Exclusive:Kevin Hollinrake interview special: 'I once thought becoming an MP was biggest mistake of my life'

But when he first entered Parliament, he recalled that “he really hated it”.

“I felt way outside my comfort zone,” Mr Hollinrake tells me, in front of a warm fire in The Star Inn in Harome, North Yorkshire.

“It was just completely different from anything else I had ever done.

“I’d never been a councillor, I’d never been near Parliament really. I knew none of the protocols, I knew none of the people.

“In fact, I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life doing this job in the first place.”

Safe to say now, Mr Hollinrake has no regrets, although it’s clear he still feels more comfortable in a North Yorkshire village than in the panelled walls of Westminster.

As we walk through Harome with his excitable dog Zuzu, everyone seems to him.

The postie stops by to check where the parcel is he needs to pick up, before a former business associate buys a round of drinks in the pub.

Ironically, the current Conservative Party Chairman tells me that it was actually discussions around communism that first got him interested in politics.

At his childhood home in Easingwold, where his father worked, first as a hill farmer and then a milkman, and his mother as a social worker, the family would debate current affairs around the kitchen table.

When Mr Hollinrake was 12 or 13, his sister would return from university, where she was studying politics, to discuss different political systems.

“We would talk about marxism, communism, she was a bit radical back then,” he says.

“My dad wasn’t into this kind of stuff,” Mr Hollinrake laughs, “he was a small business kind of guy.

“They would have these debates. My mum and dad were always keen to involve us and get our views, and that’s what spawned it really.

“I always thought that one day, if the business is in the right place I’ll give it a go.”

Mr Hollinrake’s business is the almost ubiquitous Hunters Estate Agents, which he co-founded with John Waterhouse in 1992 with a first shop in Goodramgate, York.

It has had several tumultuous moments, having to survive the impact of Black Wednesday very early on.

In 2007, when Mr Hollinrake was a Conservative candidate for the first time, in Dewsbury, the financial crisis hit and he chose to get Hunters back on its feet.

“Some people were saying the business is buggered, pack the business in and go into politics,” he tells me.

“I just couldn’t do that - to go into Parliament on the back of a failed business enterprise.”

Hunters had to make almost three-quarters of the staff redundant to stay afloat: “A lot of those people you’re laying off you’ve worked with for a long time.”

He says it’s the only time in his life he’s felt stressed. “I think some people confuse being busy with being stressed,” Mr Hollinrake says, “but I felt stressed then.

“It had some physical manifestations - one of two scabs on my face appeared, and there’s no reason other than stress.

“It’s your life’s work and your own sense of achievement, credibility.”

Thankfully the business recovered, and once again it is thriving. Ahead of the 2015 election, his home seat of Thirsk and Malton came up, and he ran and won.

After a “bewildering” first few years, Mr Hollinrake is now a central figure in Westminster life.

He thinks his experiences at Hunters really helped set him up for success in Parliament.

“Anyone who’s thinking of going into politics, you need something to fall back on,” he says.

“You need something to give you a sense of who you are and what you know, to get more credibility in the House [of Commons] so people will listen to you.

“I think it’s important to have done something, and for me it was business.”

This led to him helping victims of the RBS and HBOS banking scandals, which then in turn on to the Post Office scandal.

First, he started speaking up in the House of Commons about Lee Castleton, a Yorkshire sub-postmaster who was bankrupted over Fujitsu’s faulty accounting software.

Then he was made Post Office Minister in October 2022, with Kemi Badenoch as Business Secretary, and dealt with the aftermath of the ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

“I was in tears watching it and I knew what had happened, and I knew the ending,” he says.

“People who didn’t must have been totally shocked by the whole thing.”

Mr Hollinrake brought his experience of previous financial scandals to create large fixed-sum compensation payments, to speed up the process.

He’s generally highly regarded by the victims for his astonishing work ethic, with one former sub-postmaster telling me he contacted Mr Hollinrake at 1am only to get a response at 4am.

Since the 2024 general election, which saw a disastrous defeat for the Conservatives, Mr Hollinrake has continued to stick by his former boss, with Mrs Badenoch appointing him as Chair of the Conservative Party.

He says he is “not a sycophant for Kemi, but I do think she’s the best person to run this country because she’s totally authentic”.

He says he never saw any alleged bullying, which Mrs Badenoch was accused of by staff in the Department for Business and Trade, but said “she can be bloody direct”.

“Both in front of the cameras and off-camera she’s the same person.

“She’s got a good sense of humour, but if there’s an issue you’ll know it. In Yorkshire, that’s what we like up here.”

Mr Hollinrake believes this can help tackle some of the growing apathy and disenchantment in politics.

“The biggest worry I have is people genuinely questioning whether democracy can work, which is scary,” he tells me

“I don’t want to move to an autocratic system. We’ve got to make sure people have some confidence this system can be run properly.

“I can sit here all day long and criticise Labour, but there are some very big demographic challenges we are facing.”

Mr Hollinrake says Reform are likely to be the beneficiaries of this, and he has had one high-profile recent run in with Nigel Farage and co.

When the Brexiteer released a Reform UK black football shirt, Mr Hollinrake tweeted comparing it to a golden badge on a Nazi uniform.

Mr Farage accused the Thirsk and Malton MP of “inciting violence”, however he tells me he was just cracking a joke.

“I didn’t come into politics to offend anyone, so if someone thinks I was saying every Reform voter is a Nazi or something, then that’s not what I was saying at all,” he says.

“I was poking a bit of a jab in the ribs really to Nigel Farage, who I think sometimes his judgement is off the mark.”

Mr Hollinrake now has three-and-a-half years to try and reel in Mr Farage, who continues to lead in the polls.