The aftermath of a parliamentary byelection is the closest politics gets to the thick, cliche-rich broth of football punditry. Labour put in a statement performance in Holborn and St Pancras to retain a seat where it could boast a majority of almost 28,000 until the 2024 election. Meanwhile, despite the Greens having posted the second-highest byelection vote share in their history, prominent voices inside the dressing room are now openly questioning whether Zack Polanski has taken the team as far as he can.
Clearly the goalposts have shifted dramatically since the days when the Greens were a charming irrelevance, the sort of party people voted for out of politeness. Occasionally some nice middle-aged lady with a name like Jilly Begonia-Foliage would win a seat on the parish council in Enchanted Forest West, and there would be a brief flutter of excitement. But by and large, they were blithely, unashamedly ignored.
Often you will hear people say the Greens would have been better off sticking with the old approach, which talked about things like solar power and jam. We should call this what it is: a very clear lie, disprovable with numbers, and yet consistently nourished by a political class desperate to ignore them again, and prepared to unleash industrial quantities of bad-faith criticism to that end.
We saw this in the coverage of their conference last week, in which most of a very interesting domestic policy platform was overlooked in favour of allowing blatant distortions, claims that the Greens now support racist violence, to spread virtually unchallenged. Doubtless there will be plenty more of this stuff to come. So yes, it’s been a bad week. But the sort of bad week that Polanski’s predecessors could barely have dreamed of.
While we’re on the subject of platforms, and who gets to have their priorities articulated, Kemi Badenoch has
unveiled her plan to scrap the “cliff edge” that removes free childcare provision from
parents earning more than £100,000. In recent months this has become an increasing obsession of the broadsheet columnist class, who – by wild coincidence – are disproportionately likely to be middle-class, of child-rearing age and earning low six figures.
Perhaps we underestimate the way “columnist brain” impacts political discourse. Housing policy is seen almost entirely through a nimby/planning lens rather than – for example – substandard social housing. Transport means trains, not lorries or buses. And yes, I’m aware of the irony of a columnist pontificating on columnists. But you’ve got to self-disinfect now and again.
In her conference speech, Badenoch paid warm tribute to
Jeffrey Archer,
who died on Monday aged 86. “The world is a less colourful place without him,” she said, to a rousing ovation. Of course there was no mention of Monica Coghlan, the sex worker whose life was destroyed by Archer’s lies about her: lies that would eventually put him in jail for perjury. Keep this in mind the next time the Tories tell you they’re tough on crime.
The Green party conference in Brighton, 3 October 2026. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
