Zack Polanski is doing what Corbyn couldn’t: Play the media game

italiatelegraph

Rivkah Brown

A few days after his election as Green party leader last week, Zack Polanski released a 90-second video on social media. In it, he canvases Clacton-on-Sea residents’ views on fire-and-rehire and zero-hours contracts – then shocks them by revealing that those are some of the very policies endorsed by their MP, Nigel Farage. Polanski’s video was strikingly similar to another that did the rounds late last year, in which Zohran Mamdani, the soon-to-be Democratic candidate for New York City mayor, asks his fellow New Yorkers why they voted for Trump. Someone’s been taking notes.

At the time of their respective videos, both Mamdani and Polanski were relatively unknown. Mamdani, a diligent but undersung city assemblyman; Polanski, an insurgent leader yet to breach national awareness (just three weeks ago, only 18% of Britons had any opinion of him, positive or negative). It’s been less than a year since Mamdani went around Queens vox-popping Trump voters, and he’s now a shoo-in to govern the largest city in the US.

A smart media campaign did not single-handedly produce this outcome – Mamdani reportedly has 29,000 canvassers – nor would it have been possible without one. “It’s going to be all about the volunteers,” Mamdani reportedly told videographer Anthony DiMieri, the guy who shot the Trump video that soft-launched his candidacy. “It’s gonna be all about video.”

Hear the echo: “Cutting through on media and socials is the back-up our door knockers and leafleters need,” Polanski tweeted in July. The Green leader has clearly been taking notes from across the pond – at least, the notes he can.

There’s no way Polanski can emulate the size and slickness of Mamdani’s operation, for example, not even with the entire party budget at his disposal (don’t get me started on Green leadership candidates, who get a whopping £1,000 to splash on their campaigns – don’t spend it all at once!). The individual budget for New York City mayoral candidates – $7.9m (£5.8m), a target Mamdani hit almost two weeks ago – is more than three times what the whole of the Green party spent contesting the 2024 general election (£1.7m), and almost the same as the party’s entire income last year (£5.2m).

What Polanski can do, and has already done, is to make media central to his pitch – he tells me he spent the “vast majority” of his campaign budget on comms – and now, his premiership. In so doing, he’s correcting one of the fatal errors of the Corbyn period.

Hostile media
From early in his political career, Polanski has understood something Corbyn did not: that Britain’s media is unappeasably anti-left. Though even centrist commentators commended Corbyn’s straight-talking style, under pressure he vacillated between evasion, churlish defensiveness and half-hearted apology.

Corbyn’s new party co-leader Zarah Sultana recently admitted this was a major miscalculation: “When it came under attack from the state and the media, [the leadership] should have fought back, recognising that these are our class enemies,” Sultana told the New Left Review. “But instead it was frightened and far too conciliatory. This was a serious mistake. If we’re contesting state power, we’re going to face a major backlash, and we need to have the institutional resilience to withstand it. You cannot give these people an inch.” And Polanski has not.

Rather than seek to find the “right answer” that will sate the bloodthirsty newshounds, whether on Article 50 or the IHRA, Polanski has turned the hunt on the hounds. Pressed by Laura Kuennsberg to apologise for retweeting a video by George the Poet, Polanski shrugged off the BBC broadcaster’s “absurd line of questioning”.

Polanski is a frequent critic of the BBC, its omertà over the Gaza genocide and obsessive platforming of Reform, as well as of the British media more generally. When the media attacks him, he bites back. This offensive strategy plays exceptionally badly with editors and producers and exceptionally well with the public, only 36% of whom trust the media. This was something that Corbyn could not, or would not see: that he wasn’t addressing the interviewer before him, but their millions of viewers, and that doing so successfully would ultimately endear him to the public, while bringing the hostile media to heel.

Lo and behold, by the end of his campaign, even the Murdoch press was reluctantly recognising Polanski.

Learning from Farage?
In his media strategy, Polanski is learning less from Corbyn than from Nigel Farage – a man from whom he could not be ideologically more divergent, and yet stylistically is openly emulating. The reason is that he knows Farage has perfected a winning formula: how to leverage his outsider status and freedom from a party whip (the Greens have none) to make an outsize impact on the media relative to their parliamentary size.

According to an analysis published by Byline Times, Reform received 952 mentions in mainstream news and outlets over one month, with just 5 MPs, Labour 2,181 posts with its 404 MPs (now 399). That’s 190 posts per Reform MP, five per Labour MP.

At the time of writing, Google Trends rates UK search results for Zack Polanski at 5 to Keir Starmer’s 17 – meaning Polanski is generating roughly a third of the online interest as the current prime minister, despite commanding just 1% of the MPs.

Polanski, of course, lacks one of Farage’s great advantages: a friendly media environment. Unlike the Reform leader, Polanski has no Elon Musk or Tim Davie, Rupert Murdoch or Paul Marshall in his corner – no media baron itching to give him a primetime TV show, no tech mogul tweaking their algorithm in his party’s favour. He knows this. Rather than awaiting his invite to the Spectator garden party, Polanski has set about creating his own media microclimate. Having amassed a medium-sized social media presence (he has more followers on X/Twitter than either of his former bosses, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay), Polanski is now beginning to cash it in.

His first announcement as party leader, made the day after his election, was not a policy – it was a podcast. The first episode featured my Novara Media colleague, Ash Sarkar, a savvy media operator and frequent contributor to the BBC, despite itself. Most famous for calling Piers Morgan an idiot on live television, Sarkar does not serve at the establishment’s pleasure, but has forced her way onto its fringes, wielding irrepressible charm and acid morality – all while helping to build a platform that can apply pressure from without. In this, she is much like Farage.

Sadly, the Corbyn project has learned few of the lessons of 2015-19 when it comes to its relationship with the media. Those around the former Labour leader were reportedly responsible for leaking to the Sunday Times the internal squabbles over the new party’s launch. The paper eagerly took up the invitation to stir the pot, obviously. The move betrayed a fundamental and persistent misunderstanding of the Corbyn project, one Sultana names: that the media is the enemy, not the arbiter. Having internalised this lesson, the Polanski-led Green party represents the kind of insurgent force of the kind Britain has not seen since – well, 2015.