17 JANUARY 2026“I’m dying for a wee,” Zack Polanski says as he gets off the train at Wakefield Westgate.Why didn’t you go on the train, I ask? “It was very busy and too many people recognised me on the way to the toilet.I knew I’d never get there for all the conversations, so I came back.” When did it become hard for him to go to the toilet on a train? “2 September,” he says.“The day I was elected.

”At first, I wonder if Polanski is bigging himself up, but over the next couple of weeks I see for myself he is not exaggerating.While Polanski says it’s not, and cannot be, about one individual, in Green circles there is much talk of the Polanski effect.Since he was elected in September 2025, the Greens have risen by an average of four points in the polls.Just before going to press, the Guardian’s latest poll tracker had the party at 13.5%, only five points behind Labour, on 18.

6%; 20% of people who voted Labour in 2024 now say they will go Green.It’s astonishing how life has changed for the party leader over five months.For 20-odd years Polanski, aged 43, was a jobbing actor nobody had heard of.He got by, just, by supplementing his acting gigs with all sorts of jobs – teaching drama, dressing up as hotdogs, handing out flyers at the nightclub Heaven, working in bars and, now notoriously, as a hypnotherapist.Polanski became deputy leader of the Green party in 2022, and still pretty much nobody had heard of him.

These days, he looks like an old-timer, born to a life in politics,But the truth couldn’t be more different,We reach the hall in Wakefield where supporters are waiting to welcome Polanski,Kate Dodd, a local party co-ordinator, says when he came here two years ago, there was an audience of a dozen,“We booked the same venue and pushed the capacity to 50, but in October we thought we’d better get a bigger room.

We’re expecting 400 and there’s a reserve list,It’s a bit overwhelming,I never thought this would happen, not here,”Wakefield is not traditionally fertile territory for the Greens,But last May they sensed things might be changing.

Polanski announced he was standing for the leadership, and local people were already disillusioned with the government, despite the town being a Labour stronghold,So Wakefield Greens held a strategy meeting,“We had about 80 members and set ourselves a target of 150,” It was ambitious, but Polanski wanted to rebrand the Greens as the party of hope, in opposition to Nigel Farage’s Reform, which he saw as the party of hate,“We now have nearly 600 members,” Dodd says.

“That is how things have changed.Some of it is down to our activism, but a lot is down to Zack’s leadership.”To say there’s a lot left to be done is an understatement.Of the 63 councillors on the council, not one is Green.How many seats would Dodd like to win in the May elections? “All of them, obviously.

” She laughs, then gets serious.“Our goal is to win half a dozen.”The Green party looks different from Britain’s other political parties.Many members here today are young.Dodd introduces Olli Watkins and Ash Howick, both wearing green HOPE badges; they were parliamentary candidates at the general election, aged 21 and 22, and have been partners for five years.

Next to them is Incy Wood, an artist and wheelchair user in a magnificent rainbow-­coloured checked suit and orange bob.You can’t move here for orange, blue and purple hair.Few people I speak to mention the environment.It’s taken for granted they’re green.The word on everyone’s lips is socialist.

“People had seen us as a party for climate justice but hadn’t realised the extent to which we are a socialist party,” says Dodd, a Labour refusenik.Wood introduces Polanski to the audience.“I would like to welcome an absolute lunatic and general rattler of the establishment, Zack Polanksi.” There’s a roar.“Nigel Farage called me an absolute lunatic,” Polanksi explains, then proceeds to talk fluently, at 100 miles an hour without notes, about community, the cost of living crisis, taxing the rich, making the world work for the majority.

When he became leader, he said the Greens were reclaiming the language of Reform; they were the true populists because they represented regular civilians, not the elite.Today, we hear less about populism.It turns out it’s not such an easy word to reclaim.In a tiny room, I join Polanski for a lunch of vegetable tacos.He is a vegan and supports Forest Green Rovers, the world’s only fully vegan football club.

After he won the New York mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani, to whom Polanski is often compared, invited him for a tete-a-tete.Polanski declined because he doesn’t fly.He seems like a caricature of a to-the-manure-born Green politician.But, he says, “I couldn’t have been less political for most of my life if I’d tried.I actively avoided conversations about politics.

