How the Environment Secretary’s £420 wellies are fuelling a farmers’ revolt

They say you can tell a lot about a man by his shoes. This week, Britain’s angry farmers are judging Steve Reed by his. The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is not a mucky gumboots kind of man. Instead, according to reports this week, Reed favours leather-lined Le Chameau “Chasseur” boots, “hand crafted by one single master boot maker”, or so says their blurb, and priced at a whopping £420.

Not that Reed necessarily had to dip into his own pocket. Among the directors of Le Chameau is none other than the most generous of Labour donors, Lord Alli, who has given tens of thousands of pounds to Labour ministers, not least the Prime Minister.

Reed’s boots were reportedly a gift from Alli, continuing the peer’s recent history of outfitting the Labour Party. At the time the boots were claimed to be donated they cost £270, handily just below the £300 threshold to be registered in the members’ interests.

For farmers furious at Rachel Reeves’ Budget this week, which promises to increase inheritance tax (IHT) for tens of thousands of farmers, while keeping the overall agriculture budget flat, Reed’s boots have become a symbol of a Government completely detached from rural reality.

“You’ll never see a farmer who wears £400 wellies, because we’re getting them covered in muck every day,” says Aled Thomas, a farmer and Conservative councillor in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

“How can the MP for Streatham (Reed’s south London constituency) know anything about what’s going on in the depths of rural Wales or England? There’s this disconnect between the reality on the ground and what people are actually going through and what happens within the M25. Steve hasn’t helped himself. People are feeling quite insulted.”

Bethan Holt, the Telegraph’s fashion director, says that the Reed’s Le Chameau wellies are far from the classic farmer option.

“Le Chameaus are undoubtedly fabulous wellies but they won’t have scored Reed any authenticity points with the farmers,” she says. “They’re more a label associated with the Princess of Wales and glossy Cotswolds types. They have a whiff of City boy about them, when manure would have been preferable. A £50 pair of Dunlops would have done the trick.”

“They’re absolutely not the kind of wellies a farmer would wear,” says Andrew Court, a farmer from Staffordshire. “Anything above £100 is not really appropriate for farming, it’s for driving your Chelsea tractor, that sort of thing. It’s possibly not been very thought out, wearing such expensive wellies. If you want to make the right impression with people, you probably want a more practical down-to-earth welly.”

It is not the only way in which Reed, 60, does not fit the stereotypical profile of a farming secretary. Raised in St Albans, he studied English at 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 wrestle control of the council back from the hard Left. The two men later formed Labour Together, with Jon Cruddas and Lisa Nandy, a think tank designed to help resist Corbynism and which played a crucial role in getting Starmer elected leader.

Reed’s background is in a street-fighting, inner-city kind of politics. He was elected MP for Croydon and Streatham North in 2012. Since then, he has been best known for campaigning successfully for police attending mental hospitals to wear body-cameras when restraining patients. In 2020, he was in the news for labelling the Jewish businessman Richard Desmond a “puppet-master” on social media. He deleted his post after learning Desmond was Jewish.

In an interview last month, Reed spoke about his pride in fighting off the hard Left in south London. “Lambeth had been taken over by the hard left and we won it back,” he told The Times. “We knew what they were and how to beat them.”

In his core Defra practice, he said he was focused on moving farming towards a more environmental model. There was no mention of any changes to IHT.

“There’s a need to transition farming to a more nature-positive model of farming,” he said. “But we should be working with farmers who understand that transition, because they’ve already done it, and then supporting them to engage with other farmers, so you get a farmer-led model of transition.”

Such platitudes have proved 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 responded furiously, particularly as Labour had said before the general election that it would not alter the relief.

“Labour has made repeated assurances over the last 12 months that it would not tamper with inheritance tax reliefs, and its decision to now rip the rug from under farmers is nothing short of a betrayal,” said Victoria Vyvyan, president of the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), in a statement.

The CLA has said it will be making urgent representations on behalf of 70,000 farms that it estimates will be affected by the changes. “This puts dynamite beneath the livelihoods of British farming,” she added, “and flies in the face of growth and investment.”

For some, this is the latest injustice in years of policies, from successive governments, that have made farming in Britain increasingly unviable as a way of life.

“It’s the final straw and a kick in the teeth,” says David Exwood, a farmer and deputy president of the NFU. “There has been simmering anger for a while. They promised they were not going to touch 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 haven’t thought it through, or they have thought it through and thought ‘we don’t care, we’re doing it anyway’.”

If nothing else, picking a fight with the farmers would be in-keeping with Reed’s reputation as the kind of politician who does not mind a scrap, particularly after his time fighting off Corbynism in Lambeth. On his current path, he is certain to get one.

The NFU has already planned a protest in Westminster on November 19, with thousands of farmers from around the country expected to attend to make their fury felt. To judge by the response this week, we can be only months – maybe weeks – away from the British version of the gilets jaunes protests that brought life in France to a standstill, as furious farmers closed the roads with tractors and hay bales.

“Farmers are not going to let this drop,” Exwood adds. “If the Government are smart, they’ll react to it quickly and announce a consultation or change course.”

If Reed doesn’t change his mind, his £420 “Chasseurs” might not be the only footwear causing him grief. That will be the boots of thousands of angry farmers from up and down the country, descending on Westminster to urge him to walk.