Why do people change their names? To seem more glamorous, is the obvious answer. But even actors, who used to do it the most (or more accurately, have it done to them by their studio bosses) have pretty much stopped doing it now. Singers mostly, too. The days of Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Chubby Checker are long gone, although somewhat understandably Peter Gene Hernandez called himself Bruno Mars after being told he should be making ‘Spanish music’ as a teenager. And I guess Elizabeth Grant wouldn’t sound half as sumptuously sexy and sad as Lana Del Ray does.

We don’t expect politicians to change their names, suggesting as it does a kind of fakery. Some might wish they could. Would you trust your vote with Mark Reckless? Chris Pincher’s name turned out to be sadly apt. Ed Balls never stopped spouting rubbish. Lady Garden of the Lib Dems sounds fragrant. And Samantha Niblett recently outed herself as sex-mad.

So why did these brave souls stick with their given names and David Paulden change his to ‘Zack Polanski’? Apparently, he did it at 18 to reclaim his Jewish heritage, his grandparents having anglicised it to avoid anti-Semitism, and chose ‘Zack’ as he didn’t get along with his stepfather, also a David. Still, it’s an unfortunate choice, considering the sex crimes of the director Roman Polanski, and that our humble hero would go on to become the legendary ‘Tit Whisperer’. And as for ‘Zack’ – that’s the choice of a man who mouths ‘Rock star!’ into the bathroom mirror many a morning.

At times, Polanski’s life seems like a political satire about the rise of the man least likely to. ‘Zack’ was a thespian before his political career, but don’t be looking for him on old episodes of The Bill, as he primarily worked as an ‘immersive theatre actor’. His top credit on Wikipedia is ‘a university production of Shopping and Fucking’, so it’s not like he had to tear himself away from the roar of the crowds like, say, Glenda Jackson when she became an MP. He also taught at something called the National Centre for Circus Arts, which explains why he seems to believe that be-clowning oneself is normal.

Then came what we may think of as his ‘Hypno-Tits’ years, the apex of which saw him getting pranked by a Sun journalist who asked him what the chances were of her being inflated to Page 3 dimensions. It’s funny that acting and lying were Polanski’s passions before he went into politics, as to most of the jaded electorate, this is exactly what our Honourable Members do.

His rise in politics has been rapid, further convincing one that he is an operator. Contrasting with the fact that many politicians start planning their careers while still at university, our humble hero wasn’t interested until he reached his 30s (he’s still only 43). Presumably, he finally accepted that working in the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ (which involves meeting people who have allegedly suffered injustice and then playing them on stage, a process which he says politicised him) wasn’t going to win him any gongs. As with the tit-whispering, this should ring alarm bells; what sort of person isn’t interested in politics until their thirties, and then only when their first career choice of showing off for a living fails?

In an interview with Zoe Williams of the Guardian last year, Polanski relaxed in the presence of an obvious acolyte, and the result was a rather amusing interface, somewhat how one imagines Dumbo and his mother relating before the evil circus man separated them. ‘He has a dewy, wide-eyed look’, she reported breathlessly. ‘He means to retake patriotism. “We should love our country. Loving your community is loving your country.”’ As an actor, ‘he still felt that “politics was a dirty thing that didn’t really change anything”’. He describes some of the theatre he was making at this time, with the company that later became Punchdrunk – wild, participatory productions in which the audience is invited to alter the course of events. In one performance, an audience member rugby-tackled one of the actors to prevent a murder. In another, Polanski played a leader stewarding the audience into an environmental crisis, and they had to overthrow him…

The interview is quite something:

‘His experience as an actor has left Polanski with a genuinely unusual style of political communication – he doesn’t equivocate, his manner is quite urgent and arresting, he never drones, but nor is he embarrassed to say something very simple, even if it sounds schlocky, or boastful. He tells me that the video he launched announcing his leadership bid has been seen 1.4million times. “It’s had hundreds, maybe even thousands of people responding, and I would say 99 per cent of those things are, ‘Is this what hope feels like?”’

Is this what hope feels like? I don’t believe that Barack Obama at his most rhetorical would have chanced that one, and he had all the equipment. It’s clear that Polanski is very high on his own supply. It’s pure self-belief that drove him so quickly up the greasy pole; joining the Lib-Dems in 2015 and standing unsuccessfully for local council elections in London; heckling Corbyn at a rally in 2016 and tweeting that as ‘a pro-European Jew’ he had ‘two reasons I couldn’t vote for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn’; and joining the Green Party in 2017. Since then, it’s been a jolly round of musical chairs, with that weird three-legged-race thing the Greens do with the ‘sharing’ leadership – Lucas and Bartley, 2016-2018; Bartley and Berry, 2018-2021; Denyer and Ramsay, 2021-2025 – until Polanski took over last year.

