Barely four months ago, England and Wales Green Party leader Zack Polanski appeared, politically, as if he could walk on water. Yet as Britain’s political season cranks up after the break, is he now in danger of drowning?
As early summer dawned, the Greens had overtaken Labour in most polls, and the insurgent left-wing party was straining to nail down second place behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
It won its first Westminster byelection in Gorton and Denton in February, laying waste along the way to Labour’s Muslim vote, and it surged in May’s local elections in England and Wales, especially London.
Polanski had been leader for only eight months, but party membership had trebled.
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“Two-party politics is not just dying, it is dead, and it is buried,” he said after the Greens gained 411 councillors in May and took control of five borough councils.
If the two-party system was to survive, Polanski suggested, it would be with two different parties: “The new politics is the Green Party versus Reform.”
Polanski was also fast becoming one of the hottest media tickets in politics in London even though not a part of the Westminster carousel – he is a London Assembly member, and not in the British parliament.
Fast forward to now, the run-up to its autumn conference in five weeks’ time. Polanski may have been forgiven if, earlier this year, he imagined it as a jubilant gathering of the Green troops celebrating this once-fringe party’s transformation under his leadership.
Yet as The Times in London suggested this week, the mood has changed. There is now angst in the Green ranks. A five-page motion submitted for the conference warns of the risk of a “period of stagnation for the Green vote”.
The Times’ report says the motion, which was signed by five senior party members, worried that a Labour bounce under new British prime minister Andy Burnham risked leaving the Greens behind.
It called on the party under Polanski to be more radical on big issues such as a wealth tax and climate change, warning that instructions from headquarters on local canvassing were “holding us back”.
The Greens are now back to fourth in most opinion polls, way behind Labour. Its candidate, Irish woman Geraldine Coggins, was also soundly beaten in the Manchester mayoral byelection sparked by Burnham’s move to Westminster. She finished a distant third behind Labour winner Bev Craig and Reform UK.
Meanwhile, the lustre has also tarnished on Polanski’s media image after attacks by his opponents, some avoidable controversies and missteps, and subsequent apologies from Polanski for errors.
Martin Allen, a Green councillor in Worcestershire, even quit the party last month, saying Polanski was “not fit” to lead due to “poor judgment”.
What has happened to burst the Green leader’s once-burgeoning bubble?
The most obvious part of the answer is the appointment of Burnham as PM. He has galvanised Labour and led its modest renewal in polls.
Yet Polanski’s difficulties had started before Burnham took over. The Greens might have posted record results in May’s local elections, but, like Reform UK, that only helped to disguise that its peak had already passed.
A More in Common poll released just before the May vote showed Polanski’s personal popularity had plummeted by 14 points in a week after a public row with London Metropolitan Police chief Mark Rowley.
Polanski had tweeted a suggestion that there may have been police brutality in the arrest of a terror attack suspect in Golders Green, a Jewish area of London.
It sparked a wave of criticism from inside and outside his party. Moreover, it fuelled a narrative, exploited by the Greens’ political rivals, that the party had a problem with anti-Semitism, even though Polanski is Jewish.
Polanski said he regretted his social media post and apologised. It would not be the last time.
He had already shipped months of barbs from political rivals when it emerged that, a few years ago, when he was a therapist, he had agreed to hypnotise women into believing they had bigger breasts. Polanski also apologised for that.
Meanwhile, the party faced further criticism as its new influx of hard-left members advanced a motion for debate that stated: “Zionism is racism”. The Greens, it appeared, were sliding into the same pit of acrimony over allegations of anti-Semitism that had sullied Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as Labour leader.
Polanski faced further criticism after he boosted a social media post showing a man wearing a T-shirt with a guillotine and an apparent reference to Farage. Polanski acknowledged he was wrong, but refused to apologise. The Greens had already launched a review of his social media use, however, after previous missteps.
Finally, a section of his party feared that, under Polanski, the Greens were focusing too much on culture war issues, and not enough on the climate crisis.
As he attempts to brush this off, Polanski this week intervened in the debate over energy-gobbling data centres.
The party, also this week, won a council seat byelection in the migrant hotspot of Dover after a split in the right-wing vote, proving it still had the ability to pull off surprises.
But the sparkle has come off Polanski’s Green halo. It will be a test of resolve to see if he can retrieve it.
