The Burnham bounce is eclipsing the Green surge – and Zack Polanski’s radical hope is being tested | Gaby Hinsliff

Cackling happily into their pints, the two most powerful men in the country scoff their way through a selection of pub snacks.

Pork scratchings or scampi fries? Or maybe old-school peanuts? It’s hardly the toughest choice currently facing Andy Burnham and the chancellor, John Healey, so some may find this week’s made-to-go-viral Instagram reel of them gleefully ranking crisps a bit silly. (I’m writing this, laptop balanced on my knee, beside a hospital bed; right now I couldn’t care less whether the chancellor likes bacon fries.) But I do care, intensely, about a government that is promising once-in-a-generation reform of care for elderly people winning the public’s confidence for long enough to actually carry out that promise, and weirdly in 2026 that means chomping crisps on camera to establish your bona fides with people who’d scroll straight past conventional political content.

Pulling off this kind of freewheeling, seemingly casual content actually takes surprising skill, as the compulsively online Green leader, Zack Polanski – until now the reigning king of leftwing British TikTok – has just inadvertently demonstrated. On Wednesday, the police cleared Polanski of any wrongdoing over reposting a picture of a man in a T-shirt emblazoned with a guillotine and the words, “We’re only making plans for Nigel”. (Polanski says it was among a bunch of images he uploaded without looking properly first, and he deleted it as soon as he realised.) An innocent mistake but a sloppy one, coming days after the alleged murder of the Reform spokeswoman Ann Widdecombe; the kind he can no longer afford to make too often.

The unexpected resurgence of hope, joy and radical energy in the Labour party over the last week and a half poses an unmistakable threat to the leader who until now has had a virtual monopoly on those things. Hardened Green voters – those for whom Burnham’s “business-friendly socialism” will never be socialist enough, or who see the new prime minister’s support for more drilling in the North Sea as environmental vandalism – are going nowhere. But newcomers who migrated to the Greens because they felt Keir Starmer’s government had lost its moral compass, or become too relentlessly miserable, are now squarely in Burnham’s sights. Interestingly, the More in Common poll this week, which put Labour back in the lead for the first time since last March, found that “Burnham bounce” coming if anything more at the Greens’ expense than Reform’s.

When the new prime minister apologises for the way his predecessor approached the Gaza war, or condemns what he calls 40 failed years of neoliberalism, he’s signalling that it’s safe for those lost Labour voters to come home. When he’s messing about on Instagram, he’s reaching out to younger people unused to seeing Labour politicians doing anything interesting on Green-dominated feeds. And when he holds cross-party talks on fixing social care without either Polanski or Farage, then intentionally or not, he is sending a message about who he takes seriously. Polanski, whose partner works in palliative care, has spoken movingly about the issue. But it was only the Lib Dems and the Tories, Downing Street says, who actually wrote to the prime minister expressing interest in his call for a non-partisan approach to this difficult issue.

It would be ridiculous, of course, to think this Labour honeymoon can last. Keir Starmer was popular, right up until his first spending cut. The Green surge may be receding for the moment but it’s only five months since they left Labour for dust in the Gorton and Denton byelection, and it would be a surprise if they don’t at least improve on their 2024 performance in this week’s Manchester mayoral elections.

Yet something has clearly shifted. As recently as early May, 22% of Britons thought Polanski would be a better prime minister than Starmer, according to YouGov. But only 9% now prefer him to Burnham. The guillotine T-shirt affair, meanwhile, was merely the latest in a string of mistakes – from Polanski’s failure to register to vote in May’s local elections, to confusion over whether he paid enough council tax while living on a houseboat in London, to a spate of antisemitism allegations involving Green candidates at the local elections – that together raise questions about Polanski’s readiness for the remorseless scrutiny that wannabe main parties of the left inevitably face.

The Greens’ defence is to argue that only they can offer a “full fat” socialist revolution, not some watered down Burnhamite version. If he won’t impose rent controls or new property taxes – both ideas circulating around the sprawling Burnham camp that have died an unceremonious death since he entered Downing Street – then they will. Unconstrained by the realities of government, their freedom to say whatever Labour won’t could easily become a powerful weapon again given time and the inevitable disappointments of office, though it’s unclear how much time Burnham intends to give them. (He has publicly ruled out a snap election, but the current strategy – a blitzkrieg of exciting but vague announcements, starving Reform and the Greens of political oxygen but without giving them much to fight him on – wouldn’t half be good preparation for one.)

But for the next few weeks at least, it’s Burnham on whom the fickle political sun shines: Burnham who has the priceless opportunity to actually do something about what ails the country, rather than simply talk – however fluently or winningly – about it. Political careers, as he should know, are notoriously short these days. He should make the most of every moment while it lasts.

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• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist