Zack Polanski, Toolmaker’s Apprentice

Paul Knaggs writes:

Modern British politics runs on backstory. Not policy. Not record. Not the hard, testable evidence of what a person has done with power or sought to do with the power they were denied. Backstory. The distilled personal mythology that a political operation constructs, tests in focus groups, and then releases into the world as though it were the spontaneous expression of an authentic life.

Sir Keir Starmer’s handlers understood this with considerable precision. As Labour Heartlands documented in our 2024 investigation into the prime minister’s manufactured working-class credentials, Starmer mentioned his father’s occupation as a toolmaker so many times across so many interviews, speeches, and campaign events that the repetition itself became a form of revelation. Not revelation of working-class roots, but revelation of a communications strategy. Genuine working-class politicians do not catalogue their backgrounds with that kind of metronomic discipline. They mention it once, because it is simply who they are, and then they move on to what they think. The repeated invocation of the toolmaker was the tell: here was a man, or the team around him, who had identified working-class origin as the credential most needed for the electoral task at hand, and had decided to deploy it, again and again, until it was indistinguishable from instinct.

The toolmaker’s son became prime minister. The toolmaker himself, Rodney Starmer, ran a small factory that made specialist components. He was, by any reasonable account, a skilled small businessman rather than a factory floor worker. The distinction matters not because it diminishes Rodney Starmer in any way, but because the word toolmaker was chosen precisely for the associations it carries: the overalls, the lathe, the calloused hands, the honest manual labour that the professional class has always found it useful to claim proximity to when seeking the votes of people who actually do it. The truth of the father’s life was quietly promoted into a more useful version of itself.

The trade in manufactured origin stories is not confined to Labour. It is the operating system of managed politics across the spectrum. What changes is only the specific credential being inflated, and the specific audience it is calibrated to reach. Starmer needed working-class authenticity, so his father’s factory became a badge. Nick Clegg needed principled insurgency, so his tuition fee pledge was scripted as the statement of a man who meant every word, right up until the moment he voted the other way. The origin story and the policy promise perform the same function: they construct the impression of a self that the actual record does not fully support.

Starmer had the toolmaker’s son. Polanski has the reluctant activist. Both are confections. Both were manufactured in the same political workshop, and both serve the same purpose: to give the audience a story it wants to believe, for long enough to win whatever is currently being sought.

Zack Polanski’s contribution to this tradition is the reluctant politician. A man who never planned to enter public life, who was dragged in by conscience rather than pulled in by ambition, who would rather have been anywhere else but found himself unable to look away from injustice. Politics Was Never Part of the Plan, as he titled the 2019 Medium essay in which he constructed this persona with some care. It is, as origin stories go, rather well made. It has the right texture: the drama school in Atlanta, the gig economy jobs, the hypnotherapy clinic, the accidental convergence of a life lived away from Westminster with the moment when the world demands something of you. It reads like the opening pages of a political memoir that has not yet been written. It is also, when set against the documented record, largely a fiction.

What follows is not merely the chronicle of a man who told some lies. It is the chronicle of a system that rewards the lie, selects for it, and then expresses surprise when the lies keep coming. Starmer was that system’s product. Polanski is its latest apprentice.

THE RED CROSS: SPOKESMAN FOR AN ORGANISATION THAT SAYS HE NEVER WAS

The breaking story today is the most straightforward of Polanski’s documented fabrications, and for that reason the most damaging. In a CrowdFunder appeal published in 2022, as he campaigned to become the Green Party’s deputy leader, Polanski described himself in the following terms: as a spokesperson for the British Red Cross, I care deeply about ending racialised policing and have been calling for an end to the phoney war on drugs.

The British Red Cross has confirmed, without qualification, that Polanski has never been an official spokesperson. He was a host at several fundraising events. The charity is scrupulously non-partisan. It does not lend its name to politicians for use in political fundraising appeals. It raised the issue with Polanski’s team. The claim had also appeared on his personal website in 2020, where he wrote that he worked as a spokesman for the British Red Cross and added that he was really proud of the work we do. A man who was really proud of the work we do was, on the charity’s own account, someone who hosted a few events. He was not someone who did it.

