Politics is a funny old game, isn’t it. Almost exactly a year ago, Zack Polanski, newly elected leader, was at his first Green Party conference, carrying all before him, and he was reading the funeral rites over the twitching corpse of Keir Starmer’s broken Labour Party. With all that sunny, charismatic, breathless energy he once possessed, it was he who was the great hope for “progressives”.
His confidence was almost suffocating in its intensity: “I said when I won [the leadership] that I didn't want to just be concerned with Labour, I wanted to replace Labour”. To Polanski, Labour was a party “collapsing in in itself”, and he generously offered asylum to its supporters, and he was “very open to a conversation” with “progressive, particularly left-wing” Labour MPs looking to defect because their “home is in the Green Party”.
