Why won't Labour MPs cheer for Jeremy Corbyn, their most successful leader in 20 years?

You can be forgiven, in these serious times, for not having got round to considering What The General Election Result Means for political sketch writers, but I compel you now to consider the absolute seriousness of what happened.

For those of us who counted down, not even from six but from 18 , what were meant to be Jeremy Corbyn’s final questions to the Prime Minister scarcely two months ago – safe in the knowledge that change, at least of some sort, would have to come – the night of 8 June was one of unspeakable horror.

Whatever one’s political persuasion, it does not require the establishment of a cross party commission to conclude that the May vs Corbyn show had had its time. For those of us whose job it is to try and find something – anything – even vaguely amusing to say about a loud, weekly, bitter yet somehow still meandering conversation between two septuagenarians who are about as comfortable around a joke as Paul Nuttall is around the truth, a change surely had to come.

Come, as you know, it has not. But that is not to say the first episode of Corbyn vs May Season Two, which could yet run for a full five years, had not been slightly reimagined by the writers.

An actual cheer from the Labour backbenchers to greet the arrival of a leader who has actually gained seats at a general election, for the first time in twenty years, was evidently too much to ask. But at least the sarcastic cheers from the Tory backbenches have dried up: progress of sorts.

It has been a while since people stopped claiming that politicians are “all the same” but even so, the fundamental difference in Labour and Conservative DNA has rarely seen in sharper focus than was so at three minutes to 12pm on Wednesday lunchtime.

The standard criticism aimed at Corbyn by his party’s ‘centre-left’ ‘moderates’ is an obsession with ‘dogma’, of ‘ideological purity’, at the expense of actually, you know, seeking to win elections. That they were not sufficiently moved to acknowledge the arrival of a leader who is winning nationally both in personal and party approval ratings, merely because they happen not to agree with his far-left politics was behaviour that can only be described as Corbynite.

So regularly offered, and for such minor cause, is the stock advice of the Corbynista – namely to “f*** Off and join the Tories” – one has to wonder whether Corbyn himself has ever been tempted to follow it.

There was Theresa May, 30 seconds later: the majority-detonating, Brexit-imperilling, DUP-bribing, general all-round embarrassment of a Conservative Prime Minister, wandering in to the usual eruption of noise and waving of order papers from her at least outwardly loyal backbenchers.

Churchill once said of Clement Attlee that he was a “humble man with much to be humble about”, an insult that has not aged well given Attlee’s later emergence as a giant of 20th Century history. It is possible that Theresa May’s future history will not be so favourably recalled, but with so very much suddenly to be humble about, the new May 2.0 Humble Edition was a refreshing, almost statesman-like reinvention.

The subject matter, Grenfell Tower, prompted a rare and prolonged spell of modest, sensible and subdued questioning, right up until the point at which Corbyn suddenly blamed it all on austerity. To a backing track of cries of “Shameful!” from the benches behind her, Theresa May politely, almost passively pointed out, that the cladding of high rise buildings “began under Tony Blair, had been carried out by governments of both colours and councils of all persuasions” and that a “coming together” was what was required. A dignified response only moderately undermined by the fact that it isn’t true.

Theresa May probably knew that Grenfell would dominate her exchanges with Corbyn, meaning she turned the rarely deployed strategy of storing up all her zingers (if we can call them that) for later planted questions from her own MPs.

On Trident renewal, a matter on which Jeremy Corbyn is meant to have told Glastonbury chief Michael Eavis in private at the weekend that he would scrap, the Prime Minister replied saying the Labour leader “says one thing to the many and another to the few”.

Later on, she told one of her own MPs the “only trade deals he would sign would be with Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea”.

After the first, its prompter, the new MP for Aldershot Leo Docherty sat and actually winked at the Prime Minister. Life as a new Tory MP is probably not quite what Mr Docherty was expecting, right up until one minute to ten pm on 8 June. But even so it is hard to imagine the depths of shame that must accompany the feeling of playing the straight man to Theresa May. To be Ernie Wise in a world where Theresa May is Eric Morecambe is a troubling place indeed.

Not least as, on this evidence, the signs are there for an earlyish return to the dreaded woe of normal.