Polanski's by-election crash out - is he finished?

Jon Sopel (0:02)

This is a Global Production.

This is Primrose Hill, in the Holburn and St Pancras constituency. And there before you is London. And London looking pretty much the same as it did yesterday, because Labour have won this seat.

Henry Riley (0:20)

There has been no gain.

Jon Sopel (0:22)

In fact, you could argue that the only patch of green that we can now see is what's before our very eyes, the green of Trimrose Hill.

So what of Zach Polanski? Did he need to fight this by-election? And if not, has he got a future as the party's leader? Has he led them precipitately close to the edge? Welcome to The News Agents.

Zach Polanski (0:52)

The News Agents.

Jon Sopel (0:53)

It's Jon.

Lewis Goodall (0:54)

It's Lewis. And before we go any further, I would just like to congratulate you, Jon, because, you know, lots of presenters and journalists, you know, when they get to your status as a sort of an en-screeze of journalism, they give up the reporting. You know, they don't do, you know, but like you, our fearless reporter from Primrose Hill, giving us the dispatch, the definitive dispatch from that constituency. I was there.

Jon Sopel (1:15)

Look, exactly.

Lewis Goodall (1:16)

And they say Jeremy Bowen's good. Anyway, let's go down to the results. So the Hobart and St. Pancras by-election, Jon was saying that Keir Starmer's old constituency's parting gift to the Labour Party was his resignation, when he said he wasn't going to do so, and handed Andy Burnham the first by-election of his premiership. And it was, as was widely expected, a Labour hold. So the Labour candidate who was the leader of Camden Council, Sagal Abdi-Wali, got 12,292 votes. That's about 45% of the vote. That's about 4 or 5% down from what Keir Starmer got at the general election. But, you know, even though the turnout was lowish, sub-40%, perfectly respectable for a by-election and a very credible result, obviously the interest in this by-election came from the fact that not only was it the sort of seat, young, urban, graduate-heavy, significant Muslim vote, all of the sorts of people that have been drifting to the Green Party over the course of the last year away from Labour. So the Green performance will be watched closely anyway. But then that Zach Polanski, the leader, chose to throw his hat in the ring when he didn't need to stand in this seat, obviously all eyes were going to be on what happened to him and the Green performance. And although there was a significant swing to the Green Party from the Labour Party, their 8,928 votes, about 30-ish percent of the vote, that is their second best by-election performance in history, second only to Gorton and Denton in Manchester, which of course, listeners of Viewers will remember, they won earlier in the year. Nonetheless, to fall short and to fall so significantly short after a year of such highs really does embed the idea that as we were talking about last Friday, Jon, that Polanski has peaked and the Green bubble has burst. And Labour is able to say this morning, the Prime Minister will be able to sit very happily in Downing Street, able to say, look, I won in Makerfield, classic Red Wall sort of seat, and now we've just won in North London. We have secured, at least for now, both sides of the Labour coalition. I've seen off reform and now I'm seeing off the Greens, which is exactly what you asked me to do when you asked me to replace Keir Starmer.

Jon Sopel (3:34)

What's so interesting about this by-election is what was of most interest to us was not who won, but who came second. Because if it had been Labour that had come second in this by-election, we would have been saying that the burn and bounce is over, that the bubble has started to burst, that there is a peak and that Labour have faced a very serious threat from their left flank.

As it is, we're now focusing on Zach Polanski.

When it was first announced that he was going to put himself forward as the candidate, we sat here in this studio and said, is that a smart thing to do? Is that a wise thing to do? You only do that if you know you're going to win, because the narrative otherwise is going to consolidate the idea that the Green Party has hit its high water mark and it's now receding and the tide is going out on that party. And you couple that with the events of last weekend, which were calamitous, I think, for Zach Polanski. I think the vote itself, he's absenting himself from the vote, and we should talk a bit about that as well. And then you go into a by-election and you come second. And I think that, you know, I think to the left, the even more militant, even more pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist, far left groups in the Green Party are saying, you're not delivering. And the more moderate traditional Greens are saying, you're not delivering. And that puts him in an extremely vulnerable position.