Nicholas Boles

Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles (born 2 November 1965), known as Nick Boles, is a right-wing activist and a former Director of Policy Exchange.

Boles's biography on the Policy Exchange website in 2001 stated:

Nicholas Boles is the director of Policy Exchange. He was born in 1965. He read PPE at Magdalen College, Oxford and won a Kennedy Scholarship to study for a master's in public policy at the Kennedy School, Harvard University. In 1995, Nicholas founded Longwall Holdings, a small group of manufacturing businesses supplying the DIY industry; he remains non-executive chairman of Longwall. In 1998, he was elected to Westminster City Council as a representative of the West End ward. He served as chairman of Westminster's Housing Committee from 1999 to 2001. In early 2002, Nicholas acted as associate producer of the West End production of The Mysteries.

Boles states on his official website that before setting up his DIY business he 'worked for a few years in Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe, helping state-owned industries prepare for private ownership.' On his time at Policy Exchange he states:

My biggest achievement in politics so far has been to set up and run Policy Exchange, which is now the largest and most influential policy research institute on the centre right. While I was its director, Policy Exchange devised policies to make police forces more accountable to local people, to expand the number of places in good schools and to give local communities incentives to build more houses. We also exposed the activities of Islamic extremists in some mosques in the UK and their effect on the attitudes of young British Muslims. Many of our ideas have been adopted by the Conservative Party under David Cameron.

Affiliations

• Policy Exchange, former director
• Henry Jackson Society Project for Democratic Geopolitics, signatory of statement of principles