Zack Polanski: snake-oil salesman – spiked

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.