Mamdani, Polanski and the scourge of the ‘theatre kid’ politician

Zohran Mamdani waited until after he had won New York City’s mayoral election to make his first credible public statement. ‘Conventional wisdom’, the 34-year-old self-styled socialist said in his acceptance speech a couple of weeks ago, ‘would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate’. Indeed.

Regardless of the actual quality of the candidates, no American mayoral race has been as closely followed in the UK. One reason for the British media’s obsession with this particular election and the winner in particular, is that Mamdani’s rise has notable parallels with the coming leftist force in British politics.

Mamdani and Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party, are strikingly similar, politically and personally. Both claim to represent a movement that’s fresh and invigorating. Both assert that their supporters face near unprecedented hardship and injustice. Both are young (by politicians’ standards) and claim to represent the ‘progressive’ new face of their countries – Mamdani is a Muslim who was born in Africa to Indian parents, while Polanski is a gay vegan living with his partner in Hackney, east London.

The parallels don’t end there. Both Mamdani and Polanski have had notably unsuccessful careers before politics, and, despite their carping attitudes towards ‘the rich’, they both hail from very comfortably-off backgrounds. It seems that both have entered politics because it provides them with something they have always craved: the standing ovation.

Mamdani has never been a particularly serious character. He followed up a $60,000-a-year stint at Bowdoin College in Maine, New York, where he completed an undergraduate course in African Studies, with a stab at a rap-music career, performing under the name ‘Mr Cardamom’.

It was not a stunning success. This was hardly a surprise, given lyrics such as ‘my love to the Holy Land Five’ – a tribute to five men convicted of laundering $12million for Hamas – and music videos of Mamdani dancing in nothing but an apron. His only commercial success came in 2016, when his mother hired him to write a song, called ‘#1 Spice’, for her film, Queen of Katwe.

There is a pattern here. Like Mamdani, Polanski enjoyed a privileged upbringing. He was educated at a fee-paying, 15th-century grammar school in Stockport. And he set his sights initially on a career in Hollywood, not Westminster. The closest he came to making it as an actor was a 2007 film, Art of Suicide, where he plays a struggling young artist in London. The film explores the ‘struggle for success’ and ‘how far [he’s] willing to go and get in’. To borrow a phrase from his millennial supporters: say less.

Polanski’s pursuit of some sort of fame has been consistently shameless, exemplified by his notorious 2013 interview with the Sun newspaper. A then-30-year-old Polanski claimed that, for just £220 a session, he could use hypnosis to enlarge women’s breasts.

When he finally turned to politics in the mid-2010s, as a member of the very un-radical Lib Dems, he still seemed more interested in performing than in policy. Enjoying some hosting duties at the 2015 Liberal Democrats conference, he decided to subject his audience to a crooning rendition of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’. For Polanski, the world is truly a stage.

Mamdani has never boasted that he could boost a woman’s bust through hypnosis. But some of his claims have been equally as dubious. During the mayoral campaign, he broke down in tears as he explained that his aunt had been too scared to wear her hijab on the New York subway in the aftermath of 9/11. It was a convincing performance – until it was revealed that his aunt didn’t live in America during the attack on the World Trade Centre, nor wear a hijab.

Mamdani’s attempt to play the proxy victim of anti-Muslim prejudice really sticks in the craw. Few Americans have enjoyed an upbringing as privileged as Mamdani. Both of his parents are Harvard alumni. His father is a professor at Columbia University and his mother is an Oscar-nominated Bollywood film director.

Polanski claims to have enjoyed a working-class upbringing. It doesn’t ring true. He and his siblings were educated at private schools, while his father’s business records reveal interests in a ‘string’ of investment properties.

This is not irrelevant. Their wealth and privilege have afforded them the luxury of their activism – Polanski for Extinction Rebellion, and Mamdani at the Students for Justice in Palestine, which he founded.

Despite what he generously describes as a career in ‘film, rap and writing’, Mamdani had barely worked a day in his life before he was elected to the New York state assembly in 2020. Polanski, too, seems to have followed a similarly workshy path, from brief stints in acting, hypnotherapy and counselling, before he was elected to the London Assembly as a member of the Greens in 2021. Both of them seemed to have viewed politics as a last chance for stardom.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that their politics is shallow and performative. Polanski wants to abolish private landlords, impose rent controls and end ‘rip-off’ Britain by – wait for it – taxing the ‘super wealthy’. Mamdani, too, advocates rent control, and promises to increase New York’s corporate tax rate – which he doesn’t have the power to do, in any event.

The sheer vacuousness of both men was captured in Mamdani’s acceptance speech. ‘A great New Yorker once said that while you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose’, he told his audience. ‘If that must be true, let the prose we write still rhyme.’ Like many of his statements, it made no sense. But the crowd roared anyway. His smug, immensely satisfied expression said it all: finally, Mr Cardamom was the centre of global attention.

The theatre kids are threatening to run the show now. We better get ready for more second-rate scripts.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.