No sharing for him. Only the solo spotlight will suit this cracked actor. To be fair, he’s struck a chord with a lot of disillusioned Labour voters. Membership of the Greens is the highest ever, having grown by 55 per cent since Polanski’s election as leader. They’ve got more councillors than ever before – 859 seats across 181 councils – and now some polls have put them head-to-head with Reform UK at the forthcoming local elections.

Didn’t he do well? Nevertheless, he gives me the creeps. Polanski has cultivated a gentle, come-to-me-my-flock look — but when he is questioned persistently, a look of imperious confusion followed by a flash of real contempt and anger comes through. Being grilled by Laura Kuenssberg in early May, he came across as testy and slippery. When he talks with his hands, which he does often, one is irretrievably reminded of his breast-building days, and how perhaps he must have described similar circles in the air. It distracts me from what he’s saying – which is just as well, as he really does spout bunkum.

We’ve all heard his blather about the allegedly heavy-handed police in Golders Green, his ridiculous accusations of Israeli ‘genocide’ and, of course, his ludicrous championing of transvestites’ fetishes over women’s rights. But due to the monumental incompetence and unpopularity of Labour, the Greens look set to clean up at the local elections.

Hopefully, they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Every party can be said to have different factions, but none as contradictory as the middle-class anything-goes brigade on one wing of the Greens and the extremely reactionary Muslim wing on the other. We all know the one issue that unites them.

If the safety of our heartbreakingly loyal and small Jewish community wasn’t so threatened, it would be fun to see what transpires from this loveless liaison. The Greens were always in competition with the Lib Dems for the floating crank vote, somehow managing to come across as both broad-minded and authoritarian – Legz Akimbo join the Stasi – and this time they look liable to outdo themselves, picking up a sizeable part of the solid crank Labour vote, too. Polanski can change his name all he wants – but the whiff of the snake-oil salesman will always be strong with this one.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.

On Thursday, England goes to the polls for the local elections. In theory, this is the most prosaic form of democracy we have. A chance to vote on the administration of bin collections, pothole fixing, planning applications and council taxes.

Councils are not meant to function as a stage for sectarian grievance or foreign-policy cosplay. Yet, across a growing number of English councils, that is what local politics is becoming. Over the past month, I have spent many hours analysing candidates whose political pitch revolves not around their ward, but around Gaza and the politics of the wider Muslim world.

Some of these ‘pro-Palestine’ candidates should be nowhere near public office. Amu Gib, who is standing as an independent in Islington, was allegedly part of the ton last year, in which Palestine Action activists are alleged to have caused £7million damage. Shahid Butt, standing as an independent candidate in Birmingham, was convicted in Yemen in 1999 over a plot to bomb the British consulate, an Anglican church and a hotel. An independent in Bradford, Sharat Hussain, has described Jews as ‘dirty paedo foreskin-eating pigs’.

It is hardly unreasonable to ask what this says about the calibre of people now being drawn into politics by their loathing of Israel. Local-election campaigns are becoming a vehicle for imported rage and council chambers are imagined not as a place to govern a borough, but as a place to perform allegiance to a foreign cause.

My recent report for the Henry Jackson Society sought to measure this phenomenon rather than merely gawp at it. It used ‘Muslim sectarian’ not as a label for Muslim candidates, but as an operational category for candidates whose public political appeal is repeatedly structured around Muslim communal grievance, Muslim representation or transnational Muslim causes.

On that definition, 66 out of 1,902 wards in the 2024 English local elections elected at least one Muslim sectarian candidate. The strongest predictors of a ward electing at least one Muslim sectarian candidate are higher voter turnout, a larger proportion of voters under 30, and a larger proportion of Muslims.

A one-point increase in voter turnout within a ward is associated with a 14 per cent increase in the chance of electing at least one Muslim sectarian candidate. A one-point increase in the under-30 share is associated with an 11 per cent higher chance, and a one-point jump in the ward’s Muslim proportion is associated with a seven per cent higher chance. These are not causal claims. They do not mean Muslim voters or young voters are inherently sectarian. They mean that where the numbers, demographics and mobilisation structures are in place, this sectarian politics can break through.

This is bad for everyone, especially Muslims. It reduces Muslim voters to a grievance constituency. It rewards candidates who inflame rather than govern.

Local democracy depends on shared civic life. A councillor is not elected to represent only those who share his religion, ethnicity, foreign-policy obsessions or communal grievances. He represents the whole ward: the people who voted for him, the people who voted against him and the people who did not vote at all. This basic civic ideal is being corroded by sectarian politics. We need to confront this threat before we lose this ideal entirely.

Emma Schubart is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

I guess it’s only fitting that Zack Polanski has been accused of telling porkies about his career. The Green Party leader who thinks men can identify as women apparently spent years identifying as a British Red Cross spokesman and a fully licensed hypnotherapist.

