Zack Polanski has beaten Adrian Ramsay and Ellie Chowns to become the new leader of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Unusually for the Greens, it was a closely fought — and sometimes tetchy — contest, but the result was emphatic. Polanski took a crushing 85% of the vote versus just 15% for Ramsay and Chowns — who, in the traditional Green style, ran on a joint-leadership ticket.

And that’s the real story behind Polanski’s personal triumph: the party’s old guard has been swept aside in favour of newly-arrived Left-wing activists including Grace Blakeley and Matt Zarb-Cousin. Or, to put it another way, the “watermelons” — green on the outside, but red on the inside — are the masters now.

On the face of it, that should be good news for Jeremy Corbyn and his yet-to-be launched new party of the Left. The Corbynites and the Greens risk splitting the Left-of-Labour vote if they compete for the same seats. But Polanski, who has welcomed the formation of a Corbyn party, is likely to seek a close working relationship between the two movements. Obviously, there can be no formal alliance until the Corbynites get their ducks in a row and officially launch, but expect negotiations to start thereafter. The former Labour leader said early this afternoon, addressing Polanski online, that “I look forward to working with you to create a kinder, fairer world.”

Indeed, with Polanski running the show, a pact becomes all the more important. While Ramsay and Chowns won their rural constituencies by running Liberal Democrat-style campaigns against the Tories, Polanski knows that the big hope for further Green gains lies in Labour-held inner-city seats such as Bristol East and Sheffield Central. In his victory speech, he emphasised social issues like housing, while also championing the Palestinian cause and presenting his party as the “antidote to Reform”.

The Greens may be pacifists by nature, but their new leader has just parked his tanks on Corbyn’s allotment. So while Polanski’s message to Corbyn will be “let’s be friends”, the unspoken coda is “or else”.

A potential danger for the former Labour leader is that it could destabilise the already delicate balance of power between different factions in his movement. As Joan Smith has explained for UnHerd, trans issues are turning into a point of tension between the progressive Left-wing tendency represented by Zarah Sultana, and socially conservative Muslim independent MPs such as Adnan Hussein.

Corbyn’s approach has been to try to keep everyone onside, emphasising points of agreement. By way of contrast, Polanski was able to wrongfoot his leadership rivals on the trans issue. In the new Green Party, what little room there was for dissent from the trans-orthodoxy has disappeared. So the irony is that one kind of red-green alliance — between socialists and environmentalists — has the potential to destabilise the other kind between secular Leftists and Muslims.

Finally, it might be wise to be wary of Polanski’s personal appeal. The former hypnotherapist has clearly had a mesmeric effect on Green Party members and, unless he’s kept at arm’s length, that could extend to Corbynite activists. Before Corbyn starts feeling sleepy, very sleepy, he needs to wake up to the threat.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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