EVERYTHING'S GONE GREEN

With polls and membership at an all-time high, the UK Green party is having a moment and it's largely down to their charismatic (if slightly cheesy) new leader. Can Zack Polanski really pull off a socialist revolution?

- Simon Hattenstone

Wakefield 17 JANUARY 2026

"I'm dying for a wee," Zack Polanski says as he gets off the train at Wakefield Westgate. Why didn't you go on the train, I ask? "It was very busy and too many people recognised me on the way to the toilet. I knew I'd never get there for all the conversations, so I came back." When did it become hard for him to go to the toilet on a train? "2 September," he says. "The day I was elected." At first, I wonder if Polanski is bigging himself up, but over the next couple of weeks I see for myself he is not exaggerating. While Polanski says it's not, and cannot be, about one individual, in Green circles there is much talk of the Polanski effect. Since he was elected in September 2025, the Greens have risen by an average of four points in the polls.

Shortly before going to press, the Guardian's latest poll tracker had the party at 13.5%, only five points behind Labour, on 18.6%; 20% of people who voted Labour in 2024 now say they will go Green.

It's astonishing how life has changed for the party leader over five months. For 20-odd years Polanski, aged 43, was a jobbing actor nobody had heard of. He got by, just, by supplementing his acting gigs with all sorts of jobs - teaching drama, dressing up as hotdogs, handing out flyers at the nightclub Heaven, working in bars and, now notoriously, as a hypnotherapist.

Polanski became deputy leader of the Green party in 2022, and still pretty much nobody had heard of him. These days, he looks like an oldtimer, born to a life in politics. But the truth couldn't be more different.