Confronted on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Polanski said he had hosted various fundraisers for the British Red Cross, that he would go on stage and speak for them about the amazing work they do, and that he had used the wrong word. The word he used was not spokesman at an event, however. It was spokesperson for an organisation, deployed on a political fundraising page specifically designed to establish his credentials before party members deciding whether to elect him. You do not reach for the wrong word in that context by accident. You reach for it because it carries more authority than the true one.

He told a political fundraising audience he was a Red Cross spokesman. The Red Cross says he never was. That is not imprecise language. That is a fabrication deployed to acquire authority he had not earned.

The Green Party’s initial response was not to address the substance but to attack The Times for having published a cartoon of Polanski that the party considered antisemitic. That is not a defence. It is misdirection. The response to one alleged wrong does not extinguish the other. Observing that both things can be true simultaneously is not difficult. It simply requires honesty, which appears to be the quality currently in shortest supply at the top of the Green Party. 

The same investigation raised a second allegation: that Polanski was not a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy while practising professionally and charging clients approximately two hundred and twenty pounds per ninety-minute session, despite representing himself to those clients as if he were. The Green Party has not rebutted this. Polanski has not directly addressed it. A silence of that quality tends to speak for itself. 

THE MAKE VOTES MATTER OVERCLAIM: SMALLER LIE, IDENTICAL HABIT

In the same 2022 CrowdFunder page that falsely named him a Red Cross spokesman, Polanski also described himself as a spokesman for Make Votes Matter, the proportional representation campaign. Make Votes Matter clarified that while Polanski had spoken in support of a cause it championed, he was not a spokesman for the wider organisation. The Green Party, when pressed, said he had served as a representative rather than a spokesman.

Representative. Spokesman. Spokesperson. Host. These words are not interchangeable, and political candidates understand that perfectly well. Spokesman implies institutional standing: that an organisation has chosen you, authorised your voice, and stands behind your public statements. Host means you stood on a stage at someone else’s event and spoke warmly about the work. The upgrade from host to spokesman is the kind of inflation that constructs an impression of seriousness and consequence without the underlying substance that would justify it. Applied once, it might be imprecision. Applied across multiple organisations over multiple years, it is a system.

THE HYPNOTHERAPY LIE: AND THE LIE ABOUT THE LIE

In 2013, Polanski offered a session to a Sun journalist at his Harley Street hypnotherapy clinic. The journalist claimed her measurements subsequently increased. He charged the clinic rate. He failed to disclose the resulting article in his Green Party candidate declaration when standing for office in 2019. When it resurfaced during his 2025 leadership campaign, he told LBC and then Good Morning Britain that he had never believed breast enlargement through hypnotherapy was possible, that he had been misrepresented, and that he had gone on the BBC the following day to apologise and correct the record.

The BBC investigated and found no record of any such interview. What they found was a BBC Radio Humberside recording made six days after the Sun piece, in which Polanski described the session as a successful project, cited anecdotal evidence at least of a growth in breast size, and, when asked directly whether he believed hypnotherapy could achieve this, replied: I believe that it can happen in theory. Those are not the words of a man who had rushed to apologise for a misrepresentation the previous day. They are the words of a man defending and extending the original claim.

Against this background, the allegation that he was not a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy while charging clients for his professional services assumes a particular weight. It suggests the misrepresentation of his standing was not confined to a tabloid article or an election platform, but extended to the private relationship between a practitioner and the people paying him, who had every right to accurate information about his qualifications. That is more serious than embarrassment. It is a professional claim made to paying clients that may not have been true.

THE POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY: THE YEARS THAT VANISHED

His foundational 2019 Medium essay, Politics Was Never Part of the Plan, presents a man pulled into public life by conscience rather than design. The paper trail tells a different story. By 2014, the reluctant politician had joined the Liberal Democrats.

