WHEN IT comes to reporting events in the Conservative party, the Daily Telegraph tends to get it right. This is partly because politicians see this as the best outlet to float ideas with their supporters.

That makes it alarming that a headline in the paper suggested that after Brexit "farming subsidies could be diverted to the NHS".

This suggestion came from a key adviser to the prime minister, Theresa May. George Freeman is the MP who chairs her policy board, and to give the story even more credibility its author was the newspaper's chief political correspondent. It was couched in terms that if people saw £3 billion spent on farm subsidies their immediate reaction would be that this was unacceptable, and that a large slice of those funds should be diverted to the NHS.

This is real motherhood and apple pie politics – coming up with an argument in a way that fits the public mood. It undermined bland assurances from the Defra minister, Andrea Leadsom, that the government will match CAP payments until 2019. The timing of Brexit for that same year suggests that by then direct payments as we know them through the CAP will be gone. In his comments Mr Freeman suggested support for hill farmers in marginal areas could be justified to the taxpayer, but that was the limit of what he thought they, and indeed the Treasury, would buy.

Farmers can put forward sound arguments against this. These include the importance of farming and food, particularly in Scotland; they can also argue that every developed country in the world supports their agricultural industry – but this is going to be a case of trying to push water up a hill. The politics surrounding Brexit are heavy, and the Conservative party, at least in England, now seems to pay little heed to the rural vote. The days of agriculture minister from the Shires are long gone. Instead we now face decisions dictated by urban focus groups and newspapers that have little sympathy for farmers in general, and for those perceived to be successful in particular.

This has to worry every farmer. Mrs May said Brexit would mean 'bumps in the road' – but the future being suggested for agriculture is a lot more than a bump. Farmers have welcomed the sterling value increase in single payments this year, but in any year, strip support from farm incomes and the industry would look very sick.

Add to that threat the suggestion that the government wants a free trade approach with as many countries as possible outside the EU, and the prospect of low cost food imports becomes very real. Over this style of politics the UK farming lobby, for all its efforts, is weak when urban views hold sway at Westminster.

For years, as an EU member, farmers here gained from French farmers saying 'non' to anything negative for agriculture. Now with Brexit farmers will be exposed to a very different reality. Whether that is a threat or an opportunity, only time will tell – but for now the road ahead looks very bumpy to farmers looking already at beleaguered bank accounts.

There will be a huge battle ahead to get the government to take a more pragmatic approach towards farming. Those who voted Leave – and if polls were right that is the majority of farmers – must now be questioning whether this was what was promised. My memory is of Owen Paterson, who was the main cheerleader for the agricultural Leave vote, promising a CAP devolved to Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast with the funding that would go to Brussels used to create a new UK farming policy.

That now seems to have been quietly forgotten, although to be fair that is perhaps because despite his aggressive pro-Leave stance, Paterson was not rewarded with a cabinet post by Theresa May. Instead she has gone for an agricultural lightweight that will find it a lot easier to say no to farmers, even if she has a lot of farmers in her constituency.

As I read these comments from the Tory party conference, my thoughts turned to a comment during the referendum campaign from the farm commissioner, Phil Hogan. He said farmers could take the certainty of the CAP, guaranteed by the Treaty of Rome, or gamble on the 'generosity' of the British Treasury. Many opted for the latter, but the comments this week suggest that political generosity remains elusive.