Nicholas Edward Coleridge Boles was born in 1965, the youngest (and tallest) in a large family of six children and has fourteen nephews and nieces. He was brought up in the countryside and his parents live on the 300-acre family sheep farm in Devon where his step-mother runs the village shop.

After school, he spent almost a year teaching English and bible studies at a small Methodist secondary school in the middle of the bush in Zimbabwe. He was a scholar at Winchester College before studying PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) at Magdalen College, Oxford, winning a Kennedy Scholarship for a Master's degree in Public Policy at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He then worked for a few years in Germany, Russia and Eastern Europe, helping state-owned industries prepare for private ownership and in 1995 founded a small DIY supply business, Longwall Holdings Limited, one of the UK's leading suppliers of paint brushes, rollers and decorating tools to the DIY industry, of which he is non-executive chairman, having served as the chief executive until 2000 and the business is now part of a larger European group.

In 1998, he was elected to Westminster City Council for the West End ward comprising Mayfair and Soho and served as chairman of the housing committee from 1999-2001, before stepping down in 2002. During much of this time, Boles shared a flat 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, an influential 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. During his tenure Policy Exchange became one of the most influential think tanks in the country, especially after David Cameron was elected Conservative Party leader in 2005.

Boles was the Conservative Party candidate for the Labour-held marginal seat of Hove for the May 2005 general election and received some media attention during that year by being an openly gay Conservative candidate for a winnable constituency but in the event, Celia Barlow retained the seat for Labour and the share of the Tory 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.

He recovered from his illness and in October 2007 was selected as the prospective candidate to contest Grantham and Stamford at the next election after the sitting member, Quentin Davies, had switched allegiance to Labour earlier that year. In May 2008, he was appointed as the Chief of Staff for the new Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, for a period of three months and in the latter half of 2008, he started work on preparing the Conservatives for potential government by meeting senior civil servants to discuss how to implement Tory policies if they won the next general election.

Boles is a member of the Cambridge-based think tank the Henry Jackson Society which advocates a pro-active approach to the spread of liberal democracy in the world. The think tank is linked to many influential American neo-conservatives and its members have been enthusiastic supporters of U S President George W Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq.

He currently lives in the constituency in a small cottage next to the church in Wyville near Grantham.

Boles is openly gay and in May 2011 he entered into a civil partnership with his Israeli partner, Shay Meshulam, at in Camberwell, London. Then in August 2012, it was revealed that he had claimed expenses for Hebrew lessons on the grounds that he "could talk to his civil partner". Boles was quoted as saying “It is something I am entitled to do. I’ve done it and that’s that.” But his actions incurred criticism from the Taxpayer's Alliance which suggested that he had abused his position as an M P  "in order to make conversation around the breakfast table a little easier".

In September 2012, Boles was appointed Minister of State for Planning in the autumn cabinet reshuffle by the Prime Minister, David Cameron. He told The Local newspaper (September 8th): “It is a pretty daunting prospect but an exciting one and I am ready to crack on with it. We have got two and a half years until the next general election and we have a lot to get done.”

See also Quentin Davies