An eye on career progression or a messenger from Number 10?

Well-connected Tory backbencher Nick Boles used a lunchtime fringe to continue the public remoulding of his political views by airing views on immigration more suited to the true blues of Lincolnshire than the Notting Hill dinner party circuit.

A long-term confidante of party leader David Cameron, Boles - who is also a former flatmate of education secretary Michael Gove - has been seen by some in the party as too metropolitan and too modernising for his own good.

However, Boles has got the Daily Mail purring with a chapter on immigration in his' recently published book Which Way is Up, and at today's Hansard Society fringe exploring the role of an MP, Boles focused on the subject again.

Telling the audience that time spent in his Grantham and Stamford constituency has "matured" his views, Boles explained that his constituents' "fair-minded approach to immigration has "evolved my view...to a place where I am true to myself and my constituents".

In calling for an arbitrary cap on immigration, Boles is chiming in perfectly with the mood of many in the party who feel that the Cameroonian modernisation project - and the party's alliance with the Liberal Democrats - has shut down debate on controversial issues such as immigration.

Boles is ambitious for a government job, but as a modernising insider, an early promotion would be a source of considerable grumbling. By reopening the immigration debate, Boles is either floating ideas for Cameron - a charge he denies - or making himself a little more palatable to the Tories of the shires.

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