Zack Polanski’s journey from Liberal Democrat convert to Green leader
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In 2015 Zack Polanski went against the tide of British politics: he joined the struggling Liberal Democrats.
Two years later, he jumped ship to the Greens, the party he now leads.
Polanski explained that he had grown disillusioned with the Lib Dems’ positions on gay sex and the military intervention in Syria, and was increasingly won over by the Greens’ arguments.
“I kept going home to my partner and saying to him they’re really right about everything,” he told the podcast The Rest is Politics last year.
But as late as July 2016, Polanski was battling to be selected as the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate in Richmond Park, south-west London. When he was not chosen in October, he was livid.
“The party I love is closing the door on me and people like me,” Polanski wrote in a blog. He argued that he had poured his “heart and soul” into the Lib Dems and Richmond would benefit from the “experience I would bring as a gay Jewish renter”.
He called for a full independent investigation and made numerous posts on social media about the matter, Lib Dem figures said. “He didn’t get his way and he had a massive strop,” said one senior party figure. (He has since deleted all of his tweets before early 2018.)
Polanski’s political persuasions shifted rapidly. In April 2016, he had argued against rent controls. By November, he was campaigning for them in front of the House of Commons.
Within months of being overlooked, Polanski had joined the Green Party.
He now describes himself as an “eco-populist”, and has become the most popular figure on the left, fighting to reduce inequality, lower living costs and oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.
But Polanski has faced allegations that he misled the public about his career, his legal address and whether he voted in local elections.
The FT found a further misleading claim.
In 2019, during his campaign to become the Greens’ mayoral candidate, he said he had worked as a spokesperson for Axe the Housing Act, a campaign group. When the FT queried this, his spokesperson confirmed that he was not an official spokesperson, and had only talked at events hosted by the group.
Such incidents have led to questions about whether Polanski has shape-shifted — and sometimes lied — in his mission to change the British left.
His supporters contend that he is an unvarnished and authentic communicator, and willing to do what many politicians refuse to do — apologise when he is wrong.
Ben Ansell, a politics professor at Oxford university, said Polanski had harnessed social media to move from outsider to a starring role.
“These characters can now pop up anywhere on the political spectrum and they can outflank previously existing populist figures, including [former Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn,” he added.
Polanski was born David Paulden in Salford in 1982. He says he changed his name when he was 18 to remove an association with his stepfather — also called David — and move closer to his Jewish heritage.
He gained a scholarship to a private school near Manchester, where he was bullied. Then he studied at a state sixth-form college, where he said he met his tribe and felt more comfortable being out as gay.
He studied drama at Aberystwyth University, then Shakespeare at the University of Georgia.
On his return to the UK, he began an eclectic period in London that spanned community theatre, bartending, hypnotherapy, counselling and training in places ranging from schools and universities to mental health services and prisons.
Polanski has used this time as evidence that he is an ordinary Londoner. But it has also landed him in hot water.
He recently had to apologise for misrepresenting himself as a British Red Cross spokesperson when he was running to be deputy leader of the Greens in 2022.
The British Red Cross denied he ever held that role and the Green leader clarified that he had hosted events for the charity and took “words on stage with me [to] speak”.
In a now infamous episode in 2013, he told a Sun journalist that he could enlarge her breasts through hypnotherapy. Polanski said he had apologised and had “never believed” the claim.
But the BBC unearthed an interview from the time in which he argued that “there’s starting to become anecdotal evidence, at least, of a growth in breast size”.
This year, Polanski’s spokespeople claimed he only stayed “occasionally” on a canal boat in a marina in Hackney, so did not need to pay council tax on the property. However, the party later confirmed that, “until relatively recently, Zack was living on a houseboat”.
Two days later, the party reversed a claim that Polanski had voted via post at local elections this month, saying he had in fact not registered to vote at all because of concerns about his safety.
One of the party’s senior aides told the FT that there was some consternation about the accuracy of information given to them at times by the Green leader. “I was told that there had been a postal vote,” they said.
In an interview last year, Polanski told the FT he had been influenced by a wide range of economists, including Mariana Mazzucato of University College London.
Asked whether he had met and received advice from Mazzucato, Polanski said “yes”. It transpired that the two had not met, although they had scheduled a lunch.
Polanski has described himself as a “Duracell bunny”. But some of his close colleagues feel his speediness is his Achilles heel.
He is a prolific social media user. On X, he has posted more than 1,000 times this year, or more than 4,000 including reposts. On Bluesky, he liked approximately 10,000 posts featuring his own name in the 12 months to April, according to analysis by The Economist — roughly a third of his total likes.
In April, he faced a backlash after sharing a post criticising police officers for kicking the suspect in the head following an attack on Jewish men.
“I apologise for sharing a tweet in haste,” Polanski said. He has insisted he takes antisemitism seriously, and has sought to highlight the antisemitic abuse that he receives.
One senior Green figure said Polanski has a habit of “shooting from the hip”, adding that his Twitter and Bluesky use was “one of the party’s biggest liabilities at the moment”.
However, they dismissed the idea that Polanski was “dishonest”, arguing that he was a good person but that the party still had some way to go to professionalise.
Another person involved in the party said, “It would be good if he didn’t post after 10pm”.
When he stood for the Lib Dems in the London Assembly in May 2015, Polanski sang the soul classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” on stage at a party conference.
“He clearly wanted to be something, but I’m never sure I knew what he wanted to be,” said a person who knew him well in 2016.
“He was young and very ambitious, and that ambition was just really, really clear from almost everything he did.”
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