Ms Page modelling in 1969. She later went on to become a Tory councillor before becoming a researcher for John Redwood. They would go on to have a five-year relationship
She is a former Vogue model and ex-partner of Tory MP Brexiteer John Redwood who was a Tory for 45 years and ran to be mayor of London.
But Nikki Page has ditched the party after being a member for 45 years and defected to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party over Theresa May’s failure to get the UK out of the EU.
The 63-year-old former Conservative councillor first hit the headlines when she had a five-year relationship with the MP for Wokingham in the early noughties after both of their marriages collapsed.
Now she has revealed that she has decamped from the political party she joined as an 18-year-old, with a blast at Theresa May’s leadership in the Daily Telegraph.
‘It was hard, but it isn’t my party any more,’ she said.
‘It no longer seems to represent strivers, the backbone of this country who work to make better lives for themselves and their families.
‘It doesn’t even seem remotely competent. I thought after the Referendum – when I spent my weekends delivering thousands of leaflets – that the Government would work towards Brexit.
‘But the Government has totally botched it. I’ve known Theresa May off and on since the 90s.
‘It was always incredibly difficult to know what she really believed in, but I am baffled by how she could get this so completely and utterly wrong.
‘No one out there trusts her any more.’
Ms Page said she will run for the Brexit Party in the European elections, standing in the West Midlands region her parents came from.
Ms Page with John Redwood arriving at a dinner organised by the 1922 Committee of Conservative peers and MPs in tribute to Baroness Thatcher in 2006.
Ms Page posing for the cameras in 2003, the year her relationship with Mr Redwood began. They split in 2008.
Theresa May in London today. Talking about Brexit, Ms Page said: ‘It was always incredibly difficult to know what she really believed in, but I am baffled by how she could get this so completely and utterly wrong’
Brexiteer Ms Page also claimed people were being made to feel ‘ashamed’ of having voted for Brexit and that voters were ‘equally furious’ with both the Conservatives and Labour.
‘It is clearly time for a major change, not a small change,’ she told the Telegraph.
‘You don’t have to be ashamed of having voted for Brexit.
‘We are suffocating in an atmosphere where people are frightened to say what they want to say, on campus, in Westminster or in the workplace.’
‘I was talking with a group of twentysomethings. I admitted that I was pro-Brexit.
;There was silence – I feared the worst. Then, one by one, these young people whispered that they were Brexiteers, too.
‘How can it be that they felt they couldn’t voice their real opinions?
‘Because of a smug Establishment that doesn’t understand what real people care about!’
Ms Page (third from left), then known as Nikki Woodhead, as a model in London in 1969. She has quit the Tories after 45 years to stand for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party
Nikki Page in her Fulham office in 2004. She said it was ‘clearly time for a major change, not a small change’ in politics
The then couple arrive for the Conservative Summer Party at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London, in July 2006 (left) and (right) at The Spectator Magazine Party in 2004
Thrice-married Ms Page began a relationship with the now 67-year-old MP Mr Redwood, a former secretary of state for Wales, in 2003.
It caused a storm as she was at the time his parliamentary chief of staff and both were married to other people.
However they both insisted that their marriages had broken down by the time they started dating. Ms Page told the Telegraph today: ‘If people didn’t know me, they should at least have recognised that John is utterly incapable of duplicity.’
It did not stop Mr Redwood’s wife Gail, to whom he was married for 29 years branding him ‘arrogant, utterly inhuman and capable of awful cruelty’.
Her husband, Al, said at the time he was ‘stunned’ to learn that his wife was having an affair with Mr Redwood.
Ms Page and her MP lover – who was nicknamed ‘The Vulcan’ because of his supposed similarity to Star Trek’s Mr Spock – would go on to have a five-year relationship, and were regularly pictured at Tory events.
But they eventually split in 2008, with friends said to have described the split as ‘amicable’.
Mr Redwood, who twice bid unsuccessfully to be Tory leader in the 1990s, went on to have a relationship with divorced accountant Susan Precious.
Ms Page ran to be the Tory candidate for mayor of London in 2002, on a platform of axing the position. She lost out to Stephen Norris, who was beaten by Ken Livingstone.
At the time she told the Guardian that ‘I was only a model for a year and I’ve been a businesswoman for 30 years’, adding: ‘I’m not an airhead. Don’t make me out to be one.’