On a breezy Saturday morning in mid-June, at the Friends Meeting House in central London, a middle-aged woman in a floral pashmina heckled a panel of Green Party councillors. The party’s London branch, freshly galvanised after successful local elections, had gathered at this neo-Georgian monolith – the nerve centre of British Quakerism – for a conference. The heckler wanted to ask the panel a question then walked out after being repeatedly instructed to wait for the Q&A at the end. “She’ll be voting Reform then,” said one of the panellists (the comedian Nels Abbey, who isn’t himself a councillor). A woman in the audience muttered “she must be a spy.”
Don’t be fooled by this moment of disunity; there was a buzz around this weekend’s Green Party London conference. The party’s success in London on 7 May was widespread. There were victories in key targets such as the mayoralties of Hackney and Lewisham and an increase of an additional 248 councillors across the 32 boroughs. Other gains were more surprising: Waltham Forest Council is now run by a Green administration and while Lambeth Council – the Labour stronghold where Morgan McSweeney cut his teeth – is now being led by a Green Party councillor. Opening the conference the chair of the London Green Party Eugene McCarthy described the “smell of victory in the air” before announcing that the number of party members in the capital has jumped from 8,000 to 40,000 in a year.
The first place the Greens would like to test their new blueprint for electoral success is the Greater Manchester mayoralty. Party officials have already begun planning for a hypothetical race. But that job will only become available if Andy Burnham wins the Makerfield by-election on Thursday (18 May). One might think the party’s first task would be trying to win that race. Have the Greens all but conceded defeat?
Party insiders seem sanguine about Makerfield. A poll by Convergent Opinion which landed in the final weekend of campaigning placed the Greens on 5 per cent, about the same as Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain. “It’s not a strong area for us,” one party source told me, “but we’ve found the candidate has gone down well.” The source alluded to the party’s Makerfield candidate Sarah Wakefield’s performance on Question Time, in which she challenged Reform’s Robert Kenyon over his previous social media posts (one of which suggested that women have abortions so that they can “shag anyone they want”). The sourced added that Wakefield’s “standing up to Reform’s threat to women has caught on and been influential in the campaign”.
It is highly unlikely that Wakefield will be elected as the next MP for Makerfield. Instead, the Greens are betting on a Burnham victory. The party has decided that in the event of a Greater Manchester race, it will send its chief London organiser, Elfrede Brambley-Crawshaw, to run the campaign. “She masterminded our London local election campaign and is excellent at voter targeting and focusing on issues like housing,” one source told me. Internally, the Greens see the Greater Manchester race as being run along similar lines as the by-election in Gorton and Denton. “It’s a similar battleground,” one source told me. They pointed to the council elections to Manchester City Council, where “the Greens beat Labour in popular vote.” The Greens won 17 seats, becoming the second largest party (many of those seats covered wards within the Gorton and Denton constituency, such as Longsight, Levenshulme and Burnage).
Winning in Greater Manchester would be a very different undertaking to convincing the voters of Gorton and Denton or progressive-leaning London boroughs. The Greater Manchester combined authority is made up of 10 councils, one of which is Wigan Council, which covers Makerfield (and clearly a straight Labour-Reform fight). Others, such as Tameside Council, are mapped onto similar demographics. This is not to mention the fact that in the local elections Reform came in first across the Greater Manchester area with 31 per cent of the vote. The Greens fell into third with 19 per cent. Does the Green Party really think that a (hypothetical!) battle for the Manchester mayoralty is theirs to fight?
Zack Polanski does. When I met him in a closely guarded green room behind the auditorium in the Friends’ House, he was confident about the Greens’ chances in winning the race to replace Burnham. Polanski has been unusually quiet since the 7 May local elections. Since he was 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 before the local elections were tough, with a number of stories appearing in the papers exposing aspects of his life such as inaccuracies in his CV or his failure to pay council tax on the houseboat he shared with his partner, Richie. At the party’s conference on Saturday, a burly plainclothes security guard lingered close by, and when we spoke, Polanski seemed more tired and nervous than in previous meetings. (A source close to him told me that Makerfield – which has become a far less consequential race for the Greens than Gorton and Denton – has been a welcome opportunity for some respite.)
“Makerfield has felt weird,” Polanski told me, “in Gorton and Denton we were very clearly really going all out for it, but obviously Makerfield has been a bit quieter.” But he added: “I guess what’s rumbling on is the Greater Manchester mayoral race which we absolutely will be going all out for.” Still, I point out, Burnham hasn’t won yet. Does this fighting talk about the Manchester mayoralty mean Polanski think he will? “That’s going to depend on the people of Makerfield,” he said, “but there’s clearly a possibility that Andy Burnham won’t be the mayor of Greater Manchester in just over a week’s time.”
I point out that winning in Greater Manchester would likely be more difficult than winning in Gorton and Denton (the party would have to win over the voters of Makerfield for example, something which it is struggling to do). Polanski is unfazed. He sees the mayoralty of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) as “27 Gorton and Dentons”, a “pretty huge space” (here he is talking about the 27 constituencies which cover Greater Manchester; to win the Combined Authority, the party would have to win over voters in all 10 council areas that make up GMCA). In the event of a contest, the Greens are planning a hyper-local grassroots campaign. “The good news is we know how to do that really well.”
Polanski’s predecessor as leader of the Green Party, Caroline Lucas, caused controversy early on in the Makerfield race when she called on her party not to throw everything at beating Burnham. Lucas sees Burnham as a vehicle for the UK’s adoption of proportional representation, which the Manchester mayor has explicitly backed. What does Polanski think?
“I think it depends on what version of Andy Burnham turns up,” he said, repeating a line proffered by the Labour MP (and Burnham ally) Clive Lewis at a conference last month. “What we’re seeing so far is an Andy Burnham who supports Shabana Mahmood’s regressive immigration reforms, Andy Burnham talking about cutting welfare to increase defence spending,” Polanski added. “That being said, I always want to work with people in politics who share my values,” he said, “I thought that was where Andy Burnham was, I am increasingly unsure about that. But let’s see, if there is an Andy Burnham MP, how he turns up to parliament.”
Polanski is also being watched for how he responds to another issue: candidate vetting. The weeks before the local elections were incredibly unfortunate for the party. Several candidates were suspended owing to alleged anti-Semitic comments they had posted online. In an interview with the Today programme on 6 May, Polanski pledged to improve the party’s vetting processes and has since ordered a review into the Greens’s internal systems.
The party prides itself in being heavily decentralised, with many decisions left up to local branches and local members. Too much centralisation of party policy could be seen as an overreach by Polanski. “We’re making sure that in the future, when we go into local elections, we have a more standardised process so that local parties are still making decisions about who their candidates are,” he said, “but what I think needs to be centralised are the guidelines and structures of how local parties vet their candidates”.
The Greens obviously see this next week as consequential if the next battle they aim to fight is winning the Manchester mayoralty. But is their energy misplaced? Polling at just 19 per cent does not smack of a certified Green Party victory. And remember, these resources will only be required if Burnham wins in Makerfield. A more productive use of time, perhaps, could be supporting this sudden influx of councillors and ensuring that the selection of unfavourable candidates does not happen again.
[Further reading: Zack Polanski is still learning]
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