The Conservatives need to ditch Therese Coffey if they want to win back the trust of the farming community - Sarah Todd

If he doesn’t get rid of Dr Coffey and find a replacement the farming community respects, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak risks alienating rural voters for good.

A bit of background; Dr Coffey was openly booed at this year's National Farmers’ Union (NFU) annual conference and then, instead of staying to face the music, cut short a question-and-answer session, giving the excuse she had a train to catch. She is famous, or infamous, for the way she brushed aside food shortages, suggesting that people should swap salad items for parsnips

There is chaos and uncertainty in her department, with many farmers not really knowing or understanding what they should be growing or investing in since Brexit. Farming policy and the proposed new financial support schemes are about as clear as mud. Sometimes it seems as though it’s only the big estates, the wealthy rather than everyday up-to-their-welly-top farmers, who will ever be able to navigate their way through the new paperwork.

Maybe it would make sense to be able to co-opt a shining star from another party? Rather than simply bring in yet another suit who knows nothing about farming; the department deserves somebody who would arrive with their sleeves rolled up and know their acres from their hectares.

It’s ridiculous that he’s this correspondent’s choice as a) he’s a Liberal Democrat and b) he’s a vegetarian, but there is nobody in British politics today who speaks up more for farmers and the wider rural communities than former party leader Tim Farron. There is barely a day goes by when he’s not banging the drum for the farmers in his Cumbrian constituency.

On Monday he was at his local Appleby station campaigning to save the ticket office from closure. Who among the Conservatives is visibly putting such legwork in?

Tim (as his new number one fan it doesn’t seem too forward to address him as such) is bang on the money with his fierce opposition to these closures.

Britain really needs to stand up to those who keep imposing online-only services and communications.

It was really annoying this week to have a going-on getting tickets for an agricultural show. Rather than popping into a local office they now have to be purchased online. What is it with this country’s presumption that everybody can go online?

Not only is the person-to-person contact lost - many from outlying farms would look forward to collecting their tickets and having a bit of a chat each year - the mobile phone network in rural areas isn’t good enough for people to be able to trust that there will be a signal to show the tickets, so they still have to be printed out. It’s all a chewing going on and if that's an improvement then keep it.

Slowly but surely shops are no longer stocking full ranges of products and anybody who enquires is told to go online.

This just isn’t fair, especially for people of a certain age who enjoy a trip to the shops and the social interaction it brings. Nobody will ever convince this Luddite that sitting in isolation clicking on a ‘buy now’ button is healthy. Never mind anything else; the physical removement from handing over cash must be to blame for a lot of the debt that people rack up. If young people were actually using physical cash for transactions they might manage to save a little more. There is something about handing over a banknote that seems so much more real than tapping a plastic card.

Talking of young people, it’s good that the PM and Levelling-up secretary Michael Gove have vowed not to “concrete over the countryside” in their new housing plans revealed this week. A focus on brownfield sites, rather than greenfield, makes sense. However, the mass migration young people have to make away from the rural communities they grew up in to get onto the housing ladder will never seem right.