by They say you can tell a lot about a man by his shoes. This week, angry British farmers are judging Steve Reed for his. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is not that kind of man. Instead, according to reports this week, Reed is favoring leather-lined Le Chameau “Chasseur” boots, “handcrafted by a single master-maker”, or so their info says, and priced at a whopping £420.
Reed doesn’t need to dip into his own pocket. Among the directors of Le Chameau is none other than Labour’s most generous donor, Lord Alli, who has given thousands of pounds to Labor ministers, especially the Prime Minister.
Reed’s boots were reportedly a gift from Alli, continuing the pair’s recent history of donning Labor Party outfits. At the time the boots were claimed to be granted they cost £270, just below the £300 threshold for registration for the benefit of the members.
For farmers furious at Rachel Reeves’ Budget this week, which promises to raise inheritance tax (IHT) for thousands of farmers, while keeping the overall agricultural budget balanced, Reed’s boots have become a symbol of a Government in isolation completely from rural reality.
“You’ll never see a farmer wearing £400 wellies, because we’re getting them covered in mud every day,” says Aled Thomas, a farmer and Conservative councilor in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
“How can the MP for Streatham (Reed’s South London constituency) know anything about what is going on deep in rural Wales or England? There is this disconnect between the reality on the ground and what people are going through and what happens inside the M25. Steve didn’t help himself. People feel insulted.”
Bethan Holt, the telegraphand fashion director, says Reed’s Le Chameau wellies are far from the classic farmer’s choice.
“Le Chameaus are undoubtedly great wellies but they won’t have scored Reed any authenticity points with the farmers,” she says. “They are more of a label associated with Princess of Wales and polished Cotswolds varieties. The City boy is about them, when dung was better. A pair of £50 Dunlops would have done the trick.”
“These are not the kind of wellies a farmer would wear,” says Andrew Court, a farmer from Staffordshire. “Anything over £100 isn’t really suitable for farming, it’s for driving your Chelsea tractor, that sort of thing. Maybe wearing expensive wellies like that didn’t put much thought into it. If you want to make the right impression with people, you probably want a more down-to-earth well.”
This is not the only way that Reed, 60, does not fit the stereotypical profile of a farming secretary. He was brought up in St Albans, studied English in Sheffield and worked in educational publishing for most of his career. In 2006 he became leader of Lambeth Council in south London. Together with Morgan McSweeney, now Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Reed worked to wrest control of the council back from the hard Left. The two men later founded Labor Together, along with Jon Cruddas and Lisa Nandy, a think-tank designed to help oppose Corbynism and which played a key role in Starmer’s election as leader.
Reed’s background is in street-fighting, inner-city politics. He was elected MP for Croydon and Streatham North in 2012. Since then, he is best known for successfully campaigning for police attending mental hospitals to wear body cameras when restraining patients . In 2020, he was in the news for labeling Jewish businessman Richard Desmond as a “puppet master” on social media. He destroyed his post after learning Desuman was Jewish.
In an interview last month, Reed spoke of his pride in fighting the hard Left in south London. “Lambeth was taken over by the hard left and we won it back,” he said The Rising. “We knew what they were and how to beat them.”
In his Defra core practice, he said he was focused on moving farming towards a more environmental model. No changes to IHT were mentioned.
“There is a need to shift farming to a more nature-positive farming model,” he said. “But we should be working with farmers who understand that transition, because they have already done it, and then supporting them to engage with other farmers, so that you get a transition model that is led by farmers.”
Such platitudes are hollow. In her first Budget on Wednesday, Reeves announced radical reforms to inheritance tax relief on farmland. From April 2026, combined business and agricultural assets over £1 million will be subject to an effective IHT rate of 20 per cent. Farming groups reacted furiously, especially as Labor said before the general election that it would not change the relief.
“Labor has given repeated assurances over the past 12 months that it would not affect inheritance tax relief, and its decision to rip the rug from farmers is now in full swing,” said Victoria Vyvyan, president of Tire Tire and Business Association (CLA), in a statement.
The CLA has said that they will be making urgent representations on behalf of 70,000 farms that they believe will be affected by the changes. “This dynamites British farming livelihoods,” she said, “and works against growth and investment.”
For some, this is the latest injustice in decades of policies, from successive governments, which have made farming in Britain more unviable as a way of life.
“It’s the last straw and a kick in the teeth,” says David Exwood, farmer and vice-president of the NFU. “Anger has been simmering for some time. They promised not to contact APR (agricultural property relief). If you make a promise, you should keep it. And they have broken it, 115 days into the Government. They have broken their trust with the farming community.
“Either they didn’t think about it, or they thought about it and thought ‘we don’t care, we’re doing it anyway’.”
If nothing else, picking a fight with the farmers would be in line with Reed’s reputation as the kind of politician who has no interest in cutting back, especially after his fight against Corbynism in Lambeth. On his current path, he’s sure to find one.
The NFU has already planned a protest in Westminster on November 19, and thousands of farmers are expected to attend from across the country to make their anger felt. To judge from the response this week, we can only be months – perhaps weeks – away from the British version of hawk gilets protests that brought life to a halt in France, when angry farmers blocked the roads with tractors and bales of hay.
“Farmers are not going to let this fall,” says Exwood. “If the Government is smart, they will respond to it quickly and announce a consultation or a change of course.”
If Reed doesn’t change his mind, his £420 “Chasseurs” may not be the only footwear causing him grief. That will be the peak of thousands of angry farmers from all over the country as they descend on Westminster to urge him to walk.
