Former estate agency boss fails in attempt to become Tory leader

A Conservative MP who established one of the UK’s best-known estate agencies has not made it onto his party’s list of candidates for the now looming leadership race.

A week ago Kevin Hollinrake (pictured), founder of Hunters, had been tipped to be one of the six or seven candidates for the Conservative top job, but wasn’t included in the final six yesterday after the deadline passed at lunchtime.

Those are Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, former housing secretary Robert Jenrick and Priti Patel.

All had to find ten MPs to be nominate them for the leadership and will now campaign before an initial election in September which will whittle the field down to four, followed by another vote at Tory party conference in September that will pick the final duo. The party membership will then vote for these two candidates.

Business minister

Hollinrake had been predicted to make at least the first list after an impressive performance as Minister and Permanent Under-secretary of State at the Department for Business over the past two years, and was appointed Shadow Business Secretary. Nevertheless, Hollinrake says whoever wins the competition must win back the trust over the voters.

“It’s the most important thing. I mean I think we lost in amongst the voting public generally, not universally, was trust,” he says. “People have said ‘well, you’ve had 14 years of certain things you haven’t delivered’ and we can argue that to a certain extent, but there are some things we hadn’t delivered on properly such as migration.

“I think we should give it a little bit of time rather than rushing to a new leader today, we’ll give a few months and hopefully settle on a new leader back end of this year, probably October or November time, so yes, hugely important we pick the right person and the person that will command the trust of the British people.”