Nick Timothy

Nick Timothy is a British political adviser. As of 2016, he is Joint Downing Street Chief of Staff to prime minister Theresa May, serving alongside Fiona Hill.

A native of Birmingham, Timothy's father was a steel worker. He attended a grammar school and then the University of Sheffield. He has supported conservative philosophies as benefiting poorer people and argued that the Conservative party must focus on benefiting everyone; he has cited as his inspiration in politics the Birmingham-born Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain and has also written a short biography of him for the Conservative History Group.

Timothy was a special adviser to Theresa May when she was Secretary of State at the Home Office before spending some years as Director of the New Schools Network. He took an unpaid sabbatical from this position to work on May's 2016 leadership campaign, and was appointed Joint Chief of Staff on 14 July 2016. He also wrote a series of columns for ConservativeHome in 2015-16.

In 2015, Timothy wrote an article to express his worry that People's Republic of China was effectively buying Britain's silence on allegations of Chinese human rights abuse and opposed China's involvement in sensitive sectors such as the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station. He criticised David Cameron and George Osborne of "selling our national security to China" without rational concerns and "the Government seems intent on ignoring the evidence and presumably the advice of the security and intelligence agencies." He warned that security experts are worried the Chinese could use their role in the programme (designing and constructing nuclear reactor) to build weaknesses into computer systems which allow them to shut down Britain's energy production at will and "no amount of trade and investment should justify allowing a hostile state easy access to the country's critical national infrastructure." He was rated by the Health Service Journal as the fifth most influential person in the English NHS in 2016.

Timothy voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 membership referendum. He is a supporter of Aston Villa.