”Polanski grew up in a traditional Jewish family in Manchester – a happy time until, when he was 11, his parents split up: “It felt like the world had broken.” He says he became a pawn in the hostilities.While his two older half-siblings stayed with their mother, he went to live with his father because he didn’t want him to be alone.Until his barmitzvah, at 13, he attended synagogue regularly, then suddenly stopped.Why? “Because it was a thing I did with my parents.

And once we weren’t going together, it felt quite painful to go.”By the age of nine, Polanski realised he was gay, though he couldn’t put it into words.“I was watching the wrestling and realised I wasn’t just interested in that; there was something about these men that I was really drawn to.I didn’t recognise it as gay till I was 14.”But at school he was bullied after being caught snogging in a nightclub.

“My first kiss was with a young Muslim man called Jihad when I was 14,” He knows he shouldn’t have been clubbing in his early teens, but says it was inevitable,This was the time of Section 28, which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities,“I couldn’t talk about being gay at home and you weren’t allowed to at school,” He viewed Canal Street, the focal point of Manchester’s gay village, as his safe space.

In reality, it was anything but,“It’s clearly not an appropriate place to go at that age, and I was definitely meeting age-inappropriate people,”Polanski, who then went by his birth name David Paulden, had come out at school but not to his family,These years were traumatic: “I was homophobically bashed on Canal Street at 15, and ended up in hospital,Then I was kicked out of Stockport Grammar, where I was on a scholarship.

I never felt I belonged there,I got kicked out for not making grades and being cheeky,One teacher said I’d never make anything of myself,”11 DECEMBER 2025A month before our visit to Wakefield, I meet Polanski in London where he is recording his podcast Bold Politics,He invites people he admires on to the show and soaks up what they can teach him.

It’s a clever format.As well as acknowledging how much he needs to learn, it means that influential leftwing thinkers such as the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, journalist Carole Cadwalladr and economist Grace Blakeley leave having had a positive experience, then spread the word.But lots of people are less positive about Polanski.On social media he is trolled for anything from his stance on Nato (leave, because the US is an unreliable ally), his grasp of economics, his style of running, his teeth, for saying Israel has committed genocide in Palestine (despite a UN commission reaching the same conclusion).And it’s not just trolls who are critical.

In early December he appeared on Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell’s podcast The Rest Is Politics, and he is still licking his wounds.He appeared to confuse the country’s national debt and the deficit.When asked England’s top rate of income tax, he incorrectly said 40% rather than 45%.Stewart, a former Conservative MP, was brutal.“I was horrified beyond belief on the economics stuff.

It’s not acceptable,” he told listeners once Polanski had gone.“If this is where British politics is going, no, no, no.”Today’s guest on Polanski’s show is Gary Lineker, who owns the company that hosts The Rest Is Politics.Polanski is a skilled presenter.Again, he doesn’t use notes.

The interview makes headlines, with the former Match of the Day presenter saying he’d never go into politics and admitting, “I cry most days when I see innocent kids being killed” in Gaza.But Polanski can’t leave his treatment on The Rest Is Politics alone.He repeatedly tells Lineker it was unfair – he insists they had promised not to go into granular detail and that he was misrepresented by Stewart, who told the audience he said he could learn numbers easily because he was an actor, suggesting he was acting out the role of politician.It obviously got to him.I wonder if this is him standing up to the establishment or being oversensitive.

I ask Lineker later what he makes of Polanski.“I like a lot of what he says.He seems a really good guy: fresh energy and a bit of kindness.” Does he seem different from other politicians? “I think so.He seems more open.

He’s not in power, so that makes it a little bit easier.”What does he think about Stewart’s attack on Polanski and his reaction? “Well, if people are having a pop at you, you must be doing something right.You’re going to get caught out occasionally, and he’s only been in charge for a few months.To be a politician, if you’ve not got thick skin, you’re in the wrong job.” Is Polanski’s thick enough? “I don’t know.

We’ll find out, won’t we?” Despite everything, Stewart goes on to name Polanski his politician of the year.22 JANUARY 2026Polanski, a couple of dozen supporters, a few journalists and a smattering of police are outside Palantir’s British HQ in Soho.Palantir is a US software company that helps huge organisations make sense of their data.Using a loud hailer, Polanski says it is a surveillance company providing the software used by US government agencies such as the CIA and ICE.It also supplies the Israeli Defence Forces with technology for “war-related missions”