Can Zack Polanski hypnotise the left?

There is one thing we can say for Zack Polanski, the ‘eco-populist’ leader of the Green Party. He stands out. And not entirely for the right reasons.

How Zack must regret that, in his former career as a hypnotherapist, he agreed to go along with Sun journalist Kasie Davies when she rocked up at his swanky Harley Street consulting room back in 2013, and asked him to use his mesmeric powers to increase the size of her bosom. How much better, he must reflect, it would’ve been to say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, slam down the phone and get back to the serious work of helping people with more money than sense to hand him some of that money. But he’s stuck forever now, whatever he says or does, with his reputation as the Boob Whisperer, Hypnotits, Derren Bra-on, the Mammary Master, etc.

It’s quite unfair, really. It’s not as if he made a habit of offering this unusual service. This was a one-off, a bit of fun. Unfortunately for him, it’ll make him a living Benny Hill Show sketch – Playtex Polanski, the Gazonga Guru, a politician who certainly has his knockers, etc – in the eyes of the public for the rest of his days. What bad form it would be to linger on the incident here. So let’s linger.

‘Hypnosis essentially involves taking a person’s fixed attention’, reported Davies, ‘and moving it from one place to another’. Polanski explains it as follows:

‘Take, for example, the last time you were engrossed in a book or TV show and didn’t hear someone say your name. Right then, you were under a form of hypnosis…The unconscious mind also controls our bodily functions.’

In this instance, he was speaking to the part of the brain that controls the release of growth hormones needed for breast enlargement, as well as stimulating tissue growth and blood flow to that area.

And amazingly, this experiment was a success! Davies was cock-a-hoop with the development of her décolletage. ‘I measure my bust after three days. I’ve grown from a 32 inch chest to 34 inches’, she writes. ‘Three days later, my chest measures 35 inches. Another three days and I’m 36 inches. I’m still wearing a B-cup but it is a lot more snug and I realise I should have been wearing an A-cup before.’ But then, panic sets in. ‘What if my breasts don’t stop growing?’, she wondered. (I’m seeing that Kenny-Everett-as-Rod-Stewart sketch).

‘But after 10 days the growth grinds to a halt… After two weeks, I email Zack to ask him why. He says that, during our session, it emerged my unconscious wasn’t happy for this experiment to occur for an indefinite amount of time, so he asked it whether it was okay to happen for 10 days. It apparently agreed.’

Thank goodness. Imagine if Zack hadn’t done this deal with the poor woman’s unconscious – forget the climate crisis, the exponential growth of her fulminating funbags would by now have threatened all life on Earth. Zack was certainly happy with the results: ‘This is an extremely new approach, but I can see it becoming popular very quickly, because it’s so safe and a lot cheaper than a boob job.’

Away from the pun potential, what does this great experiment tell us about Zack? That he’ll say anything that’s expedient, in the moment, without much thought. That he’ll gladly play the role of the person who tells the gullible what they want to hear.

It’s quite funny that nowadays, when reminded of the incident, he takes great pains to say, very seriously, how he apologised to the world for it the very next day after publication, as if it were some terrible crime. All that he did was to play along with a tabloid journo for a bit of daft fun. And yet, he must – grandly and dramatically – atone. Which just makes the whole affair even funnier, and much harder to shake off.

But then, he has the look of someone who’s about to add the words ‘disgraced former’ to every line on his disparate CV. He’s an insult to the noble profession of tit-nosis.

For Zack Polanski is actually David Paulden, a waster of our time and his own, bouncing from one nonsense activity to the next – actor, hypnotist and now politician. His background has been thoroughly excavated by Guy Adams in the Daily Mail. Suffice to say, there’s a disparity between his claim of a humble background and the enterprising vim of the family Polanski – sorry, Paulden.

Zack was privately educated at Stockport Grammar School on a scholarship, but was ‘kicked out’ for being ‘a bit too cheeky’ and went to a state sixth-form college. ‘I remember absolutely loving it and thriving, and suddenly going: Oh, this is what diversity feels like. This is what it feels like when everyone’s not homogeneous.’ This would be 1998, when almost nobody gave a monkeys about ‘diversity’. But then Zack has a curious talent for throwing the modern into the past. He regularly tells us how awful the anti-homosexual piece of legislation, Section 28, was, despite being just six years old when it became law.

Adams reveals the hilarious diatribe dropped by Polanski in 2019 when he got arrested for stopping traffic crossing Westminster Bridge for Extinction Rebellion, and spent a night in the nick. ‘I’m a vegan and they were pretty bad about getting me some vegan food’, said Polanski. ‘If you are going to arrest 300 activists, you have got to think about getting some vegan food ready. There was no soy milk, either, so I had to have my tea black.’ The horror!

Zack spent some time as an actor in the mid-to-late 2000s, but seems never to have got very far on the stage except for appearing in ‘immersive theatre’. This is the lowest of a very low profession, chivvying people about pretending to be in a crashing spaceship or whatever. Then he jumped to hypnotism. Then, in 2015, to the Liberal Democrats. And then, in 2017, to eco-activism and the Greens, where he has at last found his métier.

But who is Zack Polanski? What’s in a name? Quite a lot, actually. Names have a strange power, I find. Name changing is an acceptable activity for pop stars, actors, spies and criminals. There’s something about real names that tells the truth – Harry Webb (Cliff Richard), Reg Dwight (Elton John), David Jones (David Bowie), Marie Lawrie (Lulu). They reveal something about that person.

But when people switch their appellation and have no showbiz reason, or pressing need to disambiguate themselves from another person with the same name, I find it a bit suspect. I had a couple of dalliances with exotically monikered chaps in my salad-tossing days; when I stumbled on the prosaic truth, their real names clicked around them, like a protective case snaps around a phone. ‘Oh yes, that’s you’, I thought. This holds true for Zack. There’s never been anybody who looks more like a ‘Dave Paulden’, who became ‘Zack Polanski’ aged 18.

The surname Polanski certainly sounds exotic and memorable, even if it also brings a certain child-raping film director to mind; a bit like redubbing yourself Savile or Glitter. Polanski was the original name of Paulden’s Jewish ancestors, but not used for generations. I’m not sure Zack would have switched it if the ancestral name had been Winkle, Blum or boring old Goldberg. Polanski adds something spicy. And Zack? This was the name of a character in a favourite book of our Dave’s – thank goodness it wasn’t Mr Bump.

The changing of your name is something you do as a teenager, running from yourself, trying out new looks and new identities every five minutes; practising your quirky signature and dyeing your hair. Eighteen is leaving this a bit late. When I was 14, I decided to rename myself Harvey for some peculiar reason – I think because of Harvey Keitel, who I thought was super-cool. Everyone laughed in my face, and thank the stars they did.

What can we say of Zack’s acting career? It may seem a bit too obvious to point out that he is acting at politics, but I think it could be the case. A friend of mine worked for a kids’ pop mag many years ago, and he discovered that at least one of the members of a fleetingly hyper-celebrated teeny bop group viewed music not as a career, but as a role. He was, in effect, playing the part of someone with his name, like doing a long run in a musical. I think Zack the politician could well be another example of this – another part.

In one of his super-popular promo videos for the Greens, released in October last year, we follow Zack as he stalks mournfully through the twilit streets ranting – in a caring way, natch – about billionaires and calling for that lefty panacea, a wealth tax.

Now, I failed Maths O-level three times, and even I understand that wealth taxes are always a disaster. Polanski’s video apparently made Owen Jones, among others, weep. This is because they are simple-minded, resentful zealots with no understanding of economics, or indeed of life. The likes of Polanski live in the most peaceful, prosperous and indeed most equal civilisation there has ever been. And yet, in the name of the planet or the patronised ‘poor’, they rail against it all, against industry, against prosperity, against growth. They want to overthrow it – out of nothing much more than boredom and self-flagellating, self-aggrandising guilt, the most luxurious of all the emotions. This is the tantrum of a child smashing up a toy for something to do. There are indeed serious challenges facing British society right now, but they are entirely different ones to those Polanski campaigns on.

It’s an obvious shot but I’m taking it anyway – the boob-whispering is more sane than the Green Party programme. Where does Zack think money goes, what profits actually are, what growth means? The irony is that it’s precisely the tinkering of politicians – something the Greens want to do more of – that has made the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in recent years. It is progressives, technocratic to their core, who have brought stagnation and hopelessness down upon us.

Oh, and needless to say, Zack is all in on gender, the whole trans shebang swallowed whole. He applauded the arrest of Graham Linehan last September, and has stood bravely against women’s sports, safety and dignity.

Whenever challenged in the media, he responds with a set of stock replies – billionaires, Section 28, ‘inclusive’ feminism (which means including men), etc. And of course you’re never far away from a reference to the ‘genocidal state of Israel’ – another Polanski staple. You pull the string and you get one of his 11 set phrases, like a progressive activist Chatty Cathy, new from Mattel. He is, after all, just saying what he is expected to say, as he did all those years ago in his consulting rooms with Kasie Davies.

I don’t think this is calculated. I think he thinks he believes it all. But as you can see in almost every interview, he is hopelessly out of his depth, and cannot follow the logic in even very simple questions. Last September, he told the i newspaper, ‘I believe that racism… probably comes from poverty. I think if you don’t have scarcity in your life, and if you feel safe and secure, why would you hate another person?’ This could well be the very dumbest thing I’ve ever heard a politician come out with.

The central issue is that he is clearly very, very thick. This is, after all, a homosexual who rants on about Section 28 and at the same time is happy to indulge Mothin Ali, an Islamic sectarian, as his deputy leader – a man who, on 7 October 2023, in response to Hamas’s rape and slaughter of Israeli Jews, tweeted ‘White supremacist European settler colonialism must end!’. You can read Zack’s hopeless attempts to excuse that here.

Now, finally, Dave Paulden has the attention he always wanted. He is an eco-populist for the foreseeable, until the wheels come off and / or he tires of it. On the evidence so far, I predict an eventual Third Act as a television presenter, back at the fluff-level. Stay tuned for The Great British Boob-Off, 2035.

Gareth Roberts is a screenwriter, author and novelist, best known for his work on Doctor Who. This is an edited extract from his ‘Middle Class Holes’ series on Substack.