In 2015, the year Jeremy Corbyn was rebuilding the socialist left and drawing hundreds of thousands of new members into Labour, Polanski was standing as a Lib Dem council candidate in Camden, singing songs on stage at the Liberal Democrat conference, and writing for Lib Dem Voice in praise of Nick Clegg’s coalition record.

A man who wrote that he wanted a leader who remains immensely proud of what Nick and our colleagues achieved in office was not stumbling into politics by accident. He was a disciplined partisan of the party that had provided parliamentary cover for an austerity programme from which this country’s public services have never recovered. 

Polanski Campaigning Against Climate Change — January 2019

In 2016, he stood as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Barnet and Camden at the London Assembly elections. He put his name forward for the Richmond Park by-election candidate selection. When he was not shortlisted, he wrote a public blog post objecting bitterly. According to Private Eye, a senior Green later told reporters he had quit the Lib Dems in a strop. The sequence, a failed selection fight followed by a public grievance campaign and rapid departure, fits that description rather well.

His stated reason for leaving, delivered in 2019, was deep unhappiness with the Lib Dems’ support for airstrikes in Syria. The party had backed military action in Syria in 2013 and again in 2015. Polanski joined after those votes, stood for office under the banner, praised the leadership, and agitated for a winnable seat. The Syria explanation does not survive contact with the chronology. What does survive contact with the chronology is the Richmond Park rejection and the grievance blog that followed it.

In June 2016, as an active Lib Dem operative, he heckled Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally over Europe. In 2025, he auditioned to inherit Corbyn’s voters using Corbyn’s own vocabulary.

And then there is the heckling. BuzzFeed News identified the lone heckler who interrupted Jeremy Corbyn at a Momentum rally in June 2016 as Liberal Democrat activist Zack Polanski, who had gone specifically to denounce what he called Corbyn’s passivity and ambivalence for Europe. Corbyn told the crowd to let his friend stay. Fast forward to 2025, and the same man presents himself as the natural heir to the Corbynite left, delivering speeches that borrow the rhythms, the language, and the thematic architecture of 2017-era socialism with considerable fidelity.

THE CORBYN RECANTATION: CALIBRATED TO THE AVAILABLE AUDIENCE 

In 2018, Polanski wrote publicly that Corbyn’s complicity was an existential threat to the Jewish community, and that being a pro-European Jew gave him two reasons he could not vote for Labour under Corbyn. These were public positions taken at the precise moment when the antisemitism smear campaign was being used most aggressively to destroy Corbyn’s leadership. Polanski was lending his voice to that campaign.

By June 2025, with the Corbynite constituency available and the Green leadership race underway, he told Novara Media it had not been helpful for him to assume Labour was rife with antisemitism, when we now know that blatantly was not true. He added that Corbyn had not dealt with it perfectly. The timing of the recantation tracks the available electoral constituency with suspicious precision. In 2018, the incentive was to align with the anti-Corbyn consensus. In 2025, the incentive was to attract the Corbynite left. The position changed when the calculation changed. That is not moral evolution. It is audience management.

The left, which suffered genuinely from the antisemitism smear campaign and knows precisely how it was manufactured, should be slow to forgive the man who helped give it credibility, and slower still to trust the recantation of a man who has demonstrated, repeatedly, that his positions are audience-dependent.

FROM ECOLOGY TO IDENTITY POLITICS: THE PARTY THEY USED TO BE 

There is a broader and more lasting damage that this chronicle illuminates, and it deserves honest statement: the damage done to the Green Party itself.

The Green Party was built over decades as the political home of ecologists, scientists, conservationists, and those who understood that the health of the natural world is not one item on a list of political concerns but the condition on which all other political concerns depend. That seriousness was real and it was earned. The Greens spoke about climate, about soil, about water, about the systemic consequences of industrial capitalism for the living world with a depth of knowledge that the established parties have never matched. They commanded a cross-spectrum respect that no other party in British politics could claim, precisely because they were not a faction of any existing political tradition. They were ecologists, and in a political culture saturated with opportunism, that independence had genuine value.

