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.