The Green party’s leadership announcement was live streamed using a phone which seemed to be wrapped in clingfilm and held by someone who appeared to be suffering from delirium tremens. You may not have realised that the Greens were electing a new leader. You may not even have realised that they have a leader at all – in fairness, until recently they didn’t, opting instead for a bizarre job-share arrangement whereby they had a sort of weird progressive hydra of ‘spokespeople’. Leadership for the polycule era.
The core argument against taking the Greens seriously is any engagement with the party itself
There is an argument that says we ought to take the Greens more seriously. After all they have four MPs – the same as Reform UK – and are consistently polling in double figures. They represent a genuine threat to Labour in particular as they cannibalise votes to the party’s left and render a number of their urban seats vulnerable.
However, the core argument against taking the Greens seriously is any engagement with the party itself. The announcement of Zack Polanski as their leader was no exception. For the first ten minutes of the proceedings the phone was being held upside down, resulting in the attendees – a mix of bearded men in traditional Islamic dress and middle-aged women with lanyards – appearing horizontally.
The event appeared to take place in some sort of underground bunker, all concrete and random wires. A woman got on stage and, after wolf-whistling at the chattering crowd, introduced herself with a primary school assembly style ‘Goooood morrrrnnnning everybodyyy!’. This was apparently the CEO of the Greens. A problem with the microphone meant that most people didn’t hear what she said after her opening salvos. There was a lot of guff about ‘passion, energy, and verve’. She compared the Green party to a start up. Apposite, I suppose, in that 90 per cent of them are failures.
Finally we got to the results. Zack Polanski had crushed Adrian Ramsey and Ellie Chowns. They were considered ‘the sensible candidates’, despite Ms Chowns infamously declaring in the assisted suicide debate that coercion couldn’t happen because her mum told her so. Polanski, however, is a real throwback to the loopy Greens of yesteryear. In a direct debate with Ramsay recently the two visibly bristled with mutual aversion, with Ramsay refusing to say that he ‘liked’ Polanski and instead repeating that ‘we’ve worked together’. ‘Do you like him?’ asked interviewer Iain Dale. ‘We’ve worked together on all sorts of things’, replied Ramsay. ‘Yes or no’, tried Dale again. ‘Zack is a valued colleague’, said Ramsay. And so it went on.
Polanski’s vote share – a whopping 84.6 per cent – probably gives him a mandate to wreak revenge on the Green establishment which tried to shun him. Polanski is a self-proclaimed populist who spent part of his career as a hypnotherapist, he once advised women that they could increase their bra size through the power of suggestion. Whether they can do the same with their vote share will have to be seen.
Meanwhile the Greens had competition in the loony stakes this morning. Yvette Cooper gave an interview where she seemed to imply that every inch of her home was covered in flags. ‘We’ve actually got Union Jack bunting on our garden shed’, she said, with a maniacal grin. ‘I’ve got St George’s flags, St George’s bunting, Yorkshire Rose bunting, Union Jack flags and tablecloths – er, we’ve got the lot’. Madness never seems to cease.
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