The Greens smell blood in Holborn
Keir Starmer is no longer an MP. His resignation is formal. The voters of Holborn and St Pancras will choose his successor on 8 October. For the Labour Party, this is a contest it cannot afford to lose, a by-election to secure the seat its former leader held for more than a decade. It should have been a simple defence. A routine operation. For the Green Party, this was supposed to be the moment. They smell a victory.
Party strategists believe they are the main challengers to Labour in this part of north London, seeing a path to a historic win that would send a shockwave through Westminster. This was their chance. Their golden opportunity. A high profile by-election on favourable ground.
But just as the race begins, the Greens are fighting themselves.
An internal battle has broken out. It is public. It is bitter. Zack Polanski, the party’s deputy leader and a London Assembly member, was the presumed candidate, a professional politician with a national profile seen by the leadership as the ideal man for the job. His selection seemed a formality. It was not. Hamza Chowdhury, a Green representative on Camden council, has launched a rival bid for the nomination, directly challenging the party’s favoured son. Chowdhury’s intervention is an ambush, an explicit attack on the idea of parachuting in a well known figure. The seat does not need, he says, ‘a politician you’ll only see on a leaflet’. The Green campaign has been derailed before it has even started, consumed by a messy internal war between a national figure and a local councillor that threatens to hand the entire contest straight back to Labour.
Polanski is a professional politician
Zack Polanski is a professional politician. He is the Green Party’s deputy leader. He sits on the London Assembly. These are not the credentials of a grassroots activist or a parish councillor, but of a man who has built a career inside the machine of modern politics. To the national Green Party leadership, he is the ideal candidate for a high stakes by-election, the living embodiment of their long and sometimes painful journey towards electoral professionalism. He is their man for Westminster. He is the future they want.
The Greens have spent years trying to move on from their old reputation. They want to forget the image of sandals, amateurism and chaotic local meetings. Polanski is the antidote. He is polished, media trained and comfortable in a television studio, a politician who can credibly challenge a Labour frontbencher on the 10 o’clock news without looking out of his depth. He is what the party’s strategists believe a Green MP should be. This is not about winning a protest vote. This is about winning a seat. The party’s central office sees the Holborn and St Pancras contest as a unique opportunity to prove they are a serious force, and Polanski, a known quantity with a London wide profile, is the lowest risk, highest reward candidate they have.
His selection would be a signal, a clear statement from the Green Party’s leadership that they are no longer content with being a party of protest but are now ruthlessly focused on acquiring parliamentary power. A by-election is a brutal sprint. It requires a candidate who can hit the ground running, someone who can command media attention and fundraising from the very first day of the campaign. There is no time to build a local profile from nothing. Polanski has one already. As a London Assembly member, he has a mandate from the capital and a public platform. As deputy leader, he has the ear of the national party. He is the candidate you choose when you are serious about winning.
This is the calculation made in party headquarters. It is a cold, rational piece of political management. The leadership sees a path to victory and believes Polanski is the surest way to navigate it. He is their asset, a political operator to be deployed for maximum effect in a target seat. His very existence as a full time, salaried politician represents the party’s arrival as a mainstream player. The problem, for them, is that the very qualities that make him the perfect professional candidate, his national standing and his role as a figurehead for a more centralised party, are precisely what make him an object of suspicion for some of the activists on the ground. The party’s slick new machine is already grinding against its old parts.
Chowdhury runs on localism
Then there is Hamza Chowdhury. He is the opposition. He is a Green councillor on Camden council, the very borough that contains the seat in question. His challenge to the party’s deputy leader is not subtle. It is a direct and public confrontation, an act of defiance against the central party’s apparent choice, and it is rooted entirely in an appeal to localism. Chowdhury is betting that for the activists who will actually select the candidate, being from a place matters more than being famous across the country. He thinks they want one of their own. His intervention throws the party’s carefully laid plans into chaos.
His argument is simple. It is also brutal. Chowdhury has explicitly stated that the constituency does not need ‘a politician you’ll only see on a leaflet’. The line is a masterpiece of political poison. It is aimed squarely at Zack Polanski. It seeks to define the deputy leader not as a seasoned operator but as an opportunistic outsider, a political tourist dropping in for a high profile contest before disappearing again. It is a potent accusation, one designed to resonate with voters and party members alike who are tired of career politicians treating their home as just another square on a game board. The leaflet jibe reduces Polanski’s national profile from an asset to a liability, turning his media appearances and London wide role into evidence of his distance from the very real, very local concerns of people in Holborn and St Pancras. It frames the contest as one of authenticity versus ambition.
This is not a one man protest. That would be easy to dismiss. Chowdhury claims he has the backing of most of his fellow Green councillors in Camden. This is significant. It transforms a personal challenge into a factional split within the local party machinery. It suggests that the unease with a parachuted candidate is not just a fringe opinion but a mainstream view among the very people who run the Green Party’s ground operation in the area. These are the people who organise canvassing sessions, deliver leaflets, and knock on doors. Their support gives Chowdhury’s bid immediate credibility and organisational heft. It means the selection meeting will not be a coronation for Polanski. It will be a fight.
Chowdhury is therefore presenting local members with a clear philosophical choice. His candidacy is an embodiment of the Green Party’s older, decentralised tradition, where power resides with the grassroots and candidates are expected to have deep roots in the communities they seek to represent. He is the local champion. He argues for a politics that is built from the ground up, not imposed from the top down. He is forcing a debate that the leadership did not want, a referendum on what kind of party the Greens in North London truly wish to be. The choice is between the professional and the provincial. Between the leaflet and the local.
