Zack Polanski faces harshest scrutiny of his leadership yet

T he concession came through just before 2.30am, half an hour before Zack Polanski had to face the music. “It is clear now we will come a close second in this by-election,” the text from a Green Party spokesman read. “Taking the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats shows just how far the Greens have come. Voters want us to keep Labour’s feet to the fire on affordable housing, public ownership of water and the climate crisis. Greens will be there every single day, holding Labour to account and demanding the change people voted for.” The by-election on which Polanski had staked his leadership was not, in fact, particularly close. On a low but far from risible turnout of 38.8 per cent, Labour held the seat Sir Keir Starmer vacated in haste with 45.2 per cent of the vote. Polanski, whose advisers were briefing bullishly that the Greens stood a chance of winning only last week, won 32.8 per cent. Those numbers do not by themselves add up to abject humiliation — though that will not stop the result from being interpreted as such — but they are without question disappointing. Most commented 1 My partner died. Then I found a text: ‘Shall we have an affair?’ Sex & Relationships 132 comments 2 I sleep with my dogs. A new study proves it’s better for me Pets 96 comments 3 Harvey Elliott was England’s next great hope. Now he’s out of the picture Football 46 comments 4 500 arrested as French police use tear gas during student protests Europe 37 comments 5 Oliver Glasner: Premier League’s integrity at risk if Man City case drags on Football 27 comments Ignore the heroic exertion of that one word, “close”, and the optimistic take is that of the Green spokesman. Polanski increased his party’s share of the vote in a safe Labour seat. That this already famous defeat is actually the second-best Green performance in a parliamentary by-election ever is testament to how far he has taken his party in barely 13 months. But the leader will not now be commended for a creditable increase to Green goal difference. He lost, and really nothing about the defeat was that exceptional. It was neither lopsided enough to be devastating nor close enough to be exciting. And the question now is whether he has taken his party as far as they might go in Andy Burnham’s Britain. Holborn & St Pancras by-election: follow the latest To say the Greens trebled their share of the vote, which an exhausted Polanski did in the minutes after the declaration, ignores the reality. In 2024, standing against Starmer, they mustered only 10.4 per cent. Andrew Feinstein, a left-wing, pro-Palestine independent, came a strong second on 18.9 per cent. It suggests that Polanski consolidated existing opposition to Labour under one Green banner, but little more than that. Indeed, the striking thing about these results is the stasis. The winners were down, but only marginally, their main opposition vice versa. The Conservatives and Reform UK, a cigarette paper apart in third and fourth respectively, barely moved. Advertisement The upshot is that voters in this diverse wedge of north London are as well disposed to the Labour Party as they were in 2024. It is hardly symptomatic of a mass outbreak of Andymania or grounds for going to the Palace with a request for an early election. Nonetheless, given the Green landslide in Gorton & Denton barely seven months ago, it is a good place for the government to be. Burnham’s electoral record this year now reads: fought three, won three. He beat Reform in the post-industrial northwest, the Greens in London, and both in Greater Manchester. Labour is back to business as usual, and even that, after Starmer, is its own triumph. Top stories 1 Trump Jr’s ex-fiancée ‘asked donor to pay 0k credit card bill’ US politics 2 Trump’s war with Iran doubles the cost of his rides in ‘the Beast’ US politics 3 Starbucks ‘explores takeover’ of Chipotle Mexican Grill US business 4 ‘More lives will be lost’ unless UK takes action on wildfires Environment Top stories 1 My daughter works part-time — can she rescue her retirement? Ask Times Money 2 Three popular money rules that you should rethink Saving & Investing Read again what that spokesman said. No longer do the Greens speak of replacing Labour. Instead the almost deferential promise is to keep them honest, to hold them to account: more pressure group than insurgent army. Now the Greens look less like the coming force on the left than what the loyalist vigilantes of 1960s Belfast called a “scarecrow party”: when he moved from the pulpit to politics and founded the Protestant Unionist Party, Ian Paisley ’s intention was not so much to replace the establishment but startle it into stridency. Reluctantly, and only out of necessity, Polanski’s Greens are now auditioning for the same kind of role. The hard emotional work of readjustment may yet be bumpy. In putting himself forward — he always said he wanted a London seat — Polanski has opened himself up to the harshest scrutiny of his leadership to date. The first question is of strategy. Tasty by-elections came and went with metronomic regularity throughout Ukip’s pomp in the 2010s but Nigel Farage never took this kind of gamble. The calculus was always finely poised: a big name on the ballot might have made a difference but the downside risk of the leader losing like any other candidate was always greater. In recent days Polanski has cited Farage’s losing record in by-elections past but he appears to have overlooked the ones he did not fight. Even the May local election results — a referendum on the historically unpopular Starmer — suggested this would not be a slam-dunk. Polanski could have made his excuses. That he did not may now look like a hasty miscalculation. Critics within and without the Greens now have another big stick with which to beat him. In the space of a week a party which was once the most inoffensive in British politics stumbled into a row over antisemitism after its conference voted to equate Zionism with racism, and then into an anticlimactic embrace with the electorate. These national conversations are heady and unprecedented heights for the Greens and that historical achievement is mostly Polanski’s. But now some are wondering whether it was worth it. Caroline Lucas, the party’s first MP, former leader and the grande dame of its old environmentalist guard, is the prime example. Speaking to Newsnight on the BBC just after polls closed, she conspicuously refused to say that Polanski should not resign if he lost. “I think let’s just see what happens next, in the coming days and weeks,” she said. Natalie Bennett, her successor, said Polanski could and should stay on. But for Lucas the issue was not so much the by-election but the leader’s muted response to his party’s new policy on Israel. “I want him to speak now about what’s happened,” she said. “I want him to show the leadership that was frankly missing on Sunday. I think the jury is out about whether he will do that, but I very much hope he will.” Advertisement What Polanski told broadcasters just after the declaration — neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of his conference delegates — will not have raised those hopes. It was a more uncomfortable conversation than he would have liked, for it was a little case study in the consequences of his own success. He has built his party a bigger base than it has ever known, but it is looking more and more isolated, and for now appears to have little if any room for expansion. That’s the thing with scarecrows, of course. They’re supposed to be frightening. But some Greens worry that this one is spooking the wrong people.