Obviously the t-shirt was and is beyond the pale. If you managed to miss all the news stories about it – lucky you! – then picture a Green Party supporter wearing a garment featuring a drawing of a guillotine, with a man standing next to it. The caption, clearly legible even from a distance, reads “We’re only making plans for Nigel”.
It’s tasteless and appalling, and the man who bought it presumably thought he was being funny and edgy when he did so. Though there is no world in which he would have been either of those things, our world – in which three frontline politicians have been murdered in the past decade – just isn’t one where people ought to even joke about murdering their political opponents.
It is also incredible that he managed to wear it to a Green Party fundraising rave (no comment) without anyone objecting to it.
Oh, and most of all: it is beyond belief that Zack Polanski, the party leader, agreed to be marked as a collaborator on an Instagram post featuring the t-shirt, meaning that it was shared with his 713,000 followers.
Polanski really ought to have known better and, as a now prominent political figure, probably shouldn’t even be in charge of his own social media. Parties have comms teams for a reason.
These are all the facts everyone agrees on. They’re easy and straightforward. What happened when Polanski appeared on Newsnight to discuss them on Tuesday night isn’t. Earlier this week, while interviewed on the BBC, he repeatedly refused to apologise to Nigel Farage for the incident.
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“This was not my post, it was a collaboration from a photographer. It had 20 images and I just didn’t look carefully enough and I accepted it. As soon as I was aware of what happened, I unaccepted it and took it down”, he said.
“Because this was a mistake, I think the important thing is that I point out it’s a mistake, that I also make sure that I condemn political violence and also crucially make a commitment to be better on my social media.”
That is where he stopped. Despite being asked several times for an apology, Polanski demurred, and instead said that “if Nigel Farage wants to apologise for all the times that he’s put other people in danger then I’ll be happy to make an apology”. The backlash has predictably been intense and there will be little let up even after Thursday morning’s decision by the Metropolitan Police to take no further action against Polanski.
Though it certainly feels warranted, it may be worth wondering if Polanski may not have at least part of a point. Over the past few years, Reform politicians have become quite the experts at relentlessly dishing it out, yet refusing to take it.
Suella Braverman appeared on the Today programme on Wednesday to attack Polanski for his lack of apology yet, in 2023, while still a Conservative minister, she refused to apologise for referring to an “invasion on our southern coast” when discussing refugees, even when prompted to do so by a Holocaust survivor.
Zia Yusuf, meanwhile, recently told a press conference that “many politicians and members of the media are effectively stopping the function of democracy by creating an environment of such hostility for Reform and making it unpalatably dangerous to air perfectly reasonable views”. This took place mere weeks and months after, among other things, he called the Conservatives “open-border lunatics who deserve their extinction” and posted on X that both them and Labour were “traitors to their country”. He also called Keir Starmer “sick and depraved” and, naturally is yet to apologise for any of it.
Of course, Nigel Farage isn’t exempt from such inflammatory language, having recently called on his supporters to respond to Henry Nowak’s murder with “pure cold rage”. Has he made any sort of amends since then? You can probably guess.
Now, there may be some people who, like Michelle Obama, would argue that them going low doesn’t mean that we can’t go high. Getting down to the level of the populist right helps no-one, and ultimately only ends up making political discourse coarser for everyone involved. This ought to be avoided.
That being said, surely enough has to be enough, right? Reform and increasingly larger swathes of the Conservative Party have been acting like anything they say and do is inherently beyond reproach, while everyone on the left and centre must be careful never to leave a single toe out of place.
The hypocrisy and bad faith of it all are exhausting. Naturally, being the bigger person is the correct thing to do, but must we all really be correct all the time?
Polanski erred and showed, once again, that he probably isn’t ready for the big time quite yet. It just isn’t clear that his lack of apology makes him unfit to lead, though: after all, he merely is a product of the times we live in, and these times are really quite rotten.
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