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Zack Polanski’s biographer makes a persuasive case that the Green Party leader’s greatest achievement so far has been to topple Sir Keir Starmer and clear the way for Andy Burnham to become Prime Minister.
In an interview with the* Byline Times Podcast,* Russell Warfield – who worked on Polanski’s leadership campaign in 2025 – argues that without pressure applied from the left, Starmer might have survived, to the detriment of both Labour and the country at large.
Warfield recalls that, “a few days before Polanski announced his leadership bid, The Guardian reported an anonymous Labour minister, saying something to the effect of, ‘we’re so lucky that the Green Party is s***. Basically, if they had any half decent leadership, we’d be even further down in the polls.’ It was a very prescient thing to say because just several weeks later, Polanski’s leadership galvanised the political space that was gaping open to the left of Starmer’s Labour and put immediate pressure on on them in the polls.”
Polanksi’s election in September, 2025 was followed five months later by Hannah Spencer’s by-election victory for the Greens in the traditionally safe Labour seat of Gorton and Denton; and then, three months later, the local elections, where the party made further inroads. Their success challenged the orthodox narrative of Starmer’s inner circle, especially his strategist Morgan McSweeney, that Labour had to keep tacking ever further right to fend off Reform UK.
Warfield observes that Labour lost four times as many votes to the Greens as they did to Reform in the May elections: “I think that without that pressure from Polanski’s Greens, it is very conceivable that Starmer’s project could go on deluding itself that it could somehow cohere the left-wing block of the UK electorate by more and more aping the parties to their right. The logical endpoint of that was exposed by Polanski’s leadership.”
But does this mean that the Greens are finished now that Burnham – like Polanski, an avowed opponent of the neo-liberalism – is occupying Downing Street? Not according to Warfield, who believes that the Prime Minister’s challenge to the economic status quo will run into opposition – not least from the new intake of Labour MPs who, he says, were “gerrymandered” into parliament as part of the Starmer project.
“They created arguably the most right-wing grouping of the Parliamentary Labour Party that there has ever been. That’s going to present some real political problems for him,” Warfield says. “Labour’s promising a break from neoliberalism and an attendant rise in living standards When that doesn’t happen, there’s going to be a parallel between that, and what happened on the right of politics, when the Conservatives were forever promising a drop in immigration. That never happened, and did nothing but feed the ‘full-fat’ version of that promise to the right of them, in the form of UKIP or the Brexit Party or whatever Farage was at that point. The Greens have never really successfully done that to the left of Labour before, but I think they’re well positioned to do it now.”
Despite being billed as a ‘biography’, Warfield’s book is light on the details of Polanski’s personal life. It focuses instead on his political evolution from wannabe Liberal Democrat candidate to the “green socialist” of the title, setting his own journey within the context of the development of the Green Party, from right wing conservationists such as Sir James Goldsmith, through to its pre-Zack existence as “the political arm of the WWF.”
Warfield explains that he drew inspiration from Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth Of Radical Politics written by Richard Seymour in 2016, which traced the former Labour leader’s rise to power. Warfield admits his book, “is almost a Trojan horse, which sounds like it’s going to be about the person, but it’s actually about how that person is contextualised by the party, and the limitations and the contradictions that are going to be faced within the institution that they’re leading.”
One under-appreciated feature of Polanski, he says though, “is the degree to which he’s really grafted for the success of the party over the last 10 years. One of the reasons he got that 85% mandate in the leadership election is not just because he’s a preferred communicator by the membership – although that is a huge part of it – but it is [also] because he has genuinely won over local party branches as well; knocking on doors in any weather, just going out to any local party that would have him, no matter how desolate the attendance numbers, and not having a place to stay overnight and all the rest of it. And he’s also got very, very good political strategist antennae as well, and he has a very good sense of what’s winnable, where the space is that you can move into, and how to advance the interests of the party at any political juncture. Which is another reason why I think that it would be unwise to cut out the Greens under Polanski, even under Burnham, over the next few years.”
Watch or listen to Adrian Goldberg’s full interview with Russell Warfield on the Byline Times Podcast here.
The Green Socialist by Russell Warfield is published by Pluto Press on 20 September 2026.
