You can see why Daniel Zeichner, Defra’s Minister of State for Food Security and Rural Affairs, declined two invitations to appear on BBC Radio 4’s early morning Farming Today on Thursday and Friday.

He would have had to explain why his boss Steve Reed, the Secretary of State, said late last year that the Government had “no intention” of changing the inheritance tax (IHT) regime for Britain’s farmers – when unfortunately for Reed, that’s just what the Chancellor Rachel Reeves did in her budget on Wednesday.

Reed’s “broken promise” is just one reason why Reeves’s announcement that farmers’ estates of more than £1m would from April 2026 no longer be exempt from IHT has infuriated the National Farmers Union (NFU) – not to mention Jeremy Clarkson – and so too many of its members.

Farmers fear that the reduction, outlined in the Budget, of the three-decade-old Agricultural Protection Relief (APR) on IHT from 100 to 50 percent will, at best, force many to sell productive land if they are to pass on their farms to their sons or daughters, and at worst make it impossible to do so at........

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