On a cold Saturday morning in mid-June, at the Friends Meeting House in central London, a middle-aged woman in a floral pashmina attacked a panel of Green Party councillors. The London branch of the party, newly galvanized after successful local elections, had gathered in this neo-Georgian monolith – the nerve center of British Quakerism – for a conference. The petitioner wanted to ask the panel a question and then left after being repeatedly instructed to wait for the Q&A at the end. “She’ll vote Reform then,” said one of the panelists (comedian Nels Abbey, not himself a councillor). A woman in the audience muttered “she must be a spy.”
Don’t be fooled by this moment of divisiveness; there was a buzz around this weekend’s Green Party conference in London. The success of the party in London on May 7 was widespread. There were wins in key targets such as the mayoralties of Hackney and Lewisham and an increase of 248 additional councilors across the 32 boroughs. Other gains were more surprising: Waltham Forest Council is now run by a Green administration and while Lambeth Council – the Labor stronghold where Morgan McSweeney cut his teeth – is now run by a Green Party councillor. Opening the conference, London Green Party chairman Eugene McCarthy described “the smell of victory in the air” before announcing that the number of party members in the capital had grown from 8,000 to 40,000 in a year.
The first place the Greens would like to test their new plan for electoral success is the mayor of Greater Manchester. Party officials have already begun planning for a hypothetical contest. But the job will only become available if Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election on Thursday (May 18). One might think that the party’s first task would be to try to win that race. Have the Greens accepted defeat?
Party insiders seem confident about Makerfield. A poll by Convergent Opinion, which landed in the final weekend of the campaign, put the Greens on 5 per cent, about the same as Rupert Lowe’s Take Britain Back. “It’s not a strong area for us,” a party source told me, “but we’ve found the candidate has done well.” The source hinted at the performance of the party’s Makerfield candidate, Sarah Wakefield Question timein which she challenged Reform’s Robert Kenyon over his previous social media posts (one of which suggested that women should have abortions so that they could “curse whoever they wantThe source added that “Wakefield’s stance on the Reform threat to women has reached and has been influential in the campaign.”
It is highly unlikely that Wakefield will be chosen as the next MP for Makerfield. Instead, the Greens are betting on a Burnham win. The party has decided that in the event of a contest in Greater Manchester, it will send its chief organizer to London, Elfrede Brambley-Crawshaw, to run the campaign. “She ran our local election campaign in London and is great at targeting voters and focusing on issues like housing,” a source told me. Internally, the Greens see the Greater Manchester race as being run along similar lines to the Gorton and Denton by-elections. “It’s a similar battleground,” one source told me. They pointed to the council elections for Manchester City Council, where “the Greens beat Labor in the popular vote”. The Greens won 17 seats, becoming the second largest party (many of those seats covered wards within the Gorton and Denton electorate, such as Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage).
Victory in Greater Manchester would be a very different undertaking to convince voters in Gorton and Denton or the progressive-leaning London boroughs. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority consists of 10 councils, one of which is Wigan Council, which covers Makerfield (and clearly a direct Labour-Reform battle). Others, such as Tameside Council, are drawn on similar demographics. The fact that in the local elections Reforma is not mentioned here came in first across the Greater Manchester area with 31 per cent of the vote. The Greens fell to third place with 19 percent. Do the Green Party really think that a (hypothetical!) Manchester Mayoral battle is theirs to fight?
Zack Polanski yes. When I met him in a closely guarded green room behind the auditorium at the Friends House, he was confident about the Greens’ chances of winning the race to replace Burnham. Polanski has been remarkably quiet since the May 7 local elections. Since being elected in September 2025, he has dominated the airwaves, appearing on podcasts, TV channels and social media making the case for his insurgent Greens. But the weeks leading up to the local elections were difficult, with a series of stories appearing in the papers exposing aspects of his life, such as inaccuracies on his CV or failing to pay council tax on the houseboat he shared with his partner, Richie. At the party conference on Saturday, a burly plainclothes security guard stood nearby, and when we spoke, Polanski seemed more tired and nervous than at previous meetings. (A source close to him told me that Makerfield – which has become a much less important race for the Greens than Gorton and Denton – has been a welcome possibility for some time.)
“Makerfield has felt strange,” Polanski told me, “in Gorton and Denton we were very clear that we were going all out for it, but obviously Makerfield has been a bit quieter.” But he added: “I think what’s buzzing is the Greater Manchester mayoral race, which we’re absolutely going to do everything for.” However, I point out, Burnham hasn’t won yet. Does that mean Polanski thinks he’s going to give this fight talk to the mayor of Manchester? “It will depend on the people of Makerfield,” he said, “but there is a distinct possibility that Andy Burnham will not be mayor of Greater Manchester for just over a week.”
I point out that winning Greater Manchester would be more difficult than winning Gorton and Denton (the party would have to win over the voters of Makerfield for example, something it is trying to do). Polanski is not worried. He sees the mayoralty of the Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) as “27 Gortons and Dentons”, a “pretty big space” (here he’s talking about the 27 areas covering Greater Manchester; to win the Combined Authority, the party will need to win over voters in all 10 council areas that make up the GMCA). In the event of a contest, the Greens are planning a hyper-local grassroots campaign. “The good news is that we know how to do this really well.”
Polanski’s predecessor as Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, caused controversy early in the Makerfield race when she called on her party not to throw everything into defeating Burnham. Lucas sees Burnham as a vehicle for the adoption of proportional representation by the UK, which the mayor of Manchester has explicitly supported. What does Polanski think?
“I think it depends on Andy Burnham’s version,” he said, echoing a line delivered by Labor MP (and Burnham ally) Clive Lewis at a conference last month. “What we’re seeing so far is an Andy Burnham supporting Shabana Mahmood’s regressive immigration reforms, an Andy Burnham talking about cutting welfare to increase defense spending,” Polanski added. “Having said that, I always want to work with people in politics who share my values,” he said, “I thought that was where Andy Burnham was, I’m increasingly unsure about that. But let’s see, if there’s an Andy Burnham MP, how it goes in parliament.”
Polanski is also being watched for how he responds to another issue: candidate vetting. The weeks before the local elections were extremely unfortunate for the party. Several candidates were suspended because of alleged anti-Semitic comments they had posted online. In an interview with today Program on May 6, Polanski pledged to improve the party’s vetting processes and has since ordered a review of the Greens’ internal systems.
The party prides itself on being highly decentralized, with many decisions left to local branches and local members. An excessive centralization of party politics can be seen as an excess of Polanski. “We’re making sure that in the future, when we go to local elections, we have a more standardized process so that local parties can still make decisions about who their candidates are,” he said, “but what I think needs to be centralized is the guidelines and structures for how local parties vet their candidates.”
The Greens certainly see this next week as a consequence if the next battle they intend to fight is to win the Manchester mayoralty. But is their energy wrong? At just 19 percent, the polls do not give the whiff of a certified Green Party victory. And remember, these resources will only be required if Burnham wins at Makerfield. A more productive use of time, perhaps, would be to support this sudden influx of advisors and ensure that the selection of unfavorable candidates does not happen again.
(Further reading: Zack Polanski is still learning)
