Kevin Hollinrake has been MP for Thirsk and Malton since 2015 and is now chairman of the Conservative Party. He is one of the more substantial people his party has, which makes the company he keeps in its leadership all the more striking.

He made himself before politics. He helped found the Hunters estate agency in York in 1992 and built it into a chain of more than a hundred branches, floated on the stock market by 2015. He came to Parliament a businessman rather than a researcher, and he used the experience on the cause that defines him. Leading the all party group on fair business banking, he spent years exposing how the banks treated small firms after the financial crisis, above all the scandal of Royal Bank of Scotland's restructuring division, which pushed thousands of viable businesses to the wall. When the regulator produced a report he judged a whitewash, he said so. It was real scrutiny of real power, the kind backbenchers are supposed to do and rarely manage.

As the minister for postal affairs he handled the compensation for the subpostmasters wrongly convicted in the Post Office Horizon scandal, and he took through the Commons the 2024 act that quashed those convictions en masse, an extraordinary and necessary use of the law. He was on the right side of one of the great injustices of the age, and he did something about it.

In 2016 he was among the landlords in Parliament who voted down a requirement that rented homes be fit for human habitation, an interest voting against the interest of tenants. In 2020, as Marcus Rashford campaigned to feed hungry children through the school holidays, Hollinrake tweeted that it was a parent's job to feed their children, the kind of line that tells you where the instinct goes when the cameras are not on the Post Office. And the compensation he oversaw, for all the legislation, was criticised by the wronged as slow and hedged with conditions.

In 2024 he held Thirsk and Malton with a majority of 7,550, Labour in second. In July 2025 Kemi Badenoch made him party chairman, handing the man with the strongest independent record on her benches the job of defending a party at its lowest ebb in living memory.

Hollinrake is that unusual thing, a Conservative with a business he actually built and a campaign that actually mattered, and the Horizon work is to his lasting credit. He is also a reminder that a good record on the things you choose to champion can sit beside a hard edge on the things you do not, and that the reward for being one of your party's few genuine assets is to be sent out to defend its collapse.