QUENTIN LETTS: My fellow residents in Herefordshire voted in a Green MP. What on earth would they think if they met this collection of oddballs, Marxists and Islamic hard-liners!

Fangs to the fore, Zack Polanski rallied his motley masses. The Green Party leader is a shouter.For the first five minutes or so of his conference speech in Brighton yesterday the volume was so excessive that it made my ears ache. ‘VOTE GREEN AND SEE LABOUR MOVE!’ he bellowed.His half-hour speech kept returning to this idea: that the point of the Greens was to drag Labour Leftwards on Palestine, rent reviews, trans issues, the EU, immigration, Net Zero and more; Leftwards, ever Leftwards, until they fall off the flat earth that Comrade Polanski and his ilk inhabit.British politics has, over the decades, had its share of mavericks, flashes in the pan and unpleasantly incendiary individuals. There have been goose-steppers (Oswald Mosley), oratorical rabble-rousers (George Galloway), saboteurs (Guy Fawkes) and coup plotters. In 1968 the newspaper tycoon Cecil King tried to persuade Lord Mountbatten to help him topple Harold Wilson’s government. Mountbatten declined.We have also, in years past, had racists, both low-rent (Nick Griffin) and rather more velvet-lined (Alan Clark). There was even a disappearance artist, John Stonehouse, a Postmaster General who pretended to have drowned off the coast of Florida.Parliament has had its eccentrics, too. George Sitwell, member for Scarborough in the late 19th century, wrote a history of the fork and invented a gun for shooting wasps.In Victorian days Edward Watkin MP started digging a tunnel under the English Channel, only to be stopped because it might be used by the French to invade us.Watkin later tried to build the world’s tallest tower on swampy ground in Wembley. Watkin’s Folly, as it became known, started to lean at a dangerous angle and had to be destroyed. Zack Polanski at the Green Party conference in Brighton on FridayWhere does Mr Polanski fit into this tradition? Is he a harmless oddball, a collectible crank or is he, as his party sinks into a mire of sectarianism and anti-Semitism, more sinister than that? In the last year he has led the Greens to a remarkable boom, which now seems to be deflating fast. Is Polanski’s Folly going the same way as Edward Watkin’s leaning tower of Wembley?Comrade Polanski himself is an elusive figure. His name is self-created (he was born mere David Paulden) and he once worked as a Harley Street hypnotherapist, claiming that he could enlarge women’s breasts simply by looking at them.Ha, that old gambit! This was not, let us accept, for sexual gratification: big Zack is not a ladies’ man. Perhaps he just enjoyed spinning a yarn and then became enmeshed in it. Lies can become as sticky as spiders’ nests.His student days were spent at Aberystwyth University, reading sociology and, please note, theatre.Is that where he developed his undoubted flair for theatrics? He used to be a Lib Dem but could make no headway in a party that is hardly overloaded with talent.Joining Labour was not an option because he disapproved of its then leader, Jeremy Corbyn, whose policies he considered antisemitic. Mr Polanski is, as he often asserts, of Jewish descent. The way he nowadays mentions his Jewishness, it is almost as if he is trying to defuse the stink of the antisemitism scandal that is chronicled today by the Daily Mail’s investigations unit.The Brighton conference will on Sunday debate a proposal to classify as ‘racist’ anyone who embraces Zionism, which may be described as the belief that Israel has a right to exist.After leaving the Lib Dems Mr Polanski hopped on the Greens as you or I might hop on a bus. What a ride it has been. In 2021 he became a London Assembly member, then deputy leader of the party and now he is its leader, being elected to that position last autumn.He finds himself one of the most talked-about politicians in Britain. But all is not well. There is talk that if he loses to Labour at next Thursday’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election, in which he is the Green Party’s candidate, he could be toppled.Is Icarus about to go plop into the water?The Brighton conference yesterday drew a crowd of allegedly 3,200 members. On a show of hands about half of those in the hall for his speech had joined in the last year. Since Mr Polanski became leader the membership has swollen from 70,000 to more than 220,000.Dotty they may be, but the Greens have multiplied like houseflies.The timing of his election as leader last year was fortuitous. It coincided with the bungled launch of Mr Corbyn’s hard-Left Your Party. Left-wing ideologues who were waiting impatiently for the ageing and indecisive Corbyn to challenge Keir Starmer’s Labour suddenly had an alternative in the Greens’ new motormouth Marxist leader. The admission of so many new members has changed the Greens. Older Greens were, to a large extent, small-c conservatives with a weakness for balding corduroys, wonky vegetables and Citroen 2CVs.As Mr Polanski delivered this and other snortingly Left-wing demands, he was repeatedly interrupted by tumultuous applause They were polite Good Life types who felt an admirable, even fogeyish affection for the environment. Very few of them are now left. They have either died off or been driven out by Corbnyite cuckoos.Ecological concerns are now third or fourth fiddle for the party. The class vibe in today’s Green party is urban bourgeois, trendier, less friendly – and obsessed with Palestine.At Brighton there were a lot of face piercings and purple hairdos – one youth had dyed his or her barnet red and green, to match the Palestine flag. This lot are hard-bitten Leftists, their views in several respects communist.Mr Polanski’s speech railed against property owners (even though one of his deputies, a Sloaney six-footer called Rachel Millward, herself reportedly earns £5,000 a year from letting rooms to a lodger, while her husband has a separate rental flat).As Mr Polanski delivered this and other snortingly Left-wing demands, he was repeatedly