This is not just about one seat
This fight is not about Holborn. Not really. It is about the soul of the Green Party itself. The spat between Hamza Chowdhury and Zack Polanski exposes the fundamental contradiction at the heart of an organisation experiencing rapid, sometimes painful, growth. The Greens are no longer a simple party of protest. They are a party of power, or at least the dedicated pursuit of it. They hold council seats. They have a voice in the London Assembly. They want more MPs. This ambition requires a different kind of politics, one that is more centralised, more disciplined, and more professional than the decentralised, activist network from which the party originally grew. The party is straining. You can see it in Camden.
The old guard, and those who share their philosophy, believe political legitimacy comes from the ground up. Power should be diffuse. It should be local. This is the tradition Chowdhury represents, a politics where the councillor who lives on your street matters more than the deputy leader you see on the television news. For these members, parachuting in a well known figure like Polanski feels like a betrayal of core principles, a cynical piece of careerism that apes the worst habits of the old establishment parties they claim to despise. They did not join a political movement to be told who their candidate would be by a central committee with an eye on the national picture. They joined to decide for themselves.
The modernisers see it differently. They see an opportunity. A big one. For them, winning is the point. They argue that principles without power are just words spoken into the wind, and that to effect real change on the climate crisis or social justice, the Greens must win seats in Westminster. Winning requires the best possible candidate, a recognised name with media savvy and a proven ability to cut through the noise of a national campaign, which is precisely what Zack Polanski offers. This is a simple calculation. A brutal one. A by-election in a high profile London constituency previously held by the Leader of the Opposition is not a local council scrap, it is a national event demanding a national figure. To them, Chowdhury's challenge is parochialism, a self indulgent distraction that risks squandering a golden chance to send another Green MP to the House of Commons.
So the battle lines are drawn. Not just in a Camden selection meeting, but across the entire Green Party. This is the party’s central dilemma. Its growing pain. Every new council seat won, every percentage point gained in the polls, every step towards becoming a serious electoral force sharpens the tension between these two competing visions of what the Green Party is for. Is it a decentralised movement of activists, or is it a professional party organised to win parliamentary power? For years, it could be both. Now, perhaps, it cannot. The choice presented to Green members in Holborn and St Pancras is a choice that will likely be repeated in constituencies across the country as the party continues to grow. What happens on 8 October depends on it. The party's future might too.
Labour watches and waits
And in Labour's headquarters. Relief. A quiet, knowing satisfaction. They watch. They wait. The party absolutely must hold Holborn and St Pancras, a task made considerably harder by the fact that the seat's previous occupant, Keir Starmer, left a significant personal vote that cannot be automatically transferred to his successor. Losing the former leader's own constituency in a by-election would be a political humiliation of the highest order, a story that would dominate broadcasts and front pages for a week, providing endless ammunition for their opponents. They were preparing for a brutal fight. A very difficult one. The Green Party, their main challenger, was expected to unite behind a polished, professional media performer in Zack Polanski.
Now this. A gift. An unseemly public squabble is a beautiful thing to the opposition. The Green Party's messy selection process has handed Labour campaign strategists their opening attack lines on a silver platter, free of charge. Chaos is a bad look. Division is worse. Labour's messaging now writes itself, a simple and effective contrast between a party focused on the constituency and a party focused on itself. Expect leaflets. Lots of them. They will portray the Green Party as a chaotic shambles, more interested in internal power struggles and procedural wrangles than in the lives of people in Camden Town or King's Cross. A locally rooted Labour candidate, whoever that turns out to be, will be presented as the sensible, stable choice, a representative ready to work from day one while the Greens are still arguing over who gets to be on the ballot paper.
This fight allows Labour to reframe the entire contest. It is no longer a simple choice between Labour and the Greens. It is now a choice between a united party and a divided one. This blunts the Green's primary weapon, which is their claim to represent a fresh, different kind of politics. It turns out their politics looks quite familiar. Just another group of politicians fighting each other for a job. The entire spectacle allows Labour to paint their rivals not as earnest activists, but as amateurs unable to manage their own affairs, let alone a constituency of nearly eighty thousand voters. For a party that prides itself on professionalism, the irony will not be lost. Labour will be quite happy to point it out. Over and over again, until 8 October.
The selection meeting will be tense
It all comes down to a meeting. A single room. The local Green Party branch must now choose its candidate for the by-election on 8 October, and Hamza Chowdhury’s intervention has made the outcome entirely uncertain. It forces a choice. The result will determine not just who faces the voters, but which vision of the Green Party has more sway in North London. This is a contest between two ideas. One is the professionalised, media savvy central party operation embodied by its deputy leader, Zack Polanski. The other is the street level, community focused activism of a local councillor.
Whoever wins gets a real prize. A chance. The Greens believe they can take this seat from Labour, and the victor of the selection becomes the immediate favourite to do so. The loser’s faction will be left bruised. A public challenge to a national deputy leader is a very serious business. Should Polanski lose the nomination it will represent a stinging rebuke to the party’s leadership and its strategy for winning seats in Westminster. If Chowdhury loses, his position as the voice of localism will be severely weakened after making such a pointed, personal attack on his party’s national figure. Someone has to lose.
The selection meeting will be tense. It will be uncomfortable. This is a fight about the party’s future direction, played out in a single constituency selection. For the members who will actually cast the votes, it is a difficult decision between a candidate with a national profile and a candidate with deep local roots. The vote itself, whenever it happens, will be a moment of high political drama confined to a church hall or community centre but with implications that will ripple out across the entire national party structure. One man will go on to fight the by-election. The other will have to explain what happens next.
Sources. Guardian Politics: Polanski faces Green rival in his pursuit of Keir Starmer’s old seat. Independent UK: Zack Polanski faces challenge from Green councillor in bid to contest Starmer’s Westminster seat.
Analysis. Drafted with AI assistance from the sources listed above and reviewed by an editor before publication. Jnews links to the organisations it writes about.
