Zack Polanski’s bonkers defence of Graham Linehan’s arrest
The new leader of the Greens has cheered the state’s persecution of a comedy writer for his jokes.
The Green Party of England and Wales has dabbled with some pretty kooky ideas in its short four-decade history. Yet new leader Zack Polanski may well have just outdone them all in the insanity stakes.
The Greens’ predecessors in the 1970s called for a state-sponsored programme of sterilisations to reduce the size of the UK population. In the late Eighties and early Nineties, David Icke became a key spokesperson. He would soon declare himself the messiah and claim the planet was run by reptiles.
For his part, Polanski famously subscribes to the cult of gender ideology. He believes that a man can become a woman at will and that a woman can have a cock and balls. Worse still, he now says he wants to lock up anyone who dares to disagree with this lunacy.
Polanski made this last part known on Newsnight last night in a discussion on the outrageous arrest of Graham Linehan.
According to the Father Ted writer, he was greeted at London Heathrow by five armed police officers, there to arrest him for three jokey tweets on the trans debate – one of which said men who invade women’s spaces should get a ‘punch in the balls’.
For this, Linehan says, he was held in a cell and interrogated. The stress of the situation was apparently so severe it led to him being hospitalised.
"These are totally unacceptable tweets… I think it was proportionate to arrest him"
Zack Polanski, Green Party Leader, on the arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan at Heathrow airport on Monday.#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/wzN2lkqxLx
— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) September 2, 2025
To which Polanski said… fair enough. The arrest was ‘proportionate’, apparently. Because Linehan’s tweets, poking fun at the trans nonsense, were ‘totally unacceptable’.
Madder still, Polanski doubled down on this view the next day on BBC Five Live: ‘Should you be able to say that you want to kick a woman in the balls? No.’ Which is one hell of an image.
Linehan’s arrest has caused understandable, necessary outrage across the political spectrum. To sane observers, it is an abominable abuse of state power to arrest comedy writers for their beliefs. Not least when those beliefs align with observable scientific truths.
The Linehan scandal is so serious, in fact, that it stirred the liberty-loathing Keir Starmer to say the police should prioritise proper crimes over thoughtcrimes. Whatever Starmer may think personally, he (or his advisers) at least had the good sense to know that locking up TV national treasures is not exactly a good look.
The Greens have always been a party of cranks, but to cheer as comics are carted off in handcuffs marks Zack Polanski out as the king of the crackpots.
Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.