It’s been a rough week for the Greens. After multiple allegations of antisemitic statements by Green Party candidates, former leader Caroline Lucas went public with her disquiet yesterday. It didn’t help that the current leader, Zack Polanski, shared a post last week criticizing the way in which police officers subdued the suspect in the Golders Green knife attack. Polanski also finds himself facing accusations that he misleadingly claimed to be a spokesman for the Red Cross, and that he falsely claimed to be a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy.

That this is all coming out in the immediate run-up to this week’s local elections is no coincidence. Indeed, it has all the hallmarks of a concerted campaign. But there’s no point in the Greens crying foul — not when they’ve done so much to supply their attackers with the ammunition. Instead, the real issue is whether the anti-Green campaign will work. New polling from More in Common does show a sharp drop in Polanski’s approval rating, but there is so far scant evidence of a corresponding drop in Green Party support.

There’s an interesting parallel here with Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. When he first became leader, the Conservatives couldn’t believe their luck. They rapidly built up a thick folder of embarrassing statements from his long career as a Left-wing activist and backbench MP, saving up most of this trove for the next general election. Yet when that came in 2017, the anti-Corbyn strategy fell flat. While he was wrong-footed by controversies such as his decision to meet with Hamas representatives, that didn’t stop Labour winning 40% of the vote on polling day.

But what if 2017 was simply too early for the attacks on Corbyn to cut through with the voting public? After all, two and a half years later, at the 2019 general election, Labour crashed to its lowest seat total in 84 years. So, with enough time, should we expect the Greens’ bubble to deflate in a similar fashion?

Perhaps, but only if they insist on making the same mistakes as their Corbynite forerunners. For instance, in 2018 Corbyn went out of his way to crystallize public doubts about him with a response to the Salisbury poisonings which appeared to downplay Kremlin involvement. Polanski doesn’t have to make an unforced error as bad as that one, though his response to the Golders Green stabbings hardly inspires confidence.

Corbyn’s other big mistake was allowing Keir Starmer to dictate Labour’s obstructive approach to Brexit, which persuaded millions of Red Wall voters to back Boris Johnson in 2019. Again, the Greens don’t have to sabotage their own electoral coalition, especially as they only need 20% of the vote for a breakthrough rather than 40%.

There’s another key difference between the Greens today and Labour under Corbyn, which is that their leader isn’t indispensable. When Corbyn resigned after his 2019 defeat, that was the end of Corbynism in the upper echelons of the Labour Party. His designated successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, was easily defeated by Starmer in the ensuing leadership contest. Corbyn himself was suspended and later expelled.

However, the “eco-populism” that defines Polanski’s leadership can carry on without him. As he’s proved, the Greens don’t need a heavyweight intellectual or an impressive statesman as leader — they just need another vibes-based figure with youth appeal and social media reach. And they have one in the winner of the Gorton and Denton by-election, Hannah Spencer. The winning formula that’s worked for Polanski — telling disaffected Left-wing Britons what they want to hear — can work just as well, if not better, for her.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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