Career
Boles was a scholar at Winchester College before studying PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford, then winning a Kennedy Scholarship to study for a Master's in Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
In 1995, he 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 for the West End ward comprising Mayfair and Soho. He was chairman of the Housing Committee from 1999 to 2001, before stepping down in 2002. During much of this time, Boles flatshared 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' a group of relatively young Conservatives. He founded the think tank Policy Exchange in 2002 and served as the Director until leaving the organisation in 2007 to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
Boles was the Conservative Party candidate for the Labour-held marginal seat of Hove for the May 2005 general election. He received some media attention during 2005 election by being an openly gay Conservative candidate for a winnable seat. However, Celia Barlow retained the seat for Labour. The share of the Conservative vote fell by 2% in this target marginal constituency. He was a candidate in the Conservative primary for the London mayoral election, 2008, but withdrew after being diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma.
Boles recovered from his illness and in October 2007 was selected as the prospective Conservative candidate to contest Grantham and Stamford, the seat previously occupied by Quentin Davies, who switched allegiance from the Conservatives to Labour earlier in 2007. In May 2008, he was appointed as the Chief of Staff for the new Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson for a period of three months. In the later half of 2008 he started work on preparing the Conservatives for potential government by meeting senior civil servants to discuss how to implement Conservative policies if they won the next general election. He was elected as member for Grantham and Stamford on 6 May 2010 with a majority of 14,826 votes. He was appointed as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb in 2010.
Nick Boles is a member of the Cambridge-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society, which advocates a pro-active approach to the spread of democracy in the world. In 2012 Boles was listed as being a participant in that year's Bilderberg meeting.
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