It seems you're not the only one. A similar problem (poppler and sipdistutils) was encountered by another, and a solution proposed -- though not marked as accepted by the questioner.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51420803/modulenotfounderror-no-module-named-sipdistutils-while-install-python-poppler#51421349 Perhaps an "apt-cache search sip | grep python" to see which Debian packages might be relevant other than sip-dev, rather than going with the Python package directly, since it would integrate better with the entire distribution that way.
