Prospective MP Nick Boles is a founder and former director of influential Policy Exchange think tank. He’s got great contacts in the Tory party and is hotly tipped to be a future minister.

A long-time Cameron supporter, Nick Boles is a prominent member of the Tory leader's Notting Hill set. He's played a significant role in the party's intellectual renaissance while running Policy Exchange, and is currently heading the Conservatives’ implementation team with Francis Maude MP. Having worked together to launch Policy Exchange back in 2002, Boles and the modernising Maude are now hammering out how the party will run the country and implement policy if it wins power.

After the prerequisite politics, philosophy and economics degree from Oxford, (where he became friends with Michael Gove MP), Boles became an investment banker. He quit City life and founded Longwall Holdings, a business that manufactured paintbrushes and decorating tools for DIY retailers such as B&Q. One of Longwall's investors was Old Etonian Sebastian James, a Bullingdon contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson. James and Boles also started another company, Classicforum, an online marketplace for collectors of rare books, which was bought by rival Alibris in 2001. [1] [2] [3]

By 2001 Boles was looking for more. After co-authoring A Blue Tomorrow, a collection of essays by young Tories, with his friends Ed Vaizey (now an MP) and Michael Gove (shadow schools and children’s secretary), he joined Francis Maude and Gove in 2002 to set up new centre-right think tank, Policy Exchange. [4]

Tony Blair's New Labour – greatly admired by many young, ambitious Tories – had its own think tanks in Demos and the IPPR. David Cameron and George Osborne wanted their own, and Policy Exchange was the perfect vehicle. When Cameron launched his challenge to become Tory leader in June 2005, he did so at Policy Exchange's HQ. The think tank's subsequent influence on the new-look Tory party and its policies has coincided with David Cameron's own personal rise in popularity. Profiles - [5] [6]

Ties between the Conservatives and Policy Exchange were reinforced by the number of former think tank staff or supporters who went on to take roles within the Conservative party. Boris Johnson hired Boles (who had himself hoped to be Tory mayoral candidate until he contracted Hodgkin's lymphoma) as chief of staff for his transition team, and Munira Murza, a Policy Exchange author, as his arts and culture adviser. And when Boles moved on to take up his new policy role at Conservative Central Office, he was replaced at City Hall by his successor as director of Policy Exchange, Anthony Browne.

Policy Exchange's former research chief, James O'Shaughnessy, is now heading research and policy for Cameron at Tory HQ. Both the Conservative party and Policy Exchange have subsequently worked to distance themselves from each other to avoid accusations of political bias and jeopardising the think tank's charitable status. [7]

Frustratingly for Boles, he's one of the few members of the Notting Hill set to have still not secured his place as a member of parliament. As the prospective Tory candidate for Grantham and Stamford (Margaret Thatcher's former home), a win would be significant and symbolic for the Tories, not least because Boles is openly gay. [8] [9]