Does Jeremy Corbyn believe in compromise, or just in compromise for other people?

One of my favourite things about Jeremy Corbyn, beyond the beard (I do like beards) and the way he was photographed in the Times the other day unabashedly wearing sandals with socks (spunky; no quarter given) is his embrace of dissent as a virtue. Which is a virtue born of necessity, obviously, on account of the way that there are only about six people in the Parliamentary Labour Party who don’t disagree with him on everything, and they’re not safe on telly, either. Still, though. I like it.

The doctrine of collective ministerial responsibility — the notion that everybody in a government thinks the same thing, and if one of them should ever admit that they don’t, then they have to go — doesn’t attract nearly the ridicule that it ought. It is, literally, a code of lying. Whatever Corbyn’s reasons for jettisoning it, he’s right to have done so.

The big question, though, is how he’ll cope without it. The Tories, of course, are still wobbling around over whether their ministers can have a free vote over the EU referendum, but that’s small beer compared to what Corbyn is trying to do. Or, at least, to what he pretends he is trying to do. It is true that the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition also used to suspend collective responsibility from time to time, albeit notably less often than you might have expected they would at the outset. But they had the inherent ability to agree to disagree without an implied moral slur on the other side. And I’m not at all sure that Corbyn has that.

Speaking to Andrew Marr last weekend, the new Labour leader was twinkling and sanguine about potential disagreements with his shadow cabinet. ‘I will do my persuasive best,’ he shrugged — about Trident, but it could have been about anything — ‘to bring them around to my point of view.’