Hold the front page: Green party leader Zack Polanski has called for an inquiry. After a blissfully quiet few weeks when he struggled to score so much as a ‘news in brief’ paragraph, and the television studios largely stopped calling, Mr Polanski has again been hogging the headlines.

Nature’s ancient rhythms are reasserting themselves. Damsons are ripening, the Gulf Stream is returning to normal and Zack the Yack is on the airwaves. Autumn’s imminent onset restores the old routines.

A party leader demanding an inquiry can always be sure of a few column inches. And who doesn’t like an inquiry? Lawyers make a fortune from them.

But it might be wise for us to examine more closely what Mr Polanski is calling for – and why.

He, infuriated by Fleet Street’s reporting of the Jason Arday affair and, more eccentrically, a comment article in The Mail on Sunday about the wonderful summer we have had, wants the public inquiry to be held into the culture and behaviour of the Press. ‘It’s time we sorted out the Press,’ raged Mr Polanski. Not one of life’s Mister Sunshines, he.

Some of us happen to have been able to enjoy the warm weather, despite the fires and the difficulties it brought to farmers, just as we think Cambridge University needed to be exposed for its promotion of the unfortunate, underqualified Professor Arday.

So yes, let’s have an inquiry, but let it be into the culture, behaviour and consequences of the Green Party. Would that not be more revealing, and urgently necessary?

I don’t know if you have ever been to a public inquiry but they are detailed affairs.

They delve into historic emails and corporate agendas. They subpoena witnesses from the gubbins of an organisation and compel them to explain controversial decisions. The smallest misjudgment can snowball. Low cunning can lead to disaster.

Inquiries examine the attitudes of big institutions towards pesky journalists.

That happened in the 2003 Hutton Inquiry, which exposed the confrontational approach of Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alastair Campbell, along with bungling at the BBC.

Lord Hutton examined the ‘sexed-up dossier’ on which the BBC claimed, in Lord Hutton’s judgment wrongly, that we were taken into the Iraq war. The process ended with both the chairman and the director-general of the BBC resigning. Mr Campbell had by then moved to pastures new, too.

Similar scrutiny has been seen more recently at inquiries into the Covid pandemic and the Post Office Horizon scandal. Vast bundles of evidence were assembled and digitised, at great cost. Witnesses were quizzed under oath about their work. Questions about transparency – another way of saying honesty – were central.

The Covid Inquiry may have been slow tennis but it did lay bare the vulgarity of former Downing Street strategist Dominic Cummings and Whitehall’s suppression of information. The Post Office inquiry exposed similar paranoia about inconvenient truths reaching the public.

These inquiries do not always reach shattering conclusions, and some reporters felt the Hutton Inquiry in particular was a whitewash.

More instructive are the attitudes revealed along the way. How did officials or politicians behave? How reckless were they? Why were they so jealous of secrets and resentful of the fourth estate?

An inquiry into the culture and behaviour of the Green Party could be intriguing. Suave senior counsel would lean back on their hind legs, stick their thumbs into their trouser tops and probe party grandees.

Did Green activists agree with their leader that it was ‘time we sorted out the Press’? They could deny, or perhaps even confirm, that complaining about journalists was the time-honoured tactic of politicians who have something to hide.

The Green Party has become an unfunny joke. An outfit once associated with hemp-shirted herbivores and middle-class Good Lifers has been hijacked by urban Marxists and anti-Semites. Lentils and wind-power (one follows another in that particular combination) have been replaced by police-bashing and calls for the obliteration of Israel.

The party’s now deputy leader, Mothin Ali, in 2024 delivered a speech in which he shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ in front of a Palestinian flag – and hailed his election as a Leeds councillor a ‘win for the people of Gaza’.

The Greens are no longer genial hippies. They are authoritarian Leftists who want to tax meat, ban new petrol cars and freeze defence spending. Nuclear weapons would go, but 20mph speed limits would mushroom.

They would raise the minimum wage, making it even harder for small businesses to employ youngsters. Upper tax rates would soar higher than one of Elon Musk’s rockets.

Mr Polanski, in his fly manner, denounces tax evaders yet has not always himself been prompt in paying his council tax. He once worked as a boob-whisperer, a hypnotherapist who told women he could make their breasts bigger just by looking at them. How very Benny Hill of him.

He sells policies with similar breathy intimacy.

His party’s policy on drugs is to allow heroin to be sold on prescription and for cannabis to be available at off-licence-style premises. Greens very much believe that women can have penises. Once the whole country’s been down to the offie for a bag of weed, who won’t?

And then there is their attitude to the police. In May, Mr Polanski hungrily leapt to the wrong conclusions after police detained a man suspected of stabbing two Jewish people in north London.

Mr Polanski shared a tweet that said the officers were behaving ‘violently’ to the knifeman. The head of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, called Mr Polanski’s intervention ‘inaccurate and misinformed’. Others wondered if it told us something sinister about a party that has been adopted so heavily by Islamists.

On top of the Golders Green episode came the odd business of a Green Party conference motion which proposed that funding be taken away from ‘policing, prisons and surveillance’ in order to reduce our ‘reliance on police’.

The motion originated from the Greens’ ‘crime and justice working group’. It also proposed to stop police from using pepper spray and Tasers when confronting violent offenders.

That the motion has now been withdrawn is welcome. That it was ever drafted may tell us who the Greens really are. And all this in the week we saw two fine police officers killed in the line of duty in Middlesbrough when they tried to apprehend a car of joyriders.

Come, come, you may say, the dotty old Greens are but a protest vote, a passing phase, a mid-term blip. Yet this is a party that has consistently been polling around 10 to 15 per cent of the national vote.

It seems particularly to prey on the immaturity of student voters. It was partly anxiety about the Greens that encouraged Labour MPs to topple Sir Keir Starmer, elected as our prime minister only two summers ago.

Some daft middle-class types may think this lot are Tom and Barbara Good, all woolly jumpers and free-range pigs. The evidence suggests something darker. Let’s unleash Sir Brian Leveson on them. Let’s have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about Zack the Yack.