On October 8, the Green Party fell short in a parliamentary by-election for the London constituency of Holborn and St Pancras that had been triggered by the resignation of Keir Starmer. The by-election was always going to be a long shot for the Green leader Zack Polanski, who stood as the party’s candidate. The result, which saw Labour retain the seat, was broadly what you would have expected from the current state of national opinion polls.

That hasn’t stopped much of the British media from proclaiming the outcome to have been a game-changing disaster for the Greens and Polanski in particular. Some prominent Green politicians have also launched a push to reverse the party’s left turn under Polanski and guide it back into their political comfort zone. A motion that Green members passed at their recent party conference about Israel and Zionism has become a rallying point for Polanski’s critics.

If the advocates of a more conventional and unthreatening approach to politics win out, the gains that the Greens have made over the last year will prove to be ephemeral. If the party can hold its collective nerve, there will be new opportunities to win support as the contradictions of Andy Burnham’s political platform reveal themselves in practice.