Richard James Sunley Tice was born on 13 September 1964 in Farnham, Surrey, to hop farmer James A. Tice, of Teeton Hall, Hollowell, Northamptonshire, and the philanthropist and horse trainer Joan Mary Tice OBE, who died on 26 April 2019. He is a maternal grandson of the property developerBernard Sunley. His early education was at a prep school and then the independentUppingham School. Tice is the vice chair of trustees for the latter school. He subsequently received a bachelor's degree in construction economics and quantity surveying at the University of Salford.
Property career
After graduation in 1987, Tice reports that his first job was at the housing developer London and Metropolitan. This included time at their Paris office where he learnt French. He then started working for a housebuilding and commercial property company called The Sunley Group in 1991. Tice was its joint chief executive officer for 14 years before leaving the company in 2006. Tice then ran his own debt advisory consultancy before joining property investment group CLS Holdings in 2010. He led major planning property applications in Vauxhall, London. He was their CEO till 2014, during which time he tripled the share price. He left the company to become the CEO of property investment firm, Quidnet Capital Partners LLP.
Political career
Euroscepticism
Tice is a Eurosceptic. He was a director of the campaign group, Business for Sterling. It campaigned for the United Kingdom not to join the Euro currency in the late 1990s. Tice donated £1,750 to Eurosceptic MP David Davis' candidacy in the 2001 Conservative Party leadership election. In July 2015, Tice co-founded, with businessman Arron Banks, the pro-Brexit Leave.EU campaign group. It was originally known as The Know.EU before being rebranded in September of that year as Leave.EU. He also donated £38,000 to pro-Brexit campaign group Grassroots Out. Shortly after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in the June 2016 referendum, he left Leave.EU, and co-founded the pressure group Leave Means Leave. He co-chairs it with the businessman John Longworth. In October 2017, they were placed jointly at Number 90 on Iain Dale's list of the "Top 100 Most Influential People on the Right". Tice, Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore, Nigel Farage are sometimes referred to by sections of the media as the 'Bad Boys of Brexit', a group who facilitated Brexit. He has written a number of articles advocating for a No-deal Brexit. Tice was the first to use the phrase, 'no deal is better than a bad deal' in relation to Brexit in July 2016 which would later be used in then Prime Minister Theresa May's Lancaster House speech outlining the government's approach to negotiations in January 2017.
He is the chairman of the Brexit Party, a Eurosceptic political party which participated in the 2019 European parliamentary election and the 2019 U.K. general election. The Brexit Party was formed as an incorporated limited company on 23 Nov 2018, and Tice was appointed a director of it on 8 May 2019. In the election, it won 29 seats in the European Parliament. Tice also stood as a candidate. He was first on his party's list, and was elected as one of three of its MEPs in the East of England constituency. In the European Parliament, he was a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, and was part of the delegation for relations with Canada. Prior to joining the Brexit Party, he was a long term donor, and member of the Conservative Party. In November 2019, it was announced that he would stand as the Brexit Party candidate in Hartlepool in the 2019 general election. Tice came third in Hartlepool with 25.8% of the vote.
Education
Tice has been a member of the governing body of Northampton Academy in Northampton since 2004, and is also the vice chair of trustees at the independent Uppingham School. He wrote a 2008 report for the think tankReform called 'Academies: A model education?'. In 2017, Tice co-wrote a pamphlet for the think tank UK 2020, 'Timebomb: how the university cartel is failing Britain's students', which included recommendations on how to expand two-year degrees. Tice produced a follow-up report on student finances called 'Defusing the debt timebomb' which he sent to the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond.
Housing
A long-time contributor to the magazine Property Week, Tice is a regular commentator on developments within the property world. In a May 2018 article on the Conservative Home website, Tice argued for the importance of expanding the availability of homes for people on lower incomes and how this could be achieved more effectively. He felt that crime could also be reduced if housing was better managed.
Personal life
Tice is married and has three children. He began a relationship with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott in 2018 and separated from his wife in March 2019. In October 2019, openDemocracy revealed that two offshore companies had owned shares in Tice's family business, Sunley Family Limited, since 1994.
