Green Party insider: Zack Polanski is the reason Andy Burnham is Prime Minister

'Burnham is a direct consequence of the Greens'

Speaking to PoliticsJOE, Russell Warfield, author and Green Party Insider, said that Burnham is a "direct consequence of Polanski's leadership".

Warfield identified two key moments for the Greens that led to Labour rethinking the leader of their party - the Gorton and Denton by-election and the May local elections.

The insider explained that without the by-election win and the "high watermark" in the local elections, "it's credible that Starmer would be still in post".

He added: "They would go on deluding themselves that the strategy that they were pursuing - that they could somehow win over Reform voters while completely ignoring and sneering at any other voters to their left - all of that could still be going on right now."

Warfield told PoliticsJOE that "Burnham is a direct consequence of the Greens forcing Labor to confront a certain set of electoral realities".

This included, as he claimed, that Labour were losing "four times as many votes to the Greens than they were to Reform, especially in the most recent May elections".

With Burnham now in power, Warfield explained that the new prime minister is at least appeasing some Green voters over "stuff that the Greens were advocating for over the last year, and many years before that."

"We've got a prime minister who is now at least paying lip service," he said.

"That is a direct consequence of the Green surge of the last nine months."

While this strategy may have saved Labour for the time being, with the party reaching the top of the polls for the first time in over a year since Burnham's arrival, Warfield admitted that this has also created "problems for the Greens".

He said: "Obviously, that does create some political problems for the Greens in the immediate term when you've got a prime minister who is, at the level of rhetoric, promising a break from neoliberal economics and politics."

While often seen as a minnow in a British political landscape of giants, the Greens can at least claim to have had a direct influence of the direction of the nation - which counts for something.