The delicious humiliation of Zack Polanski

Zack Polanski has failed to hypnotise the people of Holborn and St Pancras. In last night’s by-election, Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali comfortably beat the Green leader, with 12,292 votes to 8,928, to keep hold of Keir Starmer’s old seat.

These results are a humiliation for the former breast-enlarging hypnotherapist. After all, not only did Polanski’s star power and name recognition fail to move the dial in his favour – his openly sectarian campaigning also ran aground. He released videos in Urdu and Bengali, and handed out leaflets written in Somali, targeted specifically at Muslims. He won the endorsement of the Camden Muslim Alliance and the Muslim Vote, the organisation responsible for electing a spate of so-called Gaza independents in the 2024 General Election. Naturally, his campaign material had far more to say about Israel and Palestine than it did about Holborn and St Pancras.

Polanski’s loss suggests there are limits to the Greens’ attempts to gin up racial grievances based on conflicts more than 2,000 miles away. Not every constituency with a sizeable Muslim population has been lost to sectarianism (Camden, the London borough surrounding the seat, is 16 per cent Muslim). Our elections are still (just about) exercises in democracy, rather than ethno-religious headcounts.

Still, wouldn’t it have been nice if both sides could have lost? The openly anti-Semitic derangement of the Green Party of England and Wales, confirmed last weekend by party members’ support for the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion, has provided a useful foil for the Labour Party, making it look sane and moderate in comparison. But Labour is still the party that rewarded the 7 October pogrom by recognising a Palestinian state – and was praised by the anti-Semitic army of Hamas for doing so. Labour is the party that sanctioned Israel at precisely the time Israeli intelligence was tipping Britain off about Iranian plots on our soil. Labour, in other words, has gone as far as to reward Jew killers abroad and undermine national security at home, largely to court the Muslim vote. That it has done so less noisily than the Greens does not make it any less shameful.

Labour’s decision to replace its leader has also stalled the Greens’ momentum. Although the ‘Burnham bounce’ in the polls is fairly modest, it clearly derives from left-ish voters who loathed Starmer returning to the Labour fold. Yet while Andy Burnham is boosting the Labour vote (for now), Brand Polanski has become toxic. The turning point was his reaction to the Golders Green attack in April. When two Jews were set upon by a knife-wielding maniac, Polanski’s main concern was not for the victims or Britain’s terrified Jewish community, but for the suspect, who had supposedly been manhandled and ‘traumatised’ by the cops who wrestled him to the ground. The Green leader has never recovered since.

Of course, even if the Green Party fades away and Polanski loses his lustre, the Islamo-left monster that he has tried to ride to power will remain a fixture of political life. We still have four Gaza independents in the House of Commons and many more in local councils. Even within the Greens, a post-Polanski party could be even more in hock to hardline Muslims. Incredibly, many newer Green activists view Polanski as a stooge for Israel, as insufficiently committed to the destruction of the Jewish State. A Green Party led by, say, Mothin Ali may have us all wishing for the good old days of Comrade Zack.

The Islamo-left does not and will never represent British voters. But it will take far more than a poor showing in a by-election to truly slay this beast.