Donald Macintyre's sketch: Silence greets leader who must wait for MPs' 'love' to emerge

It still seemed surreal to see the dark-suited Jeremy Corbyn on the front bench

It seemed surreal to see a dark-suited Jeremy Corbyn sat on the front bench (AFP)

If the Right Honourable Jeremy Corbyn, as he has now become, is going to be accused of returning politics to the class war-ridden 1980s, then the Government generously assisted him by playing their part.

Maybe it was to prolong the new Labour leader’s honeymoon that they picked his first day in the Commons for the one piece of legislation that could be guaranteed to reunite – if only temporarily – a parliamentary opposition somewhat traumatised by his landslide election as their new leader.

No doubt we’ll get used to it, just as he will have to get used to the once unthinkable idea of kissing, whiskers and all, the Queen’s hand at the next meeting of the Privy Council. But it still seemed surreal to see the dark-suited Corbyn and his new shadow Chancellor John McDonnell on the front bench, flanking the new Shadow Business Secretary Angela Eagle like a pair of hastily recruited minders.

It all started amicably enough with Business Secretary Sajid Javid’s slightly laboured congratulatory joke about he and the Labour leader having in common the fact that neither of them would ever be photographed eating a bacon sandwich. (Javid’s a Muslim, Corbyn a vegetarian.)

Trying to soften the presentation of a trade union-curbing bill more draconian than Margaret Thatcher or Norman Tebbit ever contemplated, Javid movingly recalled that “unions helped my father when he first worked in the cotton mills. They helped him again when a whites-only policy threatened to block him from becoming a bus driver.”

But this did nothing to assuage the noisy and repeated protests of Labour backbenchers about a bill that raised the turnout threshold in strike ballots to 50 per cent—with 40 per cent required to support a strike in key public sector industries. As Ms Eagle pointed out, such a threshold would exclude half the Cabinet from becoming MPs.

It’s unlikely the angry MPs were showing off to please their leader. For one thing Corbyn had been greeted with silence when he took his place on the front bench. Respectful silence, but silence nonetheless. Those castigating the bill included Alan Johnson who, having been a moderate postal workers’ union boss, knows what he is talking about.

Earlier Jon Trickett – the only member of the mainstream-Labour-for-Corbyn tendency in the recent leadership contest – made his debut as local government spokesman. His Tory opponent Greg Clark recalled that Trickett had once been parliamentary private secretary to Peter Mandelson and that Tony Blair had said that Labour would have grown up when it learned to love the then Hartlepool MP.

The new question is about when Labour MPs will love their leader as much as the rest of the party do. Today was the start of that uneasy courtship.