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IIt seems like an age ago, but the first speed bump Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves hit in government was when seven Labor MPs voted against the King’s Speech, 17 days after the election.

They wanted to lift the two-child limit for families receiving benefits, and were rewarded by being expelled – sorry, “suspended” – from the Parliamentary Labor Party.

It was a display of brutal strength by the new Prime Minister and a warning to Labour’s new MPs not to think about indulging in the warm glow of voting with their conscience. When Starmer and Reeves said they would have to take tough decisions to save the public finances from Conservative irresponsibility, they meant it.

Since then, the conscience of the workers has been further tested. Mean testing the winter fuel payment for pensioners has been their most difficult challenge yet. But the increase in inheritance tax for farmers has also worried many new MPs for rural constituencies. There are Labor MPs for places like Hexham, Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket and South West Norfolk – and many of them have little to lose if the party’s sweeping advance into places where farming matters is temporary.

So the more I hear Labor spinners insisting that the ‘Iron Chancellor’ is not for flipping, the more I think a tactical retreat is likely. A Labor source said Huffington Post yesterday: “If we avoid the tough decisions, we will do exactly what the Conservatives did: party first, country second.”

This is the kind of briefing designed to stop journalists and MPs from speculating about the kinds of compromises that might be considered. It seems to increase the cost of a U-turn by making it more embarrassing to perform – but it doesn’t really. If Reeves doesn’t back down, people will be more interested in the substance of the policy than in a careful textual analysis of all the times her people said she wouldn’t.

So, for obvious reasons, I have no inside information on what Reeves is likely to do. I can only observe the pressure on her and what Chancellor has done before in similar situations.

I think she will give land on family farms. Only two facts are needed to reach this conclusion. One is that the inheritance tax changes are scheduled to come into effect in April 2026. That’s a year and a half (or two Budgets) away. The second is that there is a watertight case against some people buying farms as a way of avoiding inheritance tax.

It should therefore be fairly easy to exempt small farms that have been in the same family for generations, while raising revenue from people buying up farmland for the tax breaks. (“Small” is a relative term for a farm that may be worth millions but produces a low income.)

The winter fuel payment is more difficult, but it is also more urgent. Reeves tries to suggest that the matter is closed: the legislation has been passed; the political pain has been borne; she cannot afford to throw away the reputation she has earned for sticking to a fiscally responsible decision.

But there is more pain to come. The recent cold weather may be a warning. Some pensioners will die of cold, and the government will need a better line than encouraging the survivors to apply for pension credit.

Again, most of Reeve’s case is strong. There is overwhelming support for taking the payment from comfortably off pensioners who don’t need it. The problem is those pensioners on incomes as low as £12,000 a year who are not poor enough to qualify for means-tested benefits. It is, we say, impossible to use HMRC systems to identify this cohort and deliver the winter fuel payment to them.

But the Treasury’s pandemic response showed that things thought to be impossible turned out to be doable – and remarkably quickly. I don’t know how it will be done, but I’m sure Reeves has asked for a plan. Some arrangement for a winter payment aimed at pensioners just above the pension credit level, and preserving most of the savings of better-off pensioners, seems likely.

Reeves, Starmer and anonymous Labor sources will continue to insist it won’t happen, until days before it does. The crudest reason to think it will happen is that Reeves’ chances of ever succeeding Starmer as prime minister depend on it.