Westminster’s back to school. Food and farming, like everything else, have been fighting for attention, as politicians and journalists stumble back from summer. Last term’s report: a rocky twelve months (inheritance tax); some useful, long-term thinking (a food strategy); more certainty soon (a farming roadmap).

Then the reshuffle and everything’s scrambled. New ministers with no previous. Publications pushed back. The sense of drift around farming’s future, always lingering, now on everyone’s lips. Here we are again, waiting for a budget, and campaigners and businesses begging for some clear-sighted leadership.

An Old Boy’s passing comment has stuck with me. Daniel Zeichner, now former minister, was on a panel at a net zero plan launch. We’ve all done a bad job, he admitted, of telling the story of farming and food. Zeichner was talking about his time in government, about the challenge of getting these issues on the agenda of No 10 and the Treasury. It’s all well and good for ministers, like him, to build relationships and expertise. Progress will always be slow if an issue’s not a Cabinet talking point, if it’s ghettoised in a corner of Whitehall, if it stays opaque to outsiders.

Farming, in late 2025, lacks an argument, a compelling story of why it matters and where it’s going. ‘Food security is national security’ is an aphorism. ‘Back British farming’ is a demand. ‘Save the family farm’ is a call for help. From a Stockholm stage, EAT-Lancet’s calls, to change what we grow and embrace the ‘Planetary Health Diet’, fall flat for those outside the hyped-up room. The Oxford economist Dieter Helm sparked online unease with an essay on where the country’s agriculture is heading. His vision of a financialised, consolidated, high-tech future makes grim reading. It’s not so much a story as a green-tinged application of neoclassical economics. Helm’s thinking underpinned British farming’s last big narrative. After Brexit, Michael Gove envisaged many farmers morphing from food producers, supported by subsidies, to service providers, paid for environmental public goods. If this was a story, the plot’s ambition was watered down halfway through (the ending always had a hint of happily ever after).

Words and impressions matter in an attention economy. Knotty problems, like farming, food and nature, can overwhelm distracted minds. Wonderful news for the Big Food and financial interests that profit from business-as-usual and would rather everyone was looking elsewhere.

It’s in FFCC’s bones to interrogate how we talk about these things. Before summer, we hosted a session at Groundswell with ex-Downing Street spinner Lee Cain. He reminded the audience that the top concern for most people – and thus the government – remains the cost of living. Campaigners for better farming and food haven’t got a great line, yet, on affordability.

A fortnight ago, FFCC joined the autumn scrum with a breakfast reception in Parliament for the Farming APPG, attended by Zeichner’s successor, Angela Eagle. The room was so full we had to call in extra teacups. MPs and peers were keen to know how to direct their energy. We discussed connecting farming to national goals, like creating good jobs, strengthening communities, and improving public health. Achieving these requires honest conversations, the kind that parts of the industry would rather not have, about the sorts of businesses that can hit those targets — and those that won’t.

In Liverpool, at the Labour party conference, we staged a debate encouraging government to invest in the ‘real economy’. By this, we mean stuff like food, healthcare, homes, energy and green space. They won’t boost GDP by next quarter, but will sustain our lives and make them worthwhile. Our speakers argued that language can bring about change by shifting how we see the world. Writer Sarah Langford wove a tale of transplanting hedgerow saplings to describe how we help people reconnect and flourish. Hodmedod co-founder Josiah Meldrum urged the audience to talk in ecological rather than industrial metaphors. ‘Supply chains are things that enslave,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to be in chains. We want to be in networks.’ If we want stories that cut through, they can’t just be correct. They have to rally and inspire.

That’s the job of leaders — which includes our new ministers. They don’t need to know right away all the policy nuance. There’s tonnes of work in train inside and outside the civil service. What leaders do is listen, decide what matters, and tell a story that brings people along.

In The History Boys, Alan Bennett’s grammar school play, one of the pupils is asked what history is. He answers, ‘One f—ing thing after another’. That isn’t far off how many in farming have felt the past few years. But it’s not what a good history, an argument, a story is. Nor is it a way to run a vital sector.

That’s one suggestion for the end of this term, perhaps the exam schools up in Oxford. A simple analysis of what’s wrong, what everyone has to do, and where, if it works, we could get to. A beginning, a middle, an end.