There’s an ungallant phrase from the old days, generally used by men, the rotters; ‘Coyote Ugly’ which refers to the unhappy happenstance of having a few shandies and falling into bed with a pleasant-seeming partner. On waking up sober, however, one realises that the bedmate is so unsightly that the option of gnawing one’s own arm (inconveniently placed under the sleeping swain) off, as coyotes are reputed to do to escape from traps, rather than wake them seems preferable.
You see the reflections of a series of grotesques: freshly elected local councillors yelling ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and declaring ‘a win for the people of Gaza’
The Greens are like that, but mainly for women – and particularly the young, urban, educated females who have flocked to the party in herds over the past few years, like lambs to the slaughter, if you like. You fell asleep beside a gap-toothed charmer who murmured repeatedly in your ear of how he dreamed of a world where everyone was kinder and breasts were bigger; you wake to a hideous hall of mirrors – and last night’s lover-boy is no longer looking at you with affection, and wondering what he can do to make your world a better place, but staring dead-eyed into the looking glass above the bathroom sink repeatedly mouthing ‘ROCK STAR.’
Elsewhere, you see the reflections of a series of grotesques: freshly elected local councillors yelling ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and declaring ‘a win for the people of Gaza’; a leader who wants to legalise all drugs; a Scottish Green forced to say sorry for talking about the ‘demonisation’ of rape; deluded do-gooders who want to close prisons and take tasers away from police. Even if the Greens saw sense on this last point, it doesn’t compensate for how nutty they are.
Welcome to the modern Green Party. Their latest madcap move was to make it clear to the Antisemitism Policy Trust that they wouldn’t be exactly warmly welcomed at the party’s annual conference in October. A conference fringe event – The Greens and Antisemitism: what does getting it right look like? – had been proposed by the Antisemitism Policy Trust and More in Common. But the Greens refused to accept the event as part of the conference fringe programme, according to the Times. The decision is especially incomprehensible at a time when attacks on our Jewish compatriots are the highest on record, to the extent that worshippers are murdered at synagogues.
They say that a week is a long time in politics; a year seems like an epoch. Last summer, even serious political commentators were opining that the old-fashioned two-party system had been smashed by the pincer-attack breakthrough of Reform on the Right and the Greens on the Left. How things have changed! With the Burnham Bounce and the ongoing Keminisation of the boring old Tory Party, Reform have been bowled a googly by the going to ground of their charismatic front-man, leaving its soul to be publicly wrestled over by two men doing their darnedest to impersonate David Brent and Violet Elizabeth Bott.
The modern Greens have as much in common with their animal-loving, Gardener’s Question Time-listening constituency of gentler times as paganism does with Quakerism – and their showing in the polls indicates that the whiff of sacrificed wren is attracting the attention of the wayward public, who don’t like what they smell one bit. Yes, the Greens took Gorton and Denton earlier this year, but with Reform standing a candidate (Matt Goodwin) who made Keir Starmer look charismatic, and Starmer himself still leading the Labour party, this wasn’t the hardest of tasks. Besides, though Hannah the Plumber looked like the heroine of a dull CBBC show concocted solely to ‘empower’ little girls, she was unarguably not your usual kind of politician – and people had had enough of those. But now the Greens are polling the lowest they’ve done since Zack Polanski became leader. One poll published in July put the party on just eight per cent. Suddenly, keeping a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse seems to make an awful lot more sense.
It all started out so lovely and civilised. In 1972, a group of Coventry estate agents, surveyors, solicitors and a former Conservative councillor declared the formation of a new political party, PEOPLE, after reading an interview in Playboy (yeah, right!) with the overpopulation expert Paul Ehrlich. Their concerns included energy production, pollution and ‘zero growth’; this was the first Green party spotted in the entirety of Europe, their manifesto inspired by ‘A Blueprint for Survival’ published in 1972 by the Ecologist magazine, the editor of which, Edward Goldsmith, merged his ‘Movement For Survival’ with PEOPLE. As PEOPLE could been anything from condoms to a soap opera, at their 1975 conference they changed their name to the Ecology Party – and the Ecology Party became the Greens. What the Greens have become, those concerned Coventry-ites could never have foreseen – and if they had, would they have set the wheels in motion?
A lot of polluted stream water has flowed under the bridge since then. The Ecology Party took their first council seat in Sussex in 1976; along came (relatively) dishy Jonathon Porritt as their recognisable public face; and, by 1979, they became the fourth largest party in UK politics, ahead of the National Front.
Has the maniac never seen Jurassic Park?
The Ecology Party was mostly Christians, Tories and farmers; the Green Party (which it became) appears to be mostly Muslims, Communists and vegans. In the Ecology days, despite a bit of Malthusian raving about there being too many people on earth (how hollow predictions of ‘the population boom’ seem now, with some countries failing to reproduce themselves) you didn’t get the feeling that Greens as a breed were actually mad; it would be very easy to think that now. Even the ones not yelling war-cries at by-elections, the other ones who’ve had expensive educations don’t seem to have any common sense and have none of the charm you’d at least hope they might have picked up at their posh schools.
Some Greens are, perhaps not surprisingly, keen on rewilding. Over in Ireland, former Green Party (Comhaontas Glas) leader Eamon Ryan once called for wolves to be reintroduced. These people appear to treat the countryside as some sort of video game simulation, maybe a cross between Animal Crossing and Mortal Kombat. Has the maniac never seen Jurassic Park? Good luck with re-wilding, you crazy Archers kids, but mind your picnic – and your cat.
Two years ago, I wrote a column here entitled ‘Ed Davey’s Lib Dems are the real nasty party’ examining the two faces of the gurning clown; the gentle, listening one and the contemptuous, hectoring one. But the antics of Zack Polanski’s Greens since then have convinced me otherwise. I don’t want to spoil Daphne du Mauriers as yet unread, so I’ll just say that in Jamaica Inn, her plucky heroine Mary Yellen finds something nasty in the sketchbook of the apparent hero which makes her blood run cold. It’s Polanski rather than Davey who I think of now when I see this illustration in my mind. When Caroline Lucas was the only Green MP, she was considered an outlier if you want to be polite, and something of a crank if you couldn’t be bothered. Now she seems like Dame Shirley Williams in comparison to the snake-oil salesman who sits atop the nutty edifice, and has understandably expressed a desire for him to remember the ecological roots of the party.
Which brings us back to that morning-after hall of mirrors each featuring a niche kind of craziness – or, as we know it, the Green Annual Party Conference. This year’s event, taking place in Brighton, naturally, will be the most exciting conference season in decades. One of the cheaper kinds of thrill – a carny sideshow to the real business of seeing the two main parties slug it out comfortingly once more – will be seeing every kind of Green nutter come out of the woodwork and strut their stuff. Now they’re no longer a threat, we can simply get out the popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show. Let the carnival of freaks commence!