interrupted by tumultuous applause.He paused at the lectern and nodded, baring his snaggled teeth, jiggling up and down on his feet as if itching for a punch-up.The speech did not hold together intellectually. The passage about rent controls had almost as many holes as his goofy gums.But he was loving his moment, loving himself, relishing the attention, a populist seizing an opportunity.One thing you hear said is that ‘Polanski’s a good communicator’. Well, so was Lord Haw-Haw. So is Donald Trump.Television likes certitude, no matter how blase or simplistic, and Mr Polanski certainly had a gift for glib soundbites, delivered with artful head-wobbling and a slight lisp. At one point he talked about civil liberties but it came out more like ‘Sybil Liberties’, who could almost have been a member of the Bloomsbury set.It is remarkable how fast the Greens have changed. In the 2024 election campaign they came across as free-love, toothy, naively idealistic. Now it all feels angrier, more Soviet – and definitely Muslim. Activists were yesterday offered advice on how to attract Muslim voters. The approach is one of identity politics, which may be a fancy way of saying divisive. Can we imagine any political party running a course for its members on how to appeal specifically to Christian voters?Is this new, more sinister, Green Party what my fellow constituents in traditionally Tory North Herefordshire voted for when, with Reform and the Tories splitting the Right-wing vote, we ended up with a Green MP after the 2024 election?At the Brighton conference the fringe meetings included a session entitled Resisting Migration Raids, at which one member seemed to suggest that the tattoo parlour workers and hairdressers of Britain should seize hold of their scissors and needles and attack anti-immigration protestors. Another meeting was entitled When Is Tree Planting A Tool Of Ethnic Cleansing?At Labour’s conference a few days earlier we were told that real ale and black labradors were racist. Are oak saplings now likewise to be denounced? For a Green party to criticise tree planting was, well, counter-intuitive. What are voters in rural Herefordshire to make of such idiosyncracies?Other meetings in Brighton, where Green activists were getting stuck into £3.50 vegan samosas and vegan onion pasties, were entitled Queer Liberation, The Fight For Sex Workers’ Rights and Punk Politics And Subculture.The division of the party into myriad subsets was giddying. In the commercial hall the Humanist Greens were placed a long distance from the Secular Society, presumably to stop an eruption of unholy war.There were stands for Young Greens, Muslim Greens, Jewish Greens (theirs was manned by a chap in a home-knitted yarmulke), Vegan Greens, Feminist Greens and many more. There was even a stand for the Green Left, surely somewhat otiose given that the entire party would now be comfortably at home in Erich Honecker’s East Germany.Greens oppose the police having tasers. They dislike facial recognition technology which takes serial criminals off the streets. The Green council in Stroud, when not busy building houses in a beautiful rural constituency made famous by Laurie Lee’s Cider With Rosie, want to ban burglar-busting security lights on new houses, so as to avoid disturbing bats. Bats, indeed. The Greens are led by a man who long claimed his family had been persecuted by the Nazis, only for the Daily Mail to report that his grandparents and parents had been born in BritainAnd yet, amid all this incessant political fracturing and weirdness, the Greens claim to love one another – even as they are preparing to report any supporter of Israel to the Prevent anti-terrorism unit. At one fringe event yesterday we were instructed by the party’s ditzy chief executive to spend the next minute communing with the person beside us. It was like being at a trendy Church Of England service, exchanging the dreaded ‘sign of peace’.It is said that sooner or later every revolution eats its own. Could that happen to Zack Polanski? If he does not win in Holborn and St Pancras it is possible that he will face a challenge from Mothin Ali, one of the party’s two deputy leaders.There has never been any doubt about where Mr Ali stands on Zionism. When elected to Leeds City Council in 2024 he called his win ‘a victory for the people of Gaza’ and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’, the Arabic ‘God is the greatest’ chant often used by Islamist terrorists. Mr Ali, naturally, accused his critics of Islamophobia.What a patchwork quilt of oddities and intersections the Greens are, led by a man who long claimed that his family had been persecuted by the Nazis, only for the Daily Mail to report yesterday that his grandparents and parents had been born in Britain. A party spokesman responded to that little contradiction by saying: ‘It is astonishing that the only Jewish leader of a political party in Britain is having his family history raked over by the Press.’Is it not more astonishing that a political leader of Jewish descent should be adopting anti-Zionist positions in what looks like a cynical attempt to win extremist votes and see off a threat to his leadership by a Muslim deputy?The Greens’ surge may have ended. Their polls have dropped from around 20 per cent to something more like 11 per cent.Mr Polanski was right, though, to claim that he and his hard-Left campaigning has had an influence. Andy Burnham has wrenched Labour sharply to the Left, seemingly to see off the Greens. Labour is lurching away from the Centre.With its sanctions against Israel’s West bank settlements, its continuing pay rises for the public sector, its delay on North Sea drilling licences and its wild talk of rejoining the European Union, Mr Burnham is dancing to the tune of pied piper Polanski.The average, ill-shaven, keffiyeh-shrouded, faintly whiffy Corbynite might end up thinking ‘actually, Labour’s doing everything we want – forget the Greens’.But the good people of North Herefordshire will be left with an MP who seems more concerned about Gaza than Ledbury or Leominster.