As the polls closed on Thursday night, it started to become clear that Zack Polanski was not about to be elected the first Green MP for the central London seat of Holborn and St Pancras. The telling line was from a Green Party statement issued at 10pm, noting that “to be the main challenger shows how far the Greens have come”. It didn’t scream confidence. That statement was not, however, the such sign. A point made repeatedly throughout the campaign was that another populist insurgent had stood unsuccessfully for parliament seven times before finally winning in 2024. Losing once? Pah, Zack’s just getting started.
And lo, it came to pass: Polanski won nearly a third of the vote, but was nowhere near beating Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali. Being likened to Nigel Farage, though, is hardly calculated to flatter anyone, and the inevitable whispering campaign has already begun. “Zack Polanski will have questions to answer,” notes the . Then there’s the : “Zack Polanski is probably finished.” Eeesh. Far worse was the answer former leader and party grandee Caroline Lucas gave when asked if Polanski should step down. “I think let’s just see what happens in the coming days and weeks” – hardly, as host Katie Razzall noted, full-throated support.
Such rumblings are not especially surprising. There have always been qualms about Polanski: that his desire for an audience’s approval might prove stronger than any political principles that he may or may not have (accounts vary); that his Extremely Online tendency to like nice social media posts about himself, without asking himself if seeming to endorse the source’s views might cause him problems (it frequently has); that his past as a publicity-hungry hypnotherapist or, worse, a Liberal Democrat could be a source of embarrassment (duh).
Issues like these, though, could be waved aside while he oversaw a tripling of the membership, then led the party to new polling highs and victory in both the Gorton and Denton by-election and several hundred council seats. By late spring, the Greens were sometimes outpolling Labour, and Polanski could spin the future as a battle between himself and Farage. In that world, who cared that he’d once said something stupid to the ?
Since then, though, the party has struggled to maintain momentum. Under Andy Burnham’s leadership, Labour polling has rebounded, with most of the gains coming from the Greens. During the hottest and most climate change-y summer on record, the Greens have struggled to be heard.
And at a party conference at which the party had promised to reclaim the narrative and announce a raft of major policies like rent controls, its leader seemed oddly absent. Partly this was because of a by-election timed so inconveniently one might wonder whether a Labour government had done it deliberately. Partly, too, it seems to have been to avoid engaging with the toxic debate around the “Zionism is racism” motion. Polanski, Jewish himself, backed an unsuccessful amendment making clear no one would be censured simply for attending synagogue. But he did not attempt to use his position to attempt to sway the party on the motion as a whole, and gave the distinct impression he was keeping his head down. Of course questions are being asked about his leadership: he seems reluctant to lead.
Questions, though, may be all that Polanski faces: no leadership election is due until next summer, no challenger has come forward, and removing a sitting leader requires two-thirds support in the party’s governing council. There’s little sign that the membership is clamouring for change. The rapid tripling of that membership may have meant entryism; but it means, too, that a majority of those members are people who joined specifically to back Polanski.
As to Holborn, winning a third of the vote, more than won by the Green and independent left candidates in 2024 combined, was not necessarily a bad result. Taking a seat that’s been Labour for as long as anyone can remember, at a point when the governing party is conducting a radical experiment with having a leader people like, was always a tough ask. The Greens have broken through in parts of London that are generally further east, in Hackney and Walthamstow.
The real dilemma the Greens are now facing has little to do with the identity of the person who nominally leads them: it’s what their party is actually . Is it to promote the environmental cause? Pressuring Labour leftwards? Trying to displace altogether? Or simply to provide a left-wing alternative and to hell with electoral success? Those all require slightly different strategies. The risk for Polanski is not that he faces a leadership challenge, before the Burnham bounce has time to wear off: it’s that he continues leading without being able to answer that question.