‘They didn’t think we’d have the guts’: How Labour rebels forced the government’s welfare U-turn | Labour

The Conservative shadow cabinet minister looked more cheerful than at any point in the 12 months since the general election. “How did they get into such a mess?”, they asked. “What are they going to do?”

The answer was revealed a couple of days laterwhen Keir Starmer and his ministers made a series of emergency concessions on their flagship welfare reform programme, to prevent the otherwise far-greater ignominy of the programme being voted down in the House of Commons.

U-turns of various sorts are an inevitability in government; the skill lies in how elegantly you can perform them. And this week’s eventual cave-in to backbench Labour pressure – formally announced by a Downing Street statement after midnight on Thursday – was very, very messy indeed.

To return to the shadow…