It's easy for a Liberal Democrat with a good memory to find Zack Polanski irritating. His story that he stood for his local council as Lib Dem because he cared about proportional representation, but then joined the Greens because he found he agreed with them more, doesn't square with what we recall of him.
He didn't just stand for his borough council, he also stood for the London Assembly and was dead keen to be our candidate in the 2016 Richmond Park by-election. His complaints when he wasn't selected filled Lib Dem social media for ages afterwards.
In fairness to him, my best researches have found no trace of any democratic process behind that selection: Sarah Olney seems to have been simply announced as the candidate. If this was the case, it was understandable, as the party had found itself without a single woman MP after the carnage of the previous year's general election.
There was little sign of Polanski the eco-populist in those days. Here he is writing on Lib Dem Voice right after that election:
I want a leader who is proud of our Government record, who doesn't have blinkers about where we failed to communicate effectively with the electorate whilst still being immensely proud of what Nick and our colleagues achieved in office.
Well, we can all change our minds – in fact, politics would be better if more people changed their minds – but maybe the thread of continuity between old Zack and new Zack is that both are very good at judging what his audience wants to hear.
Again courtesy of Lib Dem Voice, you can also watch Polanski's performance at the conference rally from 2015 – his speech starts at 24:55 and then, you've been warned, there's music.
The media's attempted gotchas against Polanski – his council tax, his failure to vote and, most worrying if justified, his claimed professional qualifications – don't seem to have deterred voters, but they do suggest a rather disorganised individual.
What they should spend more time asking Polanski, of course, is where the substantial policies to support his rhetoric are and why he so rarely talks about the environment.
But however irritated we Lib Dems feel, a significant section of the electorate feels sympathy with his views. And they are voters – young, urban and radical, but without ancestral loyalty to Labour – that a Liberal party should be winning over.
Writing in the London Review of Books, James Butler gives a kinder account of Polanski's progress, suggesting that his journey is typical of that also taken by many of his new voters:
Polanski’s political journey – he started out as a Liberal Democrat – is sometimes framed as opportunism but in fact reflects the often radicalising economic experience of millennials now approaching middle age.
Many of the instinctive policy positions of Green supporters are the common sense of a decade ago: opposition to austerity, borrowing for infrastructure, rent control and social housebuilding.
But the environment has changed: borrowing is harder, energy supply unstable, inflation a drag, wages miserable; the world is less stable, chaos and conflict are inevitable. There is an opportunity to frame a coherent Green politics in response to this moment – an egalitarian politics of public affluence and energy sovereignty – but it cannot be a cargo-cult Corbynism.
What do we Lib Dems have to say to people radicalised by their economic experience over the last 10 or 20 years? Providing a good answer to that question will be key if we are again to be able to win seats outside the affluent South of England.
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