How powerful can the Tory Universal Credit rebellion really be?

One of the brewing Tory rows of the autumn looks to be over Universal Credit, with Heidi Allen now claiming she has 25 Conservatives prepared to rebel on the matter. They are worried about a number of aspects of the fiendishly complicated reform which is supposed to make the benefit system less, er, fiendishly complicated. Chief among their worries is the six weeks that claimants have to wait for their benefits, which is a long period in itself, but almost a quarter of claimants have had to wait even longer than that to receive their money, leaving many of them unable to buy food.

Ministers had been reasonably relaxed about Allen’s letter calling for a pause in the roll-out of the new benefit, mainly because they didn’t see Allen as a particularly serious Conservative (many Tories wonder aloud whether she is a Conservative at all, which may be unfair but it is the consequence of her expending so much political capital early on in her tenure as an MP to the extent that she is now considered a maverick rebel rather than someone who ministers need to worry about getting on side).