Inside Zack Polanski's Comms Strategy
9 min read
The Green Party has doubled its membership since Zack Polanski became leader. Sophie Church explores how his training in the ‘Gonsalves method’ of acting is benefiting the party
After just two months as Green Party leader, Zack Polanski has transformed the party’s electoral prospects. Since his victory, the Greens have doubled their membership, and 40,000 under-30s have joined the youth wing. Some recent polls record a higher share for the party than the Conservatives.
Polanski’s allies credit a natural charisma, but The House can reveal that the Green Party leader is being coached in the ‘Gonsalves method’ of acting, which focuses on building ‘authentic connection’.
Developed by Aileen Gonsalves, a theatre practitioner, director, actor, playwright and author, the Gonsalves method focuses on forging bonds between actors, directors and audience members through “the art of charismatic persuasion”. She formulated her approach after observing Dame Judi Dench (who “does this authentic present connection instinctively”), Sir Simon Russell Beale and Vanessa Redgrave while directing at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
“The Gonsalves method is for when people are talking, to help you get your message across,” she explains. “It roots itself in this idea that you see the other person clearly, and you hear them clearly.”
Polanski, a former actor himself, met Gonsalves at the ArtsEd drama school in Chiswick, where he worked as a college counsellor, and she as head of the masters in acting course. They soon became friends.
“He recognised something in me about this authentic acting approach,” she recalls. “I recognised something in him about being incredibly authentic when he talked to people. When he came and talked to anyone, I was like, ‘Wow, who are you? Why are you so straightforward?’”
When Polanski entered politics, Gonsalves offered to assist him in his comms. She has been coaching the leader, and the party, ever since.
“I’m from a generation where we went through spin and Alastair Campbell,” she says. “We feel it immediately when we’re being lied to now. That’s why politicians can’t get round us anymore, because we feel it. We feel sick, our teeth hurt, and we disengage.”
Polanski’s style of communication has been compared to New York’s recently elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who uses pithy videos to promote his socialist vision for the city.
Polanski’s campaign team was in touch with Mamdani’s during the Green Party’s leadership election, The House understands. The teams are now speaking “even more”, says Gonsalves.
“Now is the time really to keep talking,” she says. “They’re extremely successful. They’ve proven themselves to be extraordinary in New York. So, of course, we want to know – and they’re very open to share – what’s going on.”
This authentic way of communicating is paying dividends. Polanski’s social media inboxes are filling up with messages from actors, musicians and TV stars asking to collaborate.
The 43-year-old leader is fielding the large majority of messages himself, grabbing his phone to send messages in between meetings or while travelling. Polanski’s team are slowly prising his phone from his grip, asking him to divert messages to the press office instead.
“If somebody’s like, ‘I’ve just joined the Green Party’. He won’t just see that, he’ll then quickly respond, ‘you’re welcome’, or say, ‘we’re lucky to have you’,” says a Green Party official. “He genuinely loves it. This is what maybe sets him apart from other politicians.”
Where Keir Starmer’s government has been criticised for its lack of clear message, Polanski is crafting a clear story for the Greens, his colleagues say. When he eventually appeared on the Laura Kuenssberg show (the BBC cancelled his original slot in the wake of the Manchester synagogue attacks), 10,000 new members joined.
“How people consume politics is about heroes and villains,” says a Green staffer. “But for some people, the BBC is a villain, and Zack is a hero at the moment. The juxtaposition of the hero and the villain on the Laura Kuenssberg show is then what drives that emotive response.”
Whether nature or nurture, or both, Polanski’s colleagues are taking tips from the Green leader’s comms skills. “I’m learning from him,” says the official. “I’m sure it’s his acting background. He comes across as genuine.”
“He couldn’t get the coverage that he wanted, so he created his own media sphere,” they add, pointing to Polanski’s Bold Politics podcast. “It’s something that he’s picked up along the way. There is a similarity with Farage. Farage is huge on YouTube – and does his own YouTube videos. But Zack’s a natural storyteller.”
the party has recognised that media – particularly social media and comms more generally – is just a critical part of the strategy that we need
The Green Party’s outreach has become more proactive in turn. “When I came in, the Green Party was very reactive,” says the official. “If we could get a comment in a news feed on The Guardian or a comment on the BBC, it’d be a day’s work. That’d be great. But the pace has changed – you can imagine going from that to trying for Zack to be on absolutely everything.”
