Sir Keir Starmer was staring down the barrel of a long weekend on the phone to Labour rebels, pleading with them to come around before Tueday’s crunch vote.
The prime minister was hoping to stave off a rebellion from backbench MPs over his plans to make life significantly more difficult for some of their most hard up constituents.
So it will have been a relief for the PM when lead rebel Dame Meg Hillier accepted his £1.5bn U-turn as a “positive outcome”, all but guaranteeing his welfare bill will survive Tuesday’s vote.
Despite the late concession, the prime minister’s U-turn has not solved his problems, but simply stored them up for another day.
While he will now avoid the embarrassing sight of a prime minister losing a key vote just a year after winning a 174-seat majority, the fallout from the welfare row will quietly chip away at his authority.
First, it has emboldened Labour backbenchers. Especially among new intake MPs, there was a reluctance to speak out against the Labour leader for fear of being blacklisted from government jobs in the future, or even having the whip withdrawn.
The impact of the PM’s benefit cuts would have had such a devastating impact on disabled people that many felt they simply could not hold their tongues.
They have now learned that a public rebellion can go a long way in winning the prime minister’s attention after months of griping that he is not engaged enough with his MPs and their concerns.
Secondly, it makes the prime minister look weak. The U-turn followed the same pattern as previous climbdowns over winter fuel payments and Labour’s £28bn green investment plan.
On winter fuel he spent months telling voters he was right to have stripped the payments from millions of pensioners, that he was taking “tough decisions” and would not back down.
Even when a U-turn looked inevitable, Sir Keir stuck to his guns and pressed ahead with the decision.
Then, having squandered any political capital or goodwill that may have been gained from a concession to pensioners, he changed course, fudging the rationale and refusing to accept that he made the wrong decision in the first place.
It will be the same with benefit cuts. As well as weakening the PM in the eyes of his own backbenchers, Sir Keir’s third U-turn in a month weakens him in the eyes of voters - and Nigel Farage is set to pounce.
The Reform UK leader has already sought to point the prime minister as devoid of ideas and convictions, presenting his insurgent right-wing party as a strong alternative government in waiting.
So much of what Sir Keir, driven by chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, already does is aimed squarely at countering the rising threat of Reform. Getting hundreds of thousands of people off welfare and back into work, slashing the benefit bill, was another of those policies.
But, after walking back from large parts of the policy, Sir Keir will leave Reform-minded voters yet again asking why they would back a Farage-lite Labour Party when they can instead vote for the real thing.
Thirdly, the prime minister’s chaotic approach to his latest U-turn means Labour - once a party which railed furiously against “unfunded spending commitments” - has a £1.5bn black hole in its spending plans.
It will need to be filled somehow, and the only options are spending cuts elsewhere or yet more tax hikes.
Care minister Stephen Kinnock was the first minister out defending the policy change, while refusing to say how it would be paid for. Labour will now face months and months of questions and speculations about exactly which taxes will rise to pay for the U-turn, derailing much of the rest of the party’s agenda.
And lastly, the U-turn has solved a short-term problem but created a potentially larger long-term one.
Campaigners have warned that the changes create a two-tier system for personal independence payment (Pip) claimants, with those starting claims in future treated differently to those on Pip currently.
Sir Keir frequently criticised the Conservatives for what he called “sticking plaster politics”. But in tackling his biggest rebellion yet, the prime minister has merely placed a sticking plaster over a major crack, and it is only a matter of time before it comes undone.
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Have your say: Has Starmer been weakened by Labour’s welfare revolt?
