Zack Polanski reportedly put himself at odds with the rest of the London Assembly on Thursday, declining to back motