The Times Interview: Opposing the Labour Party

3 March 2025

“This isn’t about me”, Henry Tufnell says, sitting in the kitchen of a small farmhouse on the northern edge of his vast Pembrokeshire constituency.

He is about to become the third Labour MP to publicly come out against the party’s inheritance tax raid on farms, one of the most controversial measures in Rachel Reeves’s first budget.

But Tufnell, 32, knows there is an elephant in the room. “For what it’s worth, I’m not going to inherit my Dad’s farm, my brother will. I appreciate that it’s still family, but that’s not what this is about.”

The 2,200-acre Gloucestershire estate of his parents, Mark and Jane, is worth about £20 million. Reeves’s decision to impose an inheritance tax rate of 20 per cent on agricultural property worth more than £1 million means Tufnell’s brother, Albermarle, could have meant a bill of around £4 million.

But a few weeks before the budget his father decided to pass on about a quarter of that land to Albermarle, meaning that as long as Mark lives for another seven years there will be nothing to pay on that portion.

That led to questions in December, when the Daily Mail first reported the story, about whether Tufnell gave information to his parents about the changes in the pipeline.

“It’s just absurd to suggest that I had concrete knowledge of what was going to be in the budget as a backbench MP,” he says.

He admits, though, that he had heard rumours of a change in the offing, and did discuss it with his father. “My dad was the president of the Country Landowners Association, he sits on the board of Natural England, he’s all over what goes on in the industry.

“So when it’s being briefed out that there might be changes, of course I talked to him.”

Tufnell’s lineage is packed with former parliamentarians. His great-grandfather, Richard Tufnell, was a Tory MP, as was Richard’s father, Edward. Edward’s grandfather, William, was a Whig MP who died in 1809; Tufnell Park in north London is named after him. Before William, every generation since 1640 bar one produced members of parliament.

Relatively speaking, this Tufnell MP is a rebel of the family. Though like many others he was educated at boarding school and qualified as a barrister, he suddenly quit to join a trade union representing cleaners and moved into Labour Politics.

“Fundamentally for me it’s social justice and those values of fairness,” he says. “I feel a big affinity with Keir [Starmer] in terms of his values, the way he talks about public service. That’s something that runs deep within my DNA.

“I accept it’s an unusual background for a Labour MP, obviously … I would never describe myself as working class.”

Speaking out now is all about Pembrokeshire and not home in Gloucestershire, he says. “We had said categorically as a party that there wouldn’t be any movement on inheritance tax. I stood on the platform where I said directly to farmers in my constituency that it was something that we weren’t going to pursue as a party. It’s embarrassing to say you’re going to do one thing and then do another.”

In total, 59 of Labour’s 100 most marginal seats are in rural or semi-rural areas, and in 13 of those the party’s majority was less than 1,000 votes. Tufnell warned that Labour could suffer in the polls unless it compromised on the inheritance tax issue.

“We’ve lost that trust and confidence of the farming sector,” he says. “This is about the social fabric of the countryside.

“These men and women work incredibly hard. They get up incredibly early, face the wind, the rain, isolation, loneliness. We as a government have to respect that. It’s embedded into what we stood for, what we are as a party.”

Tufnell isn’t angling for the policy to be abandoned completely. The point of business property relief and agricultural property relief, introduced in the 1970s and the 1980s respectively, was to ensure that a farm or family business could continue trading after the owner’s death, protecting it from being sold and broken up. The plan now is that farms worth more than £1 million will not be eligible for relief, and those above will be subject to inheritance tax of 20 per cent, compared with the usual rate of 40 per cent.

Instead of returning to full relief, Tufnell argues it should be capped not at £1 million, but significantly higher, though he won’t give a number. On top of that, he argues for an “amnesty” for older and sicker farmers.

Tufnell still doesn’t think the policy should be completely reversed. “It’s still ridiculous that people like Jeremy Clarkson, James Dyson, can buy up agricultural land, overinflate this asset class and avoid tax,” he says. “We need just a small modification. It’s not a U-turn. It’s just a tweak of the policy, having listened and consulted with the industry.”

At the moment, just two of Starmer’s army of 411 MPs have dared to publicly call for the policy to be changed: Steve Witherden, one of a handful of new MPs from the hard left, and Markus Campbell-Savours, son of Lord Campbell-Savours, the former MP for Workington.

Those reactions came last year when the budget was fresh in the memory.

It has been four months since then. “I’m not in this gig for fame or money or because I want to achieve a great position in government,” Tufnell says. “What matters to me is being able to look my constituents in the eye and say that I’ve done my best for them. I have tried internally. The decision to do this interview was not taken lightly.”

Are there more MPs who have been pushing for changes behind the scenes, and could we see their names appear now? Tufnell pauses. “There’s not that many that have gone out publicly,” he says carefully. “I’m not alone.”