Miles Thorpe: From Former Stationery Entrepreneur To Zack Polanski's Morgan McSweeney
5 min read
As Labour now knows to its cost, the Greens have sharpened their campaigning prowess considerably in recent years. Tom Scotson profiles Miles Thorpe – the man getting much of the credit for a series of wins
Bill Clinton had ‘ragin’ Cajun’ James Carville, Boris Johnson’s election Svengali was Lynton Crosby and Keir Starmer’s swift path to No 10 is widely credited to Morgan McSweeney. Zack Polanski has a 31-year-old former stationery entrepreneur.
Miles Thorpe, from south London, has knocked around Green Party circles for years but is now developing a reputation that might one day rival the other great campaigners. He is said to have masterminded the impressive victories of Carla Denyer in Bristol Central at the 2024 general election and the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, where Green candidate Hannah Spencer won by more than 4,000 votes.
“He is very focused, good at prioritising, great at recruiting and motivating volunteers and creating a fun team spirit,” says one Green Party source who knows Thorpe well.
Thorpe, who left school at 18, founded Skyline Office Supplies, a stationery business, after working in sales for a brief period. He then left the business world, having not found the work to be very meaningful, and off the back of that, moved to Brighton. The seaside city – where the Greens won their first parliamentary seat in 2015 – was where Thorpe set up Earners, a social enterprise focused on getting people from underrepresented backgrounds into good careers.
It was not until he became involved in the city’s oldest homeless charity that he became political and interested in progressive politics. YMCA Brighton, which works with 400 people each year who are homeless or at risk, opened Thorpe’s eyes to the level of deprivation in the UK as he saw first-hand what happens when the state does not meet people’s needs.
Thorpe door-knocked for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in the 2019 election but became a member of the Greens in 2021, after the pandemic and the election of Denyer and Adrian Ramsay as co-leaders. He had wrestled with the question of whether to stay in a larger party less aligned to his values, or switch to a smaller one that could move the two legacy parties by winning council and parliamentary seats against the odds.
He became heavily involved in political campaigning after identifying Bristol Central as a unique seat where the Greens had a chance of winning. For three years, he lived from Monday to Friday in Bristol, building the Greens’ presence organically and working on how they could unseat Thangam Debbonaire, then a shadow cabinet member.
During both elections, Bristol Central and Gorton and Denton, he would open the campaign office around 7am and leave party headquarters at 10pm. With no free time and eating on the move, allies say he had an uncanny ability to galvanise activists. Thorpe credits much of his success to his business background, which made him responsible for juggling data, finances and people’s egos.
He backed Polanski in the leadership race last year, giving an insight into his views in the process. “If we’re not just here to win seats but we’re here to change a country, then we can’t do that quietly,” he wrote on an internal Green Party site.
If we’re here to change a country, we can’t do that quietly
“I hear the concern – ‘We can’t spook the horses.’ The idea that, essentially, we can appeal to a wider range of voters by being ambiguous about our identity. But that has its limits. The limit being: it only works while you’re small enough for people not to notice.
“The truth is: there is space for us. As we are. A space that people are crying out for us to occupy. It’s time to step into that – and show that with the right message, the right messenger and the right policies, people will vote for us. Not in spite of who we are – but because of it.
“In my view, this election isn’t a choice between media cut-through and ground campaigning. It’s about understanding that in modern politics, you need both.”
He had the chance to implement that combination at the Gorton and Denton by-election. Steve Jackson, who worked as part of the Green Party's by-election team in Gorton and Denton, tells The House: “He operates on a high-trust model. If you are issuing a quote from the press side, he may look at it on the first couple of days, but after that, once he trusts you, he lets you crack on. He’s not a micromanager in any way.
“Miles was always on top of the detail, incredibly well-organised. I don’t think I ever saw him with a notepad, but he was constantly on his phone. If you rang him, he would always pick up, which is impressive considering during the campaign he must’ve been part of hundreds of group chats and receiving hundreds of queries each day.”
His key tip to activists during both elections was reminding them not to think too much about the result, which he believes can negatively affect people’s mindsets.
There is good news for Labour’s Andy Burnham, however: Thorpe is sitting out Makerfield. He has opted for a campervan holiday in Oslo, having travelled across Scandinavia to meet with Norwegian Greens and Swedish Greens.
