Victoria Atkins prosecuted gun-runners, fraudsters and gangsters during her years as a barrister and now she is fighting to stop the desecration of the countryside. Labour has been in power for less than a year but she says rural communities already feel “an enormous sense of betrayal by this Government”.

The 49-year-old is dismayed at the anxiety which has gripped farming families since Labour changed the rules on inheritance tax – and she is determined to hold ministers to account.

Looking back at her days trying to take down serious organised crime networks, the Shadow Environment Secretary says: “If I can deal with those people, believe you me, the Labour frontbench doesn’t hold any problems for me, either.”

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak handed her some of the toughest jobs in Government during the Tories’ years in power. She was responsible for Afghan resettlement and prisons and probation before becoming Health Secretary. The Conservatives are now in Opposition with radically reduced numbers but she speaks with urgency of fighting for the survival of family farms and protecting Britain’s food security.

“I think a lot people assumed when Labour won power that this Government was somehow going to be a version of the Tony Blair/New Labour Government,” she says. “But we learned within a matter of weeks that this is full-throated Old Labour.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to hit farmers with a 20% tax on inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1million has spread fear through the countryside, she claims.

“It is widespread and it is genuine,” she says, adding; “The reality of this particular policy is very, very difficult conversations are happening across kitchen tables up and down the country as families are discussing whether they can afford the inheritance tax bill after this law comes into force in April next year.”

Older people and those with terminal illnesses, she says, are “asking themselves whether their family can afford for them to live beyond April”.

Describing the impact on mental health, she said she was told by one tearful farmer: “If there was a rope in the corner of this room I would use it.”

Hitting farmers with inheritance tax, she argues, is an “absolute betrayal” of children who will be “learning the ways of the farm from the cradle”. But this is far from her only worry about the future of the countryside.

Decrying a Labour leadership she says is dominated by “city MPs” who lack connections to rural communities, she says: “They just don’t get it because they don’t know it.”

She points to Labour cancelling the Sustainable Farming Incentive – which paid farmers to restore hedgerows and protect soil – while launching “a consultation on how to hold chickens correctly”.

“That just shows you how out of whack their priorities are,” she says.

A further concern is that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s push for net zero will result in swathes of the countryside being covered by solar panels, pylons and “industrial-sized substations and wind turbines”.

Ms Atkins warns of the threat to food security if “prime agricultural land” is lost.

“Once a field has been plastered in solar panels, no matter what Mr Miliband may think, there is very little that can be grown on it afterwards, sadly.”

The mother of one holds the environment brief at a time of mounting concern about sewage in British rivers and the sea. Much of her spare time, she states on her website, is spent building sandcastles with her son, Monty.

Acknowledging the scale of the problem, she says it “pretty much comes down to the way in which our sewage system has been constructed over the last century”.

Remembering childhood experiences, she says: “I went to school in Blackpool and I remember just how dicey it was to venture into the sea when I was young.”

She urges Labour to be clear about the scale of the expense and upheaval required to rectify it, saying: “None of us wants to be in this situation... My goodness me, if it was that easy we would have done it, believe you me.”

David Cameron presented the Tories as champions of nature encouraging voters to “vote blue, go green”. Ms Atkins also sees her party as a defender of the environment, saying the “clue is in the name”.

“We are the Conservatives because we believe in conserving that of which we are proud, but also of course handing on a better country and a better countryside to our children and our grandchildren.”

Politics runs deep in her family. Her father, Sir Robert Atkins, served as an MP and MEP, but it was an early encounter as a lawyer with a 12-year-old boy which sent her on the road to public service and Westminster.

She was tasked with defending the youngster who had never been in court before. When she asked if his mother or father would come to support him, she remembers: “He said, completely matter-of-factly, ‘I’ve never known my dad and my mum will be flat out drunk on the floor by now.’ And it was 9.30 in the morning.”

This convinced her she wanted to help children like him avoid a life of crime. The push to stand for election came when David Cameron re-opened the Tory candidates’ list in the wake of the Westminster expenses scandal.

Her husband – Paul Kenward, now the chief executive of ABF Sugar – urged her to put her name forward, telling her: “I’m fed up with you shouting at the television whenever Gordon Brown comes on.”

In 2015 she won election – succeeding Father of the House Sir Peter Tapsell as the MP for the Lincolnshire seat of Louth and Horncastle – and today she gets to shout at Labour ministers in the House of Commons.

The challenge of saving the nation’s family farms has become a passion and Mrs Badenoch’s pledge to reverse the inheritance tax changes means she can campaign with gusto. She donned a union jack blazer and picked up a megaphone when she joined protesting farmers outside Parliament, and she is clearly moved by her conversations with people wonder if their family’s farming days are at an end.

“I have no doubt that people are suffering,” she says.

This prosecutor turned politico is on the case.

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