Polanski is a figure by turns despicable and risible. The latest revelations fall into the latter bucket. According to The Times, he passed off his efforts hosting fundraisers for the Red Cross as a formal spokesman role with the charity, even bragging on his website in 2020 that he was ‘really proud of the work we do’ (my emphasis).

As for the hypnotherapy thing (Polanski claimed to be a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy), this has only served to remind people of the creepiest and most embarrassing chapter of his professional life: when he had a practice on Harley Street and claimed he could enlarge women’s breasts with his skills. I for one am shocked that a bloke who claimed he could do hypno boob jobs might not have been on the up and up.

Natch, Polanski has accused the right-wing media of having a vendetta against him. But he apparently can’t stop giving them ammunition. And I don’t just mean by massaging his CV. Indeed, I hope his colourful past doesn’t steal focus from the shameful things he is saying and doing in the present – particularly on anti-Semitism.

After two Jews were knifed in Golders Green, the heart of Jewish north London, last week, you might have expected the self-appointed leader of the ‘anti-racist’ left to have something strong to say about it. Instead, we got a perfunctory tweet from Polanski, which interestingly omitted the words ‘Jews’ and ‘anti-Semitism’.

If only he had stopped there. Instead, Our Zack proceeded to share posts criticising the police for how they subdued the suspect – they gave the scumbag a few stern kicks to the head, fearing he might be wearing a suicide vest, as they wrestled to get the knife off him.

After a rebuke from Metropolitan Police chief Sir Mark Rowley, Polanski apologised. Kinda. When pressed over the weekend, he conceded only that – while he remained concerned, even ‘traumatised’, by the treatment of the suspect – he should have taken it up with the cops in private, rather than on social media.

Personally, if I was looking for a word to describe how I felt watching that arrest footage, ‘traumatised’ is not the one I’d land on. (That kicking might have been the first time I’ve ever envied a copper.) But trying to turn an attack on Jews into a conversation about police brutality is only the latest, despicable distraction tactic to be used by ‘progressives’ whenever Jew hatred rears its head.

The reflex is always to deflect, to change the subject. Polanski even made a point on Sky News on Sunday of saying that the suspect, Essa Suleiman, also allegedly stabbed a Muslim man (a friend of his) in south-east London before going on his rampage in Golders Green.

What is the point of this comment, if not to dilute the distinctly anti-Jewish nature of the (alleged) attack in Golders Green? Only Polanski can know. But it looks and feels like Zack – like many on the ‘pro-Palestine’ left – struggles to compute the distinct threat to Jewish life and so feels compelled to diminish and generalise it.

You’ll have noticed this tic. After a little throat-clearing about how awful anti-Semitism is, leftists will suddenly pivot to Islamophobia, or racism in general – issues on which they’re much more comfortable. Because staying on topic would provoke awkward questions about their own role in fomenting the Jew hatred in our midst.

On this score, the Green Party is now the prime offender, picking up where Corbyn’s Labour left off. There have been a slew of stories of late about Green local-election candidates and activists spewing pond-scum anti-Semitism. And no, we’re not talking about ‘criticisms of Israel’, as some remain determined to dress it up. We’re talking about calling Jews ‘cockroaches’, dismissing October 7 as a ‘false flag’, and openly praising the rapists and butchers of Hamas. At least 25 Greens have a history of anti-Semitism. Two were arrested last week on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.

And what is the Green Party doing about it? Only a handful of these candidates have been sanctioned. Mark Adderley, standing in Crystal Palace in south London, was suspended after his rants about ‘the chosen people’ were uncovered, but his local party is still urging people to vote for him. Co-deputy leader Mothin Ali has even been encouraging some ousted candidates to take legal action against his own party.

Polanski says these are just a few bad apples, that there are anti-Semites in every party, that the establishment is just trying to take him down, etc. Presumably the media are choosing only to report on the Greens’ Jew haters. Perhaps he thinks Bibi Netanyahu put them up to it.

But this won’t wash. The Greens have succumbed to anti-Israel hysteria, which is the seedbed of the new anti-Semitism. All the ancient anti-Semitic tropes about Jews – as baby killers, puppeteers, sneaky subversives – have just been dolled up as ‘anti-Zionism’. And as the Greens’ candidates list attests, the Jew haters aren’t even bothering to make the distinction anymore.

Polanski, himself a Jewish man, can hardly be accused of being an anti-Semite. But he has become a prisoner of his own low-wattage worldview. The anti-Israel zealot cannot compute the new anti-Semitism, because doing so would require admitting he is part of the problem.

Plus, it would require admitting that much of this Jew hatred is coming from Muslim communities, which the Greens are desperate to court in our more ‘diverse’ cities. Political calculation meets moral cowardice.