Enter Comrade Jeremy. Silence. Not a word. No one cheered or stirred
WHEN a new party leader enters the Commons for the first time, it is the custom – surely human nature – to give him or her a honking great howdee-do. It is the done thing, good for team morale.
The Leader’s own MPs will normally set up a long barrage of mooings and yelps and huzzahs. ‘Hear hear hear,’ they will bray. The other side of the Commons will itself give a murmur of satirical welcome.
Jeremy Corbyn entered the House yesterday at 3.27pm. Last time he was here he had been a backbencher. Now he was Leader of HM Opposition.
Silence. Not a word. Pas une saucisse! Nobody cheered or stirred or shifted a buttock. It could have been that moment in a horror film before the vampire attacks or the bats congregate. A swirling, worrying nothingness. Comrade Corbyn was in the building, whoop whoop, but the Commons did not react.
Had Tory MPs been told to zip their antics? Labour MPs had plainly not been instructed to show acclaim. Some looked at the floor. Others studied their Order Papers with sudden fascination.
Mr Corbyn did not know what to do. Instead of striding to his new place behind the despatch box, he hesitated. He engaged Speaker Bercow in brief banter. They shook hands. Conversation appeared to run out of steam. A bit awkward, really.
Mr Corbyn saw a Labour Whip, Phil Wilson, and yarned to him for a few seconds. Then he sat beside Chris Bryant, the new Shadow Commons Leader. There were rumours of Blairite Mr Bryant becoming Shadow Defence Secretary but the Corbyn worldview may not have been a good fit. Mr Bryant looked uncomfortable, as though assailed by postprandial indigestion.
This was becoming embarrassing. Labour’s new head honcho was among us yet his presence had gone unremarked. Eventually, beardie Jon Trickett, the new Shadow Local Government Secretary who looks as though he may have wandered in off ‘Last of the Summer Wine’, gestured urgently for Mr Corbyn to come and take his proper position. The Leader ambled over there and did as bidden.
A few seconds later shadow chancellor John McDonnell entered. This was a quite different business. Mr McDonnell, a man rigid with his own indignation, exuded confidence. He shoulder-rolled to his place.
The untutored observer would perhaps have deduced that this McDonnell, not Corbyn, was the leader. Mr Corbyn tried to engage Mr McDonnell in conversation but the Shadow Chancellor, after noting his boss’s approach, brushed it aside and continued to talk to another frontbencher, John Healey.
The House debated the Trade Union Bill. Many of the Labour MPs who intervened were markedly more Leftwing than recent usual suspects from those benches.
After a point of order from Jake Berry (Con, Rossendale), these Labour MPs did start to admit their financial links with various trade unions. Until Mr Berry’s intervention, none had shown much appetite for doing that.
Business Secretary Sajid Javid, for the Government, began by pouring treacle over the unions.
HE
was a great admirer of the principle of organised labour, we were told. Cue ridicule from the Opposition benches. Mr Javid, who was hardly at his most watertight, argued that reforms of trade-union ‘bullying’ were a protection for the workers.
Few Blairites, or even Brownites, were evident. Yvette Cooper arrived, accompanied by a girly best friend (Judith Cummins from Bradford S). Yvette looked a bit shivery and forlorn. She does victimhood well.
Caroline Flint had also been around and we saw a spectre that may have been Chris Leslie. But that generation of Centrists has suffered – I hope this is not tasteless – the political equivalent of a Munich air crash. Almost a whole team has gone.
Labour MPs talked approvingly of the Scargillite miners’ strike, of Tory ‘bloodlust’ against unions and of American rightwing fundamentalism. Someone even started speaking about ‘dark Satanic mills’.
It was quite a shock to return to one’s desk and find, from the calendar, that the year really was 2015.