Eric Pickles - Early Life

Early Life

Born in Keighley, Yorkshire, he went to Greenhead Grammar School (which became Greenhead High School and is now University Academy Keighley) on Greenhead Road in Utley, north Keighley, then attended Leeds Polytechnic. He was born into a Labour supporting family – his great grandfather was one of the founders of the Independent Labour Party, and described himself as "massively inclined" towards communism as a boy – but he joined the Conservative Party in 1968 after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.

Pickles soon became the chairman of the local Young Conservatives association and later became chairman of the national organisation.

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