“I would look at how crap stuff used to be,” says Steve Jackson, co-chair of Greens Organise, a campaign group founded, in part, to improve the party’s comms. “It’s not necessarily all incredible, professional, movie-quality stuff, but the party has recognised that media – particularly social media and comms more generally – is just a critical part of the strategy that we need.”
With Polanski continuing to attract new members, Green Party CEO Harriet Lamb says it is “much too early to divert people’s attention away” from their new leader.
But the Green Party is conscious of pushing its youth wing into the spotlight. Dylan Law, the 19-year-old Green candidate for Hackney deputy mayor, and Young Greens co-chairs Callum Clafferty and Ciara Alleyne are mentioned as particularly strong media performers.
Having amassed £4m in membership fees since Polanski became leader, the team is also looking to expand. The Greens currently have small, shared offices between Kennington and Vauxhall, though most people work remotely. The press officers – two full-time and four part-time – work from Stroud, Liverpool, Exeter and London. The party is now rapidly recruiting to fill temporary gaps while keeping an eye on longer-term hires.
Employing Anjula Singh as press manager – who advised Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition and worked at the BBC previously – was considered a boon for the party. Singh has been accompanying Polanski on all major interviews since he became leader.
The Green staffer says they have been “completely blown away” by the quality of applicants. The party has now employed a social media professional who previously worked for the Bundesliga, the national German football league.
While the Greens are not currently working with PR agencies, they have received a raft of messages from freelance videographers wanting to work together. Lamb says the last person who got in touch with her to offer help – on the day we speak – was Bafta award-winning: “People see what’s happening, and they want to be part of it.”
The Greens are riding a wave of Polanski’s making. However, the leader’s relentless social media focus is causing tension with the party’s old guard.
“If we’re doing this, more storytelling, perhaps a little bit punchier, perhaps a little bit more in people’s faces, bolder [approach], you’re probably not spending as much time on the detail,” says Jackson. “It’s definitely something that we keep an eye on.”
Senior party figures, as well as lay members on internal chat forums, have disagreed with the party’s comms approach under Polanski. “I have seen people who are perhaps in the cohort of experts wanting things to be framed a little bit differently,” Jackson reveals.
A source close to the parliamentary party adds that a non-MP running to be leader caused jangled nerves during the election. “Some people were like, ‘Is it going to feel weird having a leader who’s not an MP? Is it going to feel like a disjunction?’ Actually, now that Zack’s settled in, it feels like quite a natural thing for the MPs to be doing the legwork in Parliament.”
Still, there is work to be done, they say. “My hope is that that link-up becomes a little bit more ingrained as part of the strategy, and that he can really add a bit of heft to the actual day-to-day stuff that the MPs are doing.”
While Polanski may have given the Green Party momentum, members are aware that their donations can return more Green MPs to Parliament.
“Members are keen to give as they know we need to scale up quickly – by getting canvassing software, for instance – to translate higher poll ratings into more elected Greens,” says the party official, adding they are seeing a “significant upturn in four and five figure donations”.
Now, the party must use the Polanski effect to build the party’s activist base, says Jackson.
“Zack’s job right now is sending local parties hundreds – in some cases thousands – of members, and the role of those parties is to turn them into activists.”
Around 20 local parties are now delivering comms training for potential candidates. Greens Organise is running a campaign aiming to turn 1,000 of its 10,000 new members into local brand activists, and it has hired three full-time members of staff for that purpose.
The Green Party’s approach is more about “figuring out what they’re into, basically, where they would be best placed, what they would enjoy doing and find rewarding, and then trying to fit that to a role”, says Jackson.
The challenge for local parties, he says, is “not retreating into the easy ground of going, ‘Brilliant – we’ve got 100 people to deliver leaflets. Brilliant – we’ve got 100 people to go door-knocking’. Those things are absolutely critical, but we need to be broader than that, we need to be more interesting than that."
Polanski has pulled the Greens towards mainstream popularity. It is now up to the Green Party as a whole, having been criticised for lacklustre comms under the previous leadership, to keep pace with its star.
