Labour’s whips are in despair. So said a number of senior Labour MP. And they are not professional troublemakers. They are loyal - largely - to the PM. This captures the failure in the party machine exposed by the massive rebellion of Labour MPs against the prime minister’s welfare reforms. What these MPs have told me is that whips, led by Sir Alan Campbell, have been warning 10 Downing Street officials for weeks that the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payments Bill is hated by large numbers of their own side, and they have been ignored. Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, told them that the data showed the reforms were popular with voters, that Labour MPs should toughen up, and the government was pressing ahead regardless - according to multiple sources. This steamrollering has brought a government with an enormous working majority to the brink of losing legislation central to its ambitions to make the welfare state more affordable. One part of the crisis is - according to several MPs - that the whips are saying that their jobs have become impossible. There is talk of the prime minister having to replace either the entire whips office or his most important lieutenant, Morgan McSweeney. So much for institutional dysfunction. But there is a more fundamental issue of party positioning. Perhaps the big disagreement between growing numbers of Labour MPs and Downing Street is over the identity of Starmer’s government: is McSweeney’s revealed preference for wearing the turquoise-blue of Farage’s Reform UK the optimal presentation, or should the PM and his team appeal more directly to “progressives”, those who would vote LibDems or Green in preference to Labour? MPs tell me they are anxious about what they see as Starmer’s refusal to woo voters on the soft left. They are increasingly uncomfortable with his rhetoric and actions designed to win back Reform supporters, because they see the more existential threat as stemming from the alienation of voters with left values - who may refuse to vote Labour even tactically to keep out Reform having become so disillusioned with him. Starmer has dismissed the revolt against his welfare reforms as “noises off”. Whether deliberately or by accident, this is to under-estimate the wider significance for him of this debacle.