If, as expected, Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election, he will immediately have a historic opportunity to change political culture for the better, for good. What’s more, it’s an opportunity he will have no choice but to take.

It all springs from what looks like a massive problem. Corbyn has been Labour’s most rebellious MP, voting against his party more than 500 times. That would make it practically impossible for him to demand loyalty from the parliamentary Labour party, especially since fewer than the 36 who nominated him actually support him, with Margaret Beckett even describing herself as a moron for lending him her votes. Corbyn would be a contemptible hypocrite if he were to try to crack the whip that he himself so gleefully defied.

The only way out of this is to perform some political judo, harnessing the force of his biggest disadvantage in his own favour. This he can do quite easily by announcing that under his leadership, there will be no whip. Necessity will be the murderer of convention.

The only way out is to perform some political judo, harnessing the force of his biggest disadvantage in his own favour

Rather conveniently, this would not just be an expedient move but a necessary and principled one. The whip has had its day. The public is sick of party-line-toeing politicians and want independent people answerable to constituents, not apparatchiks. That is precisely why Corbyn is so popular in the first place. He is seen as his own man, not an identikit career politician trying to climb the greasy pole.

The whip is part of the machinery of an outdated party politics that can no longer galvanise voters. It evolved in the 18th century, with the office of the chief whip formally coming into existence in the early 19th, and should be consigned to this era when deference and obedience were considered virtues. It is profoundly undemocratic. MPs are elected to represent their constituents. They cannot do this if, once in parliament, they instead have to bow down in front of their party’s leadership.

Mainstream parties have been gradually losing support in part because they appear to be stuffed with people more interested in their team winning then serving the country. The more the whip disempowers individual MPs, the weaker the party looks collectively. Hence the whole will be much stronger if it exerts less control over its parts, enabling members to show their individual strengths, troublesome though they may sometimes be.

Were Corbyn to do this it would put irresistible moral pressure on the other parties to follow suit. It would be too easy to contrast the unshackled free-thinking Labour members from their servile, sheep-like Conservative colleagues. Overnight, parties that used the whip would look anachronistic, using a form of heavy-handed top-down management that was abandoned in business years ago. Jibes that David Cameron trusts his own MPs less than many businesses trust their employees will make the whip look ridiculous.

Take the whip away and Westminster could become a very different place. It would strike a blow against its excessively adversarial ways of working, the two sides of a divided house braying at each other across the floor. This is a hangover from the already obsolete two-party system. End the whip and it would become more natural for some MPs of different parties to vote together, some against each other, purely on the merits of the policy. It would make it less common for parties to oppose a policy simply as a way of trying to draw blood, because being defeated would no longer represent a major rebellion: you can hardly rebel when no one is commanding you to obey.

If he were to abolish the whip, Corbyn must do so as soon as he is elected. Leave it any longer and it will look like an inevitable retreat in response to a failure to be able to lead his party with authority. He should make it clear that he is freely handing the whip in, rather than allowing it to be torn from his grasp.

Of course, in politics as in sport, there is no goal so open that someone can’t fluff it and miss. Corbyn might well try to retain the whip. But it’s hard to see how or why he would.

The country is crying out for a more open politics, less driven by party factionalism. Everyone accepts that there is disillusionment with politics but nobody seems willing to tackle the old-fashioned ways of doing things that create this disenchantment. Love him or loathe him, Corbyn could do something about this and start his new job by creating what could turn out to be his greatest legacy.