A BBC Question Time audience member has enraged farmers after saying he wants to play ‘the world’s smallest violin’ for those hit by Keir Starmer’s inheritance tax.

The Prime Minister is facing a growing backlash from farmers, celebrities and his own MPs over Labour’s decision to impose 20 per cent inheritance tax on farms worth more than £1million.

More than 10,000 farmers and high-profile supporters including Jeremy Clarkson and Lord Lloyd Webber descended on Westminster to protest against the controversial policy on Tuesday.

A man in the audience of the BBC Question Time debate programme told the panel of political figures: ‘I keep hearing this term cash-poor and asset-rich.

‘My maths isn’t great but for £400,000 worth of inheritance tax, you have a £5million estate.

‘I’m afraid you are gonna have to find me the world’s smallest violin to tell me that you don’t pay tax on an estate that you’re passing down to your children of £5million. It sounds crazy to me.’

Furious farmers took to X to slam the comments, with one saying: ‘I hope you find the world’s smallest violin when there’s a food shortage.’

It comes just days after the BBC’s ‘truth checking’ unit was under scrutiny for quietly deleting a statement backing ministers’ claims in their tax-grab battle with farmers.

BBC Verify, a service set up to root out ‘misinformation’, wrote that the government’s figures were ‘likely’ to be right concerning the number of farms affected by the inheritance tax raid.

But on the day under-fire Sir Keir Starmer trumpeted the BBC’s finding, triggering a political row about bias, the corporation quietly removed it from its website. According to the BBC, the change was made before Mr Starmer spoke.

There have been dramatically conflicting estimates about how many farms will be dragged into the tax changes announced in the Budget.

Ministers insist the reforms will only affect about 500 estates a year. But the Country Land and Business Association claimed 70,000 farms face being snared by the new regime with ‘devastating’ consequences for farming families.

Speaking to reporters at the G20 summit in Rio on Tuesday, the Prime Minister insisted ‘the vast majority’ of farmers would be unaffected, telling reporters: ‘All of you can check out what that means in terms of the impact – I think the BBC has already done it.

‘It means the vast majority of farms are unaffected by this and I think it’s just important we keep making that clear.’

A furious Jeremy Clarkson has begged the government to ‘be big’ and admit they had made a mistake as he addressed a mass protest of more than 13,000 farmers and their supporters in London.

Farmers and their supporters from as far away as Northumberland made their way to the centre of the rainy capital earlier this week, with many arriving in large coaches wearing tweed jackets.

The 64-year-old, who is recovering from a life-saving heart operation, attended the event alongside his Clarkson’s Farm co-stars Kaleb Cooper and Charlie Ireland, theatre legend Andrew Lloyd-Webber and dozens of MPs including Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage.

Giving a speech after the main rally, Mr Clarkson confessed he was ‘off my t***’ on codeine and paracetamol, before describing how he had come to understand that farming was ‘unbelievably difficult, dangerous and cold’.

Farmers faced costs, pressure from environmentalists and regulations, and ‘we have all these complications and costs, and there’s very little money in it as you know – and then we got the Budget’, he said, to boos from the crowd.

The TV star continued: ‘I know a lot of people across the country in all walks of life took a bit of a kick on the shin with that Budget. You lot got a knee in the nuts and a hammer blow to the back of the head.’

‘For the sake of everybody here, and for all the farmers stuck at home paralysed by a fog of despair over what’s been foisted on them, I beg of the Government to be big and accept this was rushed through, it wasn’t thought out and it was a mistake. That’s the big thing to do, and back down.’

Earlier, Mr Clarkson – who runs Diddly Squat farm in Chipping Norton – became exasperated with Victoria Derbyshire during an interview on Whitehall.

The argument began when Ms Derbyshire had asked him whether he was there for himself rather than British farmers, asking him: ‘So it’s not about you, your farm and to avoid inheritance attack?’.

A clearly taken aback Mr Clarkson immediately rolled his eyes and said: ‘Classic BBC there. Classic’. Ms Derbyshire shot back: ‘Is it?’, referring to an article in the Sunday Times where he wrote about the tax benefits of buying a farm.

Mr Clarkson then tacitly accused of her of giving an opinion, disputing her claim that it was a ‘fact’ that he bought his Oxfordshire farm for tax purposes, explaining it was because he loved country sports such as shooting.

He continued: ‘Typical BBC. You people’, and would later say to the crowd around them: ‘Are you listening to this?’ when Ms Derbyshire repeated Ms Reeves’ claims that the inheritance tax raised would ‘raise money for public services’.

Mr Clarkson also hit out at the BBC during his speech, branding the broadcaster ‘the mouthpiece of this infernal Government’.

Shortly after arriving at the rally, Mr Clarkson joked he was in London to do ‘a bit of Christmas shopping’ before saying: ‘I’m here to support the farmers, it’s that simple, because they need all the help they can get really, even from me.’

Asked about his comments in an interview with the Times in 2021 that avoiding inheritance tax was ‘the critical thing’ in his decision to buy land, he said: ‘That’s actually quite funny because the real reason I bought the farm was because I wanted to shoot, so I thought if I told a bunch of people that I bought a farm so I could shoot pheasants it might look bad.

‘So, I thought I better come up with another excuse, so I said inheritance tax. I actually didn’t know about inheritance tax until after I bought it. I didn’t mind, obviously, but the real reason I bought it is because I wanted to shoot.’