Winning the Green Party leadership race on a joint ticket makes Caroline Lucas and Jonathan Bartley the first ever job share at the top of an English political party (the Scottish Greens have been doing it for years by having two co-convenors at the top). The pair won convincingly, picking up 86 per cent of the vote in the first round. Yet whilst the margin of their win was clear, what’s less obvious is how the job share will work in reality.
There is, though, one valuable asset that Lucas will certainly be able to offer the Greens. Whilst her predecessor Natalie Bennett might have upped the party’s share of the vote by almost three per cent at the last election (in 2015, more than a million people backed the Green party; four times as many than at any other general election), she never quite mastered the media. And despite her success, Bennett failed to recover from her infamous ‘brain freeze’ interview. It’s a sad fact of politics that a few disastrous moments can be enough to tarnish a politician’s reputation for good; for Bennett, this was certainly the case during her excruciatingly awful chat about her party’s housing policy with LBC’s Nick Ferrari in February 2015.
But it’s unlikely that a similar fate will befall Lucas, who, for her faults, does possess a good media nouse and is an effective communicator. Much less is known about her job share partner (the party’s work and pensions spokesman), but Lucas herself has made a lot of what she sees as the asset of having a team at the top. During their campaign, Lucas said (perhaps rather cornily) that two heads were better than one and that the more ideas you had ‘the more plural your politics (and) the more likely they will be effective, and reach more people’. This sounds like the type of ‘progressiveness’ which either repels or attracts supporters to the party. So, in some ways, it’s business as usual for the Greens.
Certainly one fan of the idea of job sharing is Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell. When he was just a humble backbencher in 2012, before the heady days of Corbynism took hold, McDonnell called for a change in the law to allow job shares in Parliament. But Lucas will be hoping that it’s not only on this policy that the Greens and Labour can find common ground. In a letter to the Guardian, Lucas spoke of the need for a ‘progressive alliance’ between the two parties. She went on to say that, whoever Labour’s leader was, with the collapse of their support in Scotland, ‘it must be increasingly clear to Labour that they cannot win an outright majority at the next election’. This was a direct appeal to Labour. So once Corbyn’s almost certain leadership win is out the way, it’ll be interesting to see whether these words of invitation do result in a new alliance.
Comments