That party is now largely unrecognisable. Under Polanski’s tenure, the Green Party has undergone what its own internal critics describe as a fundamental mutation. The environment remains on the letterhead. It is no longer the animating principle. In its place has come an omnicause radicalism in which gender ideology, identitarian politics, and the cultural preoccupations of the urban professional class have been elevated above the material concerns of ecology, and well above the material concerns of the working class whose cause is rhetorically performed at every opportunity.

The Greens once held credibility because they placed the planet above the parliamentary game. That seriousness has been traded for a bouquet of identitarian causes that the party’s founding generation neither recognises nor voted for. The ecologists have been replaced by the culture warriors.

The exclusion of groups like the Green Women’s Declaration from party conference marked this transformation. Women who have spent years defending the material reality of biological sex found themselves unwelcome in the party of ecological materialism. The Darren Johnson case made the cost of principled internal dissent explicit. Johnson served the Green Party for twenty-four years, was a London Assembly Member and the party’s London Mayoral candidate, and was suspended after criticising the party’s response to the Cass Review. He eventually left and joined Labour. The biological had become negotiable. The ideological had become mandatory.

The Green surge in membership since Polanski’s election has been remarkable. The question nobody in the party leadership wants to sit with is who those new members are and what they have joined. A party whose membership has trebled in under a year, that cannot prevent candidates who call for the killing of Zionists from appearing on ballot papers, that has a deputy leader who privately advises candidates accused of antisemitism to seek legal advice, is not a party whose vetting procedures have kept pace with its ambitions.

The working-class communities whose names appear in every Polanski speech about wealth and power are not joining the Greens in any significant numbers. The ecological movement at its most serious was always capable of speaking to those communities, because the people most exposed to environmental degradation, to industrial pollution, to the poisoning of air and water, are not the urban professional class. They are the people at the bottom of every economic hierarchy. A serious Green politics would have built from there. The Polanski Greens have built instead from the student union and the identity politics seminar.

GOLDERS GREEN: WHERE POLANSKI WAS RIGHT, AND THEN WAS NOT 

Labour Heartlands examined the Golders Green attack in detail in our piece Fitting the Narrative: Ishmail Hussein, the Inconvenient Victim, published 3 May 2026. The full account, including the first victim the official narrative erased, is there. Readers owed the complete picture should read it.

When Polanski shared a social media post questioning police conduct during the arrest of Essa Suleiman, the man charged with the Golders Green stabbings, the question he raised was not, on its merits, an unreasonable one. Footage appeared to show officers kicking a man who had already been tasered and was on the ground. The post condemned the attack itself as horrendous. It did not defend the attacker.

Labour Heartlands went further than Polanski dared. We reported what the official narrative systematically omitted: that the first victim of Essa Suleiman that morning was Ishmail Hussein, a Muslim man, a friend of the attacker’s for two decades, stabbed in his Southwark flat hours before the Golders Green incident and erased from the story because his existence complicated the clean ideological account the government needed to tell. We reported that Suleiman had been recently discharged from psychiatric care, that his Prevent referral had been closed with no terrorist ideology identified, and that the speed with which the government raised the terror threat level and threatened to ban pro-Palestine marches owed more to political opportunity than proportionate response. Those observations remain on the record.

The question Polanski raised about police conduct was legitimate. The problem was what came next. When Starmer turned on him, calling him disgraceful and not fit to lead any political party, Polanski apologised. He said he had shared the post in haste. He retreated from a defensible position under political pressure because the electoral cost of standing his ground felt too high. A leader who abandons a correct position the moment it becomes costly is not offering the left reliable ground. The courage of conviction holds when the pressure comes. The performance of radicalism dissolves. Polanski demonstrated, in the most public possible way, which of the two he has available.

THE CANDIDATE VETTING CATASTROPHE 

The Green Party’s candidate failures in the week before the May 2026 local elections are a direct consequence of a leadership choice: to grow a party from sixty-five thousand to over two hundred thousand members in under a year, apparently without the institutional machinery to determine who was joining or standing.

