It simply can’t go on like this. It is ridiculous for a government one year into its time in office with a majority of 156 to be experiencing this kind of internal collapse. They’re behaving like a minority government at the tail end of its existence.

Yesterday’s spectacle in parliament saw the minister gut his own bill on the floor of the Commons in order to quell a rebellion. The Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill was stripped of any changes to personal independence payments, making it semantically empty as well as legislatively absurd.

There will now be a lot of blame thrown around – at the secretary of state, the whipping operation, Downing Street and the rebels themselves. But the basic failure in what happened last night is that this policy made no sense. It had no logic, even on the most superficial assessment.

The origin of the bill lies in the fiscal rules. Chancellor Rachel Reeves established a rule that the Government’s day-to-day spending should be matched by its income. It’s a sensible rule, but the manner in which it was pursued became irrational, with only one tax-and-spend Budget a year but two Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) assessments about whether the rule was being satisfied.

Last spring the OBR found a shortfall, prompting Reeves to scramble around for savings. Benefits were the obvious target. They are usually unpopular with the public and they are easily sliced away. Cutting £5bn from the welfare bill would get the spreadsheet where it needed to be. The Government consequently announced plans for stricter eligibility requirements for personal independence payments (PIP), among other measures.

Reeves had taken a perfectly sensible series of steps and ended up in Bedlam. Regardless of whether it is right or wrong, this is obviously a completely insane way to make policy. We should not be implementing cuts in order to satisfy a five-year financial horizon on a moving bi-annual basis.

Because it is insane, it cannot be admitted out loud. So instead, Labour presented the cuts as a moral mission. Starmer said we had “a moral duty to get Britain working again”. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall insisted: “We don’t start from a spreadsheet, we start from people.”

But its true origin was obvious. It did not even make sense on its own terms. PIP is paid regardless of whether the recipient is in work or not. Indeed, it often helps the person remain in work, by paying for the things they need to live an autonomous life. Hardening eligibility requirements simply and fundamentally did not make any sense given the arguments the Government was itself making. That lack of logic fuelled the backbench rebellion.

Last week, as a result of extraordinary pressure from Labour MPs, the Government made concessions. No current claimant would be affected and a review, by the highly respected social security minister, Stephen Timms, would look into the future of the system, with disability groups heavily involved. And yet even this made no sense. The review would be published in autumn next year, at the same time the new system was rolled out. There was no way it could inform it, by logic of the timeline.

The irrationality of the original decision led to the irrationality of the policy which led to the irrationality of the concessions. We kept on seeing the same basic quality to government decision-making: it made no sense. You could not formulate it into a coherent argument.

So once again, the rebellion grew. Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner spent the day desperately shuttling around the parliamentary estate conveying messages from rebels to the whips and eventually telling Downing Street that it did not have the support to pass its bill. Starmer decided to extract the PIP element of the bill. The future of the system would only be implemented once the Timms review was completed.

This was the first logical decision that had been taken on the policy throughout its lifespan. It was announced by Timms at the dispatch box, amid scenes of utter chaos in parliament. In the end, just 49 Labour MPs voted against the second reading, but the Prime Minister’s authority had been battered, the enforcement power of the whips was in tatters and the Secretary of State had been humiliated.

All this because of an accountancy approach to fiscal rules. And where are those rules now?

Reeves needs to find the money to claw back the £5bn she’d marked down with the benefits reform, along with the £1.25bn she has to make up for the previous winter fuel payment U-turn.

Labour backbenchers, smelling blood, may be able to somehow press for a reversal of the hated two-child benefit cap, which would cost another £3.4bn. That all necessitates further tax rises, which will now become the main source of rumour and innuendo until the Budget in the autumn. But markets will ask how likely the Government is to stand by those future rises, or other cuts, given that it has buckled so publicly on these other policies.

This entire series of events began with the Government trying to establish its reputation for fiscal credibility but it ended with it sabotaging it. It’s a moral parable in political form.

This needs to be a moment of reckoning, for every part of the administration: Reeves, Starmer, Kendall, the whips. A sensible approach should be taken to the annual implementation of the fiscal rule, large taxes have to go up to create a solid buffer against market movement, a decent relationship needs to be re-established between the Government and the parliamentary party. Most of all: policies must be grounded in logic and genuine moral sentiment, not the cynical misrepresentation we’ve seen here.

This simply cannot go on. It must not. Unless there are big changes now, this will only be a prologue to what’s to come.