Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you, if you want, on his conversations with fascinating people.

We're delighted to say that joining us today is the member of Parliament for Mansfield, Ben Bradley and Pete. Welcome to Trigonometry.

Hi. How are you doing?

It's good to have you on the show, man. We're excited as we were just talking before we started.

We don't ever have serving politicians on the show. We've made one or two exceptions in the past for people that we thought actually would speak their mind and be direct and honest about stuff.

So hopefully we can get you cancelled in the process of this interview.

Many people have tried. I'm just pleased to be described as fascinating. I'm happy with that. I can go now.

Well, listen, for anyone who doesn't know you and doesn't know who you are and what your background is, you became the first conservative MP for Mansfield since 1885.

You are quite a lot younger than both Francis and I. So you're quite remarkable in a few different ways.

You've done all sorts of jobs in your past. Just tell everybody a little bit about who are you? How are you where you are?

What is the journey that brings you to where you are now, which is sitting here talking to us?

Yeah, sure. It was almost an accident to be honest. As you say, Mansfield's never had a conservative MP.

It's liberal and before Labour in the early 1920s. So it's a bit of a shift politically. Was there a proper kind of hard core Labour coal field territory?

Personally, I always wanted to be a PE teacher. I went to uni to be a PE teacher and in the end, kind of changed my mind and dropped out and worked as a landscape gardener, worked at Aldi and Frankie and Benny's and other places and decided in the end to go back and do something that wouldn't railroad me down a particular route, something kind of broad at uni and pick politics, which very effectively railroaded me down a particular route.

And then actually fell out with my council about the bins. It got me really grumpy. He did look like the kind of guy who's there on the Tuesday morning.

Toe, come on, bins. Absolutely. That was me at the age of like 21 and ends up doing this petition around getting all the little old ladies on my estate riled up about the bins and decided to stand for council and never look back really. Just kind of fell in love with it.

I mean, what a story been. It's all started with the bins. I mean, that's what people get passionate about. When people talk about local council and local politics, it's inevitably the bins.

But you're in the conservative party. Now the conservative party had this massive win at the general election. And you saw seats like yours turn away from Labour. Why do you think that is?

It's a good one for a long time. And the shifts. If you look at it since 1997, months before was 18,000 Labour majority then it came down to 11 and 865 and went conservative in 2017.

And then this time, you know, I had 1000 majority then it's 16 and a half now. So it's a big old shift. And it's been happening as a say since since then. So if you look at not just Corbin, not just Brexit, those things kind of accelerated it.

But actually, it's the cultural shift, you know, for all the history of Labour voting, very unionized industries, really everybody voted Labour.

They've always been kind of small sea conservative when it comes to culture and values.

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