Nickie Aiken
Nicola Jane "Nickie" Aiken is a British Conservative Party politician serving as the Member of Parliament for Cities of London and Westminster since 2019. Previously a councillor on Westminster City Council, she served as leader of the borough from 2017 to 2020.Biography
Aiken first moved to London in 1997. In 2006, she was elected as a Conservative councillor for Westminster City Council, representing Warwick ward.
Aiken voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum. Despite this, she went on to support Boris Johnson's Brexit deal. She was the leader of Westminster City Council from January 2017 to January 2020, during which time a number of terrorist attacks took place in the city.
In early December 2019, she left Twitter, calling it "toxic". She has since returned to the social networking site. As of 2019, Aiken has lived in Pimlico for 20 years. She is married to civil servant Alex Aiken, the UK Government's communications chief. They have two children. From 2000 to 2012, Alex was director of communications and strategy for Westminster City Council, and before that he worked for the Conservative Party as head of its campaigns unit and its press office.
Aiken was selected as the Conservative Party's candidate for the Central London seat of Cities of London and Westminster to fight the 2019 general election. She defeated the Labour Party's Gordon Nardell and Chuka Umunna, the Liberal Democrat candidate who had left the Labour Party in protest against Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. She received 3,953 more votes than her nearest competitor, Umunna. This represented an increase in the majority held by the constituency's previous MP.
In Parliament, she is a member of the Women and Equalities Committee. She continues to serve as a Warwick councillor in her constituency. Outside of politics, Aiken is a company director at Sprucespace Property Management. She has also worked for the Public Relations and Communications Association in media relations and crisis communications.