Among the candidates whose social media posts were exposed: a Lambeth candidate who had shared a post reading Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism. It’s revenge; a Camden candidate who shared content attributing the September 11 attacks to Zionists; a Newcastle candidate who wrote that it takes serious effort not to be a tiny bit antisemitic; and a candidate operating an account under the name thereal.anne.frank who called for every single Zionist to be killed. Polanski said those messages are all unacceptable and expressed confidence in ninety-nine per cent of his candidates. He had himself acknowledged, during the campaign period, that vetting was a real challenge for the Greens. It was a challenge he had not met before those candidates were placed on ballots that cannot now be legally altered.

THE PATTERN THAT CONNECTS EVERYTHING 

It is worth mapping the territory plainly, because the cumulative picture is considerably more damaging than any individual element.

In his professional life, Polanski apparently told paying clients he held a professional membership he may not have possessed, then lied to national broadcasters about his response to a story about that professional work, a lie contradicted by audio evidence that remains on the public record. In his voluntary and advocacy roles, he described himself as a spokesman for the British Red Cross, a claim the organisation denies, and overclaimed a parallel status with Make Votes Matter, which also corrected the record. In his political biography, he erased a two-year period of active Liberal Democrat partisanship, obscured the personal disappointment that drove his departure, aligned himself with the antisemitism smear campaign against Corbyn before reversing when the Corbynite constituency became electorally valuable, and has presented a series of career reverses and opportunistic pivots as a narrative of continuous principled evolution.

Under his leadership, a party that once commanded genuine cross-spectrum respect for its ecological seriousness has become the vehicle of an identitarian politics that its founding generation does not recognise, whose candidate roster has required suspension after suspension in the days before a major election, and whose deputy leader responds to antisemitism allegations by advising accused candidates to seek legal counsel.

The Toolmaker’s Apprentice has performed his role with considerable skill. The reluctant politician who never planned to enter public life has, by the documented record, been planning to enter public life since at least 2014. The man who borrowed Corbyn’s language once called Corbyn an existential threat. The Red Cross spokesman never held the role. The hypnotherapy apology was never made. The professional membership may never have existed. And the green party beneath all of this is no longer, in any meaningful sense, a green party.

Starmer was the system’s product. Polanski is its latest model. The system does not produce these figures by accident. It produces them because it rewards the biography that moves the target audience, the credential that fills the authority gap, the recantation that unlocks the next constituency. It produces them because the alternative, honest politics prosecuted at personal cost, does not reliably win. Until the left builds structures that reward substance over performance, it will keep receiving performances.

The working class of this country has been offered the performance before. It recognises it now, even when the stage lighting is better than usual. 

Manufacturing Backories and CVs 

In late 2007 Reeves moved to become Head of Business Planning in the Customer Relations department, which handled complaints. Rachel Reeves claimed a decade at the Bank of England; she actually spent roughly four and a half years in employment there, with nearly a year of that spent studying. She left the Bank nine months earlier than her LinkedIn stated, and left HBOS more than six months earlier than she claimed. Her LinkedIn had her listed as an “economist” at the Bank of Scotland; she was in fact running a small complaints team managing administration, IT matters, and small projects and planning. The explanation for all of this was, in every case, administrative error.

Farage’s Mass Deportation Fantasy 

Farage, the self-styled anti-establishment man of the people, attended Dulwich College, one of Britain’s most elite private schools, and the FT reported that his City career was considerably more modest than the image suggested, with colleagues saying his suggestion of wealth was “probably a bit of a misnomer.” One of his metals broking companies went insolvent.

Jonathan Reynolds described himself as a solicitor who worked in the Manchester branch of Addleshaw Goddard on his website and told the Commons in 2014 that he had worked as a solicitor in Manchester city centre. He was never qualified, having quit his training contract to run for Parliament in 2010. His LinkedIn simultaneously listed him as both “solicitor” and “trainee solicitor.” His explanation: inadvertent error.

Credibility, once cracked, spreads like a fracture through glass. Pull one thread and the whole garment comes apart. Zack Polanski has been pulling his own threads all week, and the garment is now showing the Liberal Democrat lining beneath the socialist weave.