The meaning of Zack Polanski

In recent years, in British politics, there has been an unspoken understanding that trying to make political capital out of the private lives of our opponents is at best counter-productive. Angela Leadsom’s crass attempts at leveraging Theresa May’s childlessness against her might have cost her the keys to Number 10. At the other end of the spectrum, the Left got nowhere with their attempts at umbrage-taking at Boris Johnson’s fecundity. In Leadsom’s case, it made her appear unkind and unserious, and the attacks on Boris’s family life seemed cynical and hypocritical coming from the Left. 

Going after people’s private lives usually ends up coming across as an admission that one has conceded the argument on matters of substance

In any case, going after people’s private lives usually ends up coming across as an admission that one has conceded the argument on matters of substance. Why play the man rather than the ball, etc. This is not to say that private behaviour is off limits — far from it. The media is adept at blurring the lines between private behaviour and public interest because the latter means exactly that. The public are interested in the private behaviour of their leaders and potential leaders, for the signals that it may send about their judgement. But they may disapprove of the prurience when it comes from rival politicians. 

On the other hand, politicians have always been very keen to use their own lifestyles, and carefully curated personal mythologies, to encourage voters to make decisions about them. The public has grown accustomed and rather weary of the cultivated backstory and steady family of the ready-packaged retail politician. Yet while they are sceptical of it all, voters are aware the packaging is there in lieu of personality or individual flair. And whilst they like those things when they see them authentically, they know deep down that the sort of people they really want running the country are boring people. The right packaging is better than attempts at originality by boring people. 

Whilst Boris Johnson never attempted to come in the traditional packaging, he probably put even more effort into crafting and projecting a manufactured image of himself to the public than your average retail politician. But the electorate were aware that he had conducted a louche private life over many years, and were willing to forgive him a degree of personal flamboyance on account of his supposed originality. Attempts by the Left to encourage voters to disapprove of the way he had carried on his family life fell flat, as they had spent the previous thirty years insisting that we “de-stigmatise” exotic domestic arrangements, and insinuating that those who took too keen an interest in the private lives of others were probably perverts themselves. 

And yet, for all the tedious hypocrisy of the Left, Boris Johnson’s critics (who were not limited to that end of the political spectrum) were not wrong in suggesting that his handling of his family life offered a ready indication for what would happen once he got into Downing Street. Impulsive, easily distracted and with a childish desperation to please the most recent person he spoke to, he was as temperamentally unsuited to serious executive office as he was to the institution of marriage. With his political career now over, those of us who recognised his personal flaws but who nevertheless supported him as a means out of the constitutional crisis of 2019 are now free to accept there was merit to personal attacks on his character. Still, many of those who made such attacks would nevertheless regard it as being completely illegitimate if turned on their own favourites whose careers are still in play. 

There was of course an undeniable element of proactivity to Boris’s personal indiscretions. But what about those cases where it is not what a politician is alleged to have done, but what they have not done, which is called into question? Having children, for instance — or paying one’s council tax. 

What made Leadsom’s insinuations about Theresa May especially cruel was that her childlessness was clearly not a conscious lifestyle choice. She had already strongly hinted at it being involuntary and a matter of regret, and has subsequently confirmed that they were sadly unable to have children. It wasn’t as if she had been gallavanting during her childbearing years. She had chosen a sensible husband and married young, and they both had sensible jobs. Crucially, they did so at a time when a young couple with sensible jobs could still expect to buy a decent family home pretty much straight away. 

On the other end of the spectrum, we find Zack Polanski — an icon for the geriatric millennial cohort. The Green Party leader found himself in a spot of bother over the fact that he appears not to have paid council tax for an extended period while living aboard a narrowboat moored at the Lea Valley Marina in East London.  Despite Polanski’s admission that his affairs were irregular and that he would pay what it is alleged that he owes, the tax expert Dan Neidle has attracted the ire of Green supporters online for the revelations. In the past, Neidle has exposed financial irregularities relating to politicians of most if not all of Britain’s main parties, but the Greens seem to regard the reporting on Polanski’s council tax non-payment as a uniquely existential threat to his political project.

At first glance, this seems misplaced. If anything, Polanski is among the least vulnerable out of all of the party leaders to a loss of support as a result of this type of revelation. He is not a Keir Starmer-type figure, who has attempted to make a virtue out of adherence to due process and law, and who could therefore be charged with hypocrisy. Neither is his political appeal based on careful and thorough financial stewardship, as a Tory’s might be. Unlike a more traditional left-of-centre politician, he does not attach a value judgement to paying the taxes we legally owe; in his worldview, taxes are political weapons to be used against “billionaires”. As with Reform UK, a vote for the Greens is a vote of no confidence in the entire political apparatus, and in favour of the reordering of the whole system. Such voters are far less likely to rank strict adherence to tax law or campaign finance regulations particularly highly when making a judgment about favourable leaders. 

Yet leaving aside for the moment the legality of his council tax situation, the story offers an insight into Polanski’s lifestyle that should actually cause some people to reconsider.  Beyond his core support base — a mixture of students, frustrated graduates, non-assimilated Pakistanis and wealthy, radicalised pensioners living in barn conversions — there is a broader interest in Polanski from the media class who might not necessarily vote for him, but at least find him exciting. These are the people responsible for Polanski’s reputation among the elite as an entrepreneurial political disruptor. They consider him to be a British version of New York’s Zohran Mamdani, mainly by virtue of him winning the Green leadership at roughly the same time as Mamdani won the New York mayoralty, noting a few superficial political similarities as well as the fact they were both young-ish men, and assuming that they were therefore basically the same. 

This is an assumption that could not be further from the truth. Mamdani is the scion of the post-colonial elite — the cream of which made its way from former British colonies to New York city. His father was a celebrated left-wing academic, and his mother a fêted film actress. He grew up well-connected, and took a well-beaten, smoothly-monied path from his parents’ bohemian metropolitan set into the world of well-funded progressive activism, via college and a spell in a suitably edgy niche in the creative world. As it happens, he has gone into politics — and despite his privileged background he has done extremely well at a very young age against tough operators in the cut-throat New York Democratic machine. But had he not done so, he would surely have risen to prominence as a movie director, or an actor, or a writer or as a left-wing academic. He had the looks, the charm, and he was from that sort of New York family. 

Zack Polanski’s story is almost the diametric opposite. His forebears came to Britain to escape pogroms in Eastern Europe. They settled in the Northwest and appear to have done pretty much everything possible to fit in and keep their heads down. They assimilated into the local working class, took an English-sounding surname, and over the course of a couple of generations, made the slow journey from the working class to the respectable lower-middle class. Bullied at his Jewish high school — he claims as a result of his homosexuality — and generally chafing at his dreary provincial adolescence, he adopted a more exotic name, and struck out to join the ranks of the beautiful and cosmopolitan people.  The road was not an easy one. 

He was drawn first to the bright lights of Aberystwyth, where he took joint honours in sociology and drama. He then went on to London to pursue a career as an actor, and became involved in “immersive theatre”. I will confess that on reading those words in his Wikipedia page, my mind jumped immediately to the Legz Akimbo theatre troupe in League of Gentlemen, which tours local schools putting on crass, politically correct morality plays. But I suspect the truth is probably closer to the people who jump out at you in the London Dungeon. Over the years, he seems to have done a variety of roles that can best be described as miscellaneous — a fair bit of teaching at arts schools, including the National Centre for Circus Acts, and a stint hosting fundraisers (this led him to imaginatively claim that he had been a spokesman for the British Red Cross). There is also his well-publicised time as a Harley Street hypnotherapist. 

Polanski claims that he was initially politicised whilst performing in something called The Theatre of the Oppressed in his thirties, and that this led him for some reason to join the Liberal Democrats. He clearly appears to have been highly agitated about Brexit. We can stop at this point and say that we basically know the type — the sort of overgrown theatre kid that we’ve all met hanging around in London. Lots of young people dream of the stage of course; only a very small handful make it, while others have family in London and sufficient connections to sustain the illusion of success. 

The majority make the decision to cut their losses and get out of the city where they will never be able to afford to live a tolerable life, and go and become a school drama teacher in the sort of town they came from. And then you have people like Zack Polanski, for whom it would be far too painful to accept defeat and to return to the hometown that they had sworn they had turned their backs on. So, they live this sort of half-life, of cramped flat shares, and minimum wage odd-jobs topping up a series of vaguely dramatic roles sustained by Arts Council funding. 

A kind of 2020s Withnail and I, but with veganism instead of alcoholism

Dan Neidle may have thought he was exposing an embarrassing but ultimately relatively minor financial misdemeanour by a party leader. What he actually revealed was a man in his early forties who had moved from a house share onto an old narrowboat. A kind of 2020s Withnail and I, but with veganism instead of alcoholism. 

As I say, I suspect that most of his core vote will be fine with all of this. If anything, it makes him more real, and more like them — even if for most of them, their early forties are still a long way off. But whatever they say about his skills at book-keeping, the council tax revelations expose Polanski as one of life’s drifters. Perhaps his astonishing explosion into national politics is the big break he’d always been waiting in the wings for — but if so, it would certainly confirm the old aphorism about politics being showbusiness for ugly people (hope for us all, etc). 

Yet for all that the trendy media set in London have been busy building Polanski up as a glamorous Mamdani archetype — the Left’s answer to Farage — it seems more likely the drifter will continue to drift, and he will prove to be just another in a long line of miscellaneous eccentrics leading a miscellaneous party.