After the silly season comes the serious stuff. On Monday, parliament returns after a bumper five-party conference season. But while both Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch can claim to have cemented their position with well-received speeches to their respective followers, two party leaders now look to be in major peril. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens, and Sir Ed Davey, his Liberal Democrat counterpart, are facing internal revolts for different reasons.
For Polanski, the reasons are threefold and all related. The first is the transformation of the party membership that he has overseen in the past 13 months: many more members but plenty of undesirable types too. The second is the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion passed at conference last week, a debate from which he very publicly abstained. The third is his loss, by a double-digit margin, in today’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election, after several gaffes and bad headlines about poor leadership.
For Davey, the reasons are less concrete. But within his party there has been a deep sense of dissatisfaction among certain elements about their failure to ‘cut through’ at a national level. At a time when the Greens have risen and fallen, Reform made the weather and Burnham reset the political dial, Sir Ed seems – to some of his troops at least – a fairly plodding figure. It was a feeling perceptible at last month’s conference, with the political journalists noticeably more upbeat about Davey than his own somewhat dour Members of Parliament: a sub-optimal state of affairs.
Much like the Celebrity Traitors, both men now face a battle of bravado and a game of knowing who best to trust. Polanski appears to have more critics but is cushioned by the byzantine mechanisms of the Green party. Caroline Lucas was quietly devastating on Newsnight last night, speaking for many of the Greens’ old guard when she criticised Polanski’s non-interventionism in the conference debate. All eyes are now on the party’s five MPs: Adrian Ramsay said the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion was ‘deeply upsetting’ while Sian Berry has suggested that she and others held their tongues on the conference debate for the duration of Polanski’s by-election. Carla Denyer is understood to have taken an immense personal toll from the Gaza fall-out with Ellie Chowns and Hannah Spencer yet to issue comment.
For Davey, the question is whether he can face down his 70 fellow Liberal Democrat MPs at a crunch party meeting next Tuesday. Much of the discontent come from the new intake, in the mostly Tory-facing seats won in 2024. Davey’s support for retaining the triple lock has been the trigger, but Badenoch’s focus on winning back Lib Dem seats has not helped. One tells me that they now face the ‘worst of all worlds – a vote of no confidence, Ed fights it and wins, limping on totally wounded.’ Charlie Maynard, the MP for Witney, has this afternoon quit his post as a Treasury spokesman, with others believed to be considering their position. Davey allies claim that it is merely a ‘few MPs’ doing the briefing, with most of the group ‘annoyed’ by it all.
One thing is for certain: in the new age of political uncertainty, no leader, no matter how briefly popular, can be assured of safety for long. To quote Piers Morgan, that most unlikely of political sages, ‘One day you’re cock of the walk… the next, a feather duster.’ In the fickle game of SW1, Davey and Polanski now look only marginally safer than Ross Kemp on Traitors.
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