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Unite, one of Labour’s trade union backers, will try to force a vote on reversing the government’s cuts to the winter fuel allowance at the party’s conference in Liverpool.

The union has submitted a motion calling for “a vision where pensioners are not the first to face a new wave of cuts”.

It also urges the government to introduce a wealth tax and to end self-imposed rules which prevent borrowing to invest.

Despite criticism from opposition parties and unease among his own MPs, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has defended his cut in winter fuel payments, saying “tough decisions” are needed “to stabilise the economy”.

He has also said that the impact on the 10 million pensioners losing out will be softened by a 4% increase in the state pension, due next April.

From this autumn, older people in England and Wales not on pension credit or other means-tested benefits will not get the payments, worth between £100 – £300.

Unite’s motion says that “workers and communities voted for change – a better future, not just better management and not cuts to the winter fuel allowance”.

It adds that the country should not “turn back to failed austerity”.

Mick Whelan, head of the train drivers’ Aslef union and chair of the group of Labour-backing unions said he would vote against the cut.

Speaking to Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, he said the unions would be asking the government to “change their minds”.

Asked about the relationship between unions and the government, he said: “There’ll be times when we’ll be applauding… and there’ll be other times where, as tradition, we’ll be firm but critical friends.”

Unite is understood to be confident that its motion will be put to a vote at Labour’s annual conference, which opens in Liverpool on Sunday 22 September.

Under conference rules, delegates get to vote for the topics they want to discuss. Members of the Conference Arrangements Committee, delegates and party staff then agree the wording of a final motion to be voted on.

Any vote would be non-binding, but a result that criticises government policy could embarrass the party leadership.

Unite traditionally backs Labour, but has been very critical of Sir Keir’s leadership and last year its general secretary, Sharon Graham, warned the party there were “no blank cheques”.

In 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, the union donated £3m to Labour. This year it did not give anything to the central party’s campaign.

The union also refused to endorse the party’s election manifesto, saying it did not go far enough on protecting workers’ rights, and jobs in the oil and gas industry.

Labour’s annual conference will be its first since the party’s landslide victory in July’s general election.

The most remarkable feature of the Sue Gray saga is not how much the Downing Street chief of staff earns, but how little Britain’s prime minister does. Keir Starmer gets just £166,786, which is about £3,000 less than Gray. But then she gets less than many permanent secretaries, not to mention the consultants and lawyers Whitehall is crawling with these days. Besides, as we are tired of hearing, Starmer gets dazzling benefits in kind.

A second feature of the saga is its mess. Just 12 weeks into the rosy dawn of a new Labour era, Downing Street is enmeshed in a spat more typical of a regime on its last legs. Starmer has spent his time in office telling Britons they face a shambles, requiring a clampdown on public spending. The new army of special advisers – approximately 70-strong – is duly being paid a relative pittance, but one that has been fixed by a boss who decided to take a thumping pay rise. To put it mildly, this suggests poor political judgment. As one insider joked, Gray is the only pensioner likely to do better under Labour.

Fixing the machinery of Downing Street is the first crucial job of a new prime minister. Starmer has hit the ground stumbling. It is customary for those closest to the leader’s ear to be a circle of trusted friends ready to act as his alter ego. This was true back in the days of Thatcher and certainly of Tony Blair. When Blair came to power, his senior aide Jonathan Powell said to expect “a change from a feudal system of barons to a more Napoleonic system”. What he meant was a downgrading of the traditional civil service hierarchy, one of permanent secretaries with the cabinet secretary at their head. Instead, government was conducted more informally, from “the sofa”, as Kenneth Clarke dismissively described it.

This had benefits. Under Thatcher, the civil service acted initially as a brake on change, but she eventually gathered loyalists round her and bent the system to her will. Although she still listened to advice, as when in 1988 she did a U-turn on NHS privatisation. Under Blair, media management from the sofa overwhelmed policy. Foreign Office advice on Iraq was suppressed, and Blair made his greatest mistake with the invasion of that country. Since then, the balance in Downing Street between politicians and officials has become ever more informal and sometimes fractious. It reached its nadir under Boris Johnson and his maverick aide Dominic Cummings.

A measure of the disruption was that internal pressure succeeded in evicting Cummings, but when dissent occurred under Liz Truss, it was politics that evicted the head of the Treasury, Tom Scholar. In the case of Gray, it seems that an early victim of her boisterous style will be the cabinet secretary, Simon Case. She is already reported as controlling access to security briefings, appointing close allies as civil servants and pushing her pet building projects. This may be fine if you can keep it secret, but not if those round you keep leaking.

Gray was a civil servant who became a political adviser. They are different professions. Civil servants have spent their careers working together, with Downing Street and the Cabinet Office at the peak. They are supposedly discreet suppliers of truth to power. Political advisers are rarely used to big organisations. They are mostly the beneficiaries of party patronage, thinktanks and the murky world of lobbying. Some fit in; others do not.

The most recent grit in this machine has come from the growth of the No 10 Policy Unit, staffed by special advisers. Its proclaimed purpose is to keep Whitehall to the manifesto straight and narrow. But it inevitably cuts across similar units in departments, also staffed by advisers. It was war between the two top units – and Cummings’ reported desire to have Treasury advisers dismissed – that forced Johnson’s chancellor Sajid Javid to resign. So critical is this relationship in the realm of economic policy, that Starmer’s No 10 unit has apparently been downgraded. It will reportedly be just “a point of contact” on economic policy, “more like the nervous system than the brain”. We await the outcome with interest.

It is easy to adapt Tolstoy and say that every unhappy Downing Street is unhappy in its own way. But unhappiness starts at the top. Starmer must now support Gray to the hilt. She must at least have her own colleagues loyal to her – and to her confidences. At the same time, prime ministers have clearly strayed too far in the direction of Blair’s Napoleon. Second opinions must get through to a leader making decisions, even if the civil service must ultimately obey and deliver. Dissent should not take the current form of media leaks and disloyal gossip.

There has to be virtue in a well-established architecture of public administration. So much of this has now broken down. That is why there must be a tilt back to the tradition of a formalised and articulate civil service, with the cabinet secretary at its apex. The satire Yes Minister portrayed civil servants as subjecting the ambition of ministers to pragmatic reality. It had its virtues, and the civil servants did not always win. It is worth a repeat.

During the last election campaign it was hard to escape the impression that, whatever his other faults, Rishi Sunak just wasn’t very good at politics. The charge sheet included getting drenched announcing the election and leaving D-day veterans on the beaches. And insisting that black was white: that he was stopping the boats, that the economy was in good shape, that the Tories were on course for victory.

Just a couple of months later, it very much feels like Keir Starmer and Labour are saying: “Hold my beer.” Keen to prove that they, too, are amateurs at the political PR game. It’s almost as if there is something about being in government that makes fools of everyone. Though few would have imagined that Labour could manage it quite so quickly. A period of grace would have been more fitting.

Take the freebies. And Keir has. The Arsenal tickets. The Taylor Swift tickets. The suits. The designer glasses. The clothes for his wife. Starmer’s big shtick was that he was going to do politics differently. The antidote to Tory corruption and scandal. A man who could be trusted. He was one of us. So why put himself in a position where you can so easily be criticised by the rightwing press?

If you want to set yourself up as a model of propriety then you can’t start making exceptions. Especially not so early on. A couple of years in and people may not notice so much. You have to be above reproach. Yes, it might be a loss not to go to the football. And you might resent having to buy a few more suits for yourself. But that all rather goes with the job. Being prime minister may be a career highlight for a politician but you have to take the downsides.

Perhaps Starmer has been too honest for his own good. Maybe he should have been more like Boris Johnson. Keir has made himself accountable by listing his freebies in detail. We know exactly where all the money went. With Boris we are largely in the dark. He took whopping gifts from all sorts of undesirables and we aren’t entirely sure of the details. Being prime minister was a licence for Boris to cash in. No one expected any different from him. He never pretended to be on the side of the angels.

Then there is the question of Sue Gray’s pay. You could say that someone should have suggested that Sue drop £4,000 in salary just for appearances. So she earned less than the prime minister. Maybe throw in a clothes allowance and an events expense account to make up the difference. No one will notice. Surely. I guess she is a tough negotiator. One of the reasons she was made chief of staff.

But all this is not really the point. The issue is why the Labour party is indulging in open feuds with itself by leaking the story in the first place. We were promised a government of service and yet it already appears to be totally dysfunctional. It’s as if Starmer has taken the Tories as his role model. How did it come to this that half of the No 10 top team hate the other half? And vice versa. Couldn’t someone have just got in a therapist? Or at the very least established a workplace culture where people talked to one another? Or – and here’s a thought – pay junior staff the proper rate?

Still, Keir isn’t entirely a slow learner. There’s a tradition that prime ministers do a round of regional radio stations on the Thursday before a party conference. But after the last two years, when Liz Truss and Sunak had an hour they would rather forget, Starmer decided to reset the format to pre-recorded outings where he hoped there would be less room for disaster. All the interviews would be released at 5pm when he hoped no one would be watching.

So it was left to the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, to do the morning media round. An experience he would rather forget. Reynolds comes across as a decent man but too much more of this and he will find himself Labour’s answer to Mel Stride. The minister who gets to do the rubbish jobs that no one else will. In future, on days like this, I am sure he will learn to put his phone on mute and not take calls from the No 10 comms team. It’s early days, I suppose.

On Times Radio, Aasmah Mir cut to the chase. Why did Starmer accept so many freebies? Reynolds forgot to engage his brain. It was like this, he said. Politicians get invited to events all the time and it would be rude not to go. It was the way people tried to engage with decision makers. Sure thing. That’s why it was vital for Boris Johnson to accept a freebie to Evgeny Lebedev’s party in Italy. And a Taylor Swift concert is a prerequisite for stopping the winter fuel allowance.

It very much sounded as if he was talking about the perks of the job, said Mir. Oh no, replied Reynolds. Far from it. Perish the thought. Just that politicians worked extremely hard and deserved a little downtime. Especially if they didn’t have to pay for it. The thought occurred that if Starmer was desperate to see Arsenal he could have afforded the cost of a seat with the corporates. It was just strange that all these dazzling freebies were never offered to the rest of us.

Over on Sky, Kay Burley was outraged by the size of Sue Gray’s salary. One wonders what Burley’s wedge is. I’m not sure she would get out of bed for £170,000. She would consider that an insult. But I’m sure that’s not the point. Even so, Reynolds still couldn’t think straight. Why not just say that Dominic Cummings and other Downing Street heads of staff would have been on a similar sort of salary if you allowed for inflation. The same people outraged now were not outraged then. It could just be that £170,000 is the going rate for the job and that it is the prime minister who is underpaid. A thought.

So the nonsense will continue into the Labour party conference starting this weekend. And Labour really doen’t have anyone to blame but itself. Freebies and staff pay should have been headed off ages ago. And maybe it doesn’t matter if we have a government that is bad at politics if it gets the big calls right. After all, the chances are we’ll be talking about something else in a month’s time. Head down and onwards and sideways.