
19.
In May 2008, Nick Boles was appointed as the Chief of Staff for the new Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson for three months.
20.
Nick Boles was elected as member for Grantham and Stamford in May 2010 with a majority of 14,826.
21.
Nick Boles was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Schools Minister Nick Gibb in 2010.
22.
Nick Boles was Minister for Planning between November 2012 and August 2014.
23.
Nick Boles introduced a "presumption for sustainable development" aimed at making new housing development easier, which required councils to create local plans identifying areas that were suitable for further building.
24.
In October 2016, Nick Boles announced that a cancerous tumour had been found in his head and he expected to undergo treatment soon.
25.
Nick Boles announced in April 2017 he would be standing at the 2017 general election.
26.
On 1 April 2019, Nick Boles resigned from the Conservative Party following the announcement of the results of the second round of indicative votes on exiting the European Union.
27.
Nick Boles subsequently described himself as sitting as an "Independent Progressive Conservative" until parliament was dissolved on 6 November 2019.
28.
In 2010, Nick Boles argued that the coalition government was the true inheritor of Blairism, and called for former Labour Cabinet ministers - David Miliband, James Purnell and Andrew Adonis - to join the government.
29.
Later that year, Nick Boles called for the coalition to remain until after 2015 in the form of an electoral pact.
30.
Nick Boles has called for the forming of a "national liberal" faction within the Conservative Party, formed of social liberals with fiscally conservative views, and suggested some Conservative candidates might benefit from running for election under that name to win over voters who did not consider themselves conservatives.
31.
In July 2012, Nick Boles used a speech at the Resolution Foundation think tank to call for:.
32.
Nick Boles supported the Remain campaign in the European Union membership referendum in 2016.
33.
Nick Boles did not stand as a candidate in the 12 December 2019 election.
34.
Nick Boles endorsed the Liberal Democrats in the 2019 election, but then revealed that he had in fact voted for the Greens.
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Nick Boles had previously stated that he flirted with joining the Labour Party under Blair, but said he wanted to be on the liberal wing of a party instead of the hard-nosed, right-wing of a party.
36.
In September 2022, Nick Boles wrote an article in The Guardian, criticising Liz Truss's government and saying that "Labour is the only party that can lead us out of this mess".
37.
Nick Boles is a senior adviser at FMA, or Francis Maude Associates, a consulting firm founded by Francis Maude and Simone Finn in 2016.
38.
Nick Boles is gay, and entered a civil partnership in May 2011.