The Greens are finally coming under serious
scrutiny – and they’re rattled!
Fear not, Zack Polanski’s seismic by-election success
will ultimately spell his downfall.
Michael DeaconColumnist & Assistant Editor
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Michael Deacon writes the satirical "Way of the World" column twice a week (published at 6am every Tuesday and Saturday), plus a weekly Features column. For 10 years he reported from the Commons as the Telegraph's parliamentary sketch writer. He has previously been a TV columnist and restaurant critic. You can find him on Twitter @MichaelPDeacon
Published 04 March 2026 3:01pm GMT
What a rollercoaster week it’s been for supporters of the Green Party. One day they win a historic by-election. Then, a day later, the Supreme Leader of Iran is killed. From ecstasy to despair, in one fell swoop. The poor things will have been weeping into their ginger kombucha.
Still, now they’re on the up again because a seismic YouGov poll has shown that they’ve overtaken both Labour and the Tories – with only Reform narrowly ahead. Even more astoundingly, the poll reveals that the Greens are the most popular party with all age groups under 50. At this rate, they must be dreaming of winning not just by-elections – but the next general election, too.
Unfortunately for the Greens, however, this extraordinary upturn in their fortunes does have a downside. Which is that, at very long last, they’re starting to come under some actual scrutiny. And they clearly don’t like it one little bit.
Look how they reacted after Mothin Ali, the Green Party’s deputy leader, was criticised in the Commons on Monday for attending a protest against the air strikes on Iran. Sir Alec Shelbrooke, a Tory MP, accused Ali of “protesting in support of the Ayatollah”. In reply, Sir Keir Starmer said, “I think we’re all shocked by the actions of the deputy leader of the Green Party.”
Pretty mild stuff by the usual standards of Commons debate. Yet it seems to have sent the Greens into a shrieking meltdown. Zack Polanski, their leader, howled that Sir Keir was guilty of “blatant Islamophobia”, by “smearing a caring man of principle for standing up for peace”. Meanwhile, Ali wailed that he was a victim of a “defamatory lie” and “pure racism”.
Funny how things turn out. Polanski has spent almost his entire leadership smugly proclaiming that any politician or pundit who dares criticise the Greens is “rattled”. Yet all of a sudden, he’s sounding distinctly rattled himself.
All I can say is that he’d better get used to it. Because, for the first time, people are beginning to take the Greens seriously. And for Polanski’s party, that’s bad news. After all, let’s face it – one of the main reasons for their recent success is that many of their own voters don’t actually know what their policies are.
We demonstrated this at the weekend, when Telegraph reporters visited the scene of the Gorton and Denton by-election and asked Green voters whether they knew that, for example, the party wants to legalise crack cocaine and prostitution. Local Muslims, in particular, were aghast. “It seems they hid those policies,” lamented one. “Who supports these policies?” gasped another. Both said they would never have voted Green if they’d known.
Well, lots more people will soon know about those policies, too, because the Green Party’s opponents will be making sure everyone does. No voter will be able to avoid hearing that the Greens want to give primary school children lessons in how to take drugs “safely”, make the UK pay billions of pounds in reparations for the 18th-century slave trade, and allow absolutely all illegal immigrants to remain in Britain (while giving them a house each, and handing them free money “at the level of Universal Basic Income”, with no obligation to work for it).
As a result, the next general election should be somewhat unusual. Normally, political parties spend the campaign telling the electorate about their own policies. But this time, they’ll all be telling the electorate about Green Party policies – purely to ensure that the nation finally grasps just how screamingly bonkers they are. I used to think of the Greens as the party that puts the “mental” into “environmentalism”. But of late, they seem to have gone oddly quiet on the environment – and started putting the “mental” into everything else, instead.
Up to now, Polanski and his friends have been allowed to play politics on easy mode. Thanks to widespread ignorance of their loonier views, they’ve managed to cobble together a farcically incoherent electoral coalition of radical Islamists, trans fanatics and white middle-class useful idiots who think that voting Green simply shows how kind and caring they are. The belated advent of real scrutiny, however, is liable to put this implausible alliance under desperate strain. In effect, then, the Greens’ recent success could actually lead to their downfall.
Still, Polanski can cling to one small hope. Most of his party’s policies are so preposterous that voters may assume that their opponents have simply made them up. DT.
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