Adrian Ramsay’s success could be the reason for his downfall

Has the Green Party’s success under Adrian Ramsay’s leadership opened the door to Zack Polanski’s more ambitious leadership bid?

I first met Adrian Ramsay 14 years ago during my first year of university. He had stepped down as a councillor earlier that year, but remained one of the central figures of Norwich Green Party. What was abundantly clear from the first interactions I had with him was that he was a rare individual in the Green Party at the time; a keen strategist with an unrelenting focus on transforming the party into an organisation that was professional, that could win elections, and – ultimately – that could secure political power in order to implement its vision for society.

During his time in Norwich, Ramsay had been pivotal in getting the first councillors elected in the city and equally pivotal in building the local party to the point that it had for a time the largest group of Greens on any council in the country. In the 2010 general election, he’d received the second highest vote share of any Green candidate anywhere in the country when he picked up 14.9% of the vote in Norwich South. It’s no wonder then that, in 2008, Caroline Lucas – another of those rare figures in Green politics of this era – had hand-picked Ramsay to be her deputy when she stood to be the party’s first ever leader.

Why is all this relevant today? It’s relevant because voting opens tomorrow (1 August) in the Green Party’s leadership election. Ramsay – who has been co-leader of the party since 2021 alongside Carla Denyer – is standing for re-election, this time with his fellow Green MP Ellie Chowns. His time as deputy leader and his time building Norwich Green Party from the ground up haven’t been a major discussion point in the campaign. But his time as co-leader during which the party quadrupled its parliamentary representation has been.

Indeed, both Ramsay and Chowns have talked extensively in interviews about how the strategy adopted by the party under his leadership has delivered this breakthrough. That strategy centred on an intensive focusing of resources in the party’s four target constituencies in order to maximise the likelihood of returning a group of MPs to parliament. It delivered in all four of these seats in the 2024 general election.

The leadership election this year is about many things. But fundamentally it is about how to build on this success. Central to that is a question of ambition, and the believability of that ambition.

Now, it would be unfair to suggest that Ramsay and Chowns aren’t being ambitious in their claims about the Greens’ electoral prospects if they are to win the leadership contest. When I interviewed them, they wouldn’t put a number on how many seats they thought the Green Party could win at the next general election but did indicate they were looking at ‘double digits’. That would obviously be historically unprecedented, not just for the Green Party, but for any party in England that isn’t Labour, the Tories or the Liberal Democrats.

But their challenger – the Greens’ current deputy leader and London Assembly member Zack Polanski – undoubtedly has bigger ambitions. He says the Greens could win as many as 40 seats next time the country votes to elect a new parliament, and has accused Chowns and Ramsay of offering “timid incremental change”. His pitch for delivering this is to combine the effective ground campaign that the Greens have become known for with a much bolder attempt to cut through in both traditional and social media.

A few years ago, such a proposition would have been met with ridicule. For four general elections in a row, the Greens had only won one seat in parliament, and it remained unclear whether the party could get anyone elected to the House of Commons who wasn’t called Caroline Lucas and who wasn’t standing in Brighton Pavilion. Even the most hopeless optimists in the party wouldn’t have believed that there was any realistic chance of a breakthrough on the scale Polanski is now suggesting.

Indeed, when Ramsay stood for the co-leadership four years ago, he and Denyer were simply saying that they would win a second MP. It hardly sounded ground breaking, but it was nonetheless an ambition that felt both incredibly challenging to deliver and yet was theoretically imaginable in the minds of the party’s membership.

The 2024 general election delivered not just that second MP, but two more on top. This certainly wasn’t inevitable. There is a world in which the Greens ran a very different campaign – more ambitious, more diffuse – and came second in a lot of places, but first nowhere. As such, Ramsay’s leadership pitch and the strategy advocated by him and others in advance of the election was likely crucial to achieving this seismic result. In many ways, his offer to the membership in 2021 – that he and Denyer wouldn’t be particularly exciting, but they would get the job done through careful targeting and a laser-focussed strategic operation – has been vindicated.

But there is a major irony in this. That vindication may just prove Ramsay’s undoing. The reason Polanski’s pitch is believable is because of Ramsay’s success. The reason people believe the party is ready to move beyond slow and steady progress is because under their leadership, Ramsay and Denyer delivered it to a degree the party had never before achieved.

As a result, many members seem to be much more willing to take a gamble. They’ve had a taste of success and they want more. They think that the party’s strategy has been the right one, and has been integral to securing the gains attained thus far. But they also think there is a political moment which can be seized by the right level of ambition and, crucially, the right leadership.

This analysis has obviously been heavily criticised by those in Ramsay and Chowns’ camp. They say that Polanski’s proposed strategy is unrealistic and threatens to undo the gains the party has made under its current approach. Likewise, they argue that his suggestion that the Greens should adopt an ‘eco-populist’ approach to its political campaigns risks alienating parts of the electorate it needs to win over in order to secure parliamentary seats across the country.

Will caution or ambition prevail? Members will begin voting tomorrow (1 August), and will have until the end of the month to make up their mind. In lieu of any formal polling of the membership, it is very difficult to get a clear understanding of which way the election will go and the party’s appetite for risk.

Despite this, the broad consensus is that Polanski appears likely to win. His campaign has generated far more interest from the party’s ‘online’ membership. He appears to have mobilised a significant number of people to join the party specifically to vote for him. And, possibly crucially, he has been endorsed by many, many people who supported Ramsay when he was standing with Denyer last time around.

If that consensus proves correct, there will no doubt be many factors underpinning why he won. His charisma is often commented on. His willingness to utilise more populist, radical, left wing rhetoric is popular with the membership. His ability to bring new people into the party seems to have been genuine.

All of these and more may contribute in determining that outcome, if it is to be borne out in reality. But a big part of it will likely be that the Green Party’s unprecedented success delivered by one of his predecessors and one of his competitors has provided the springboard from which his campaign could launch from.

Chris Jarvis is head of strategy and development at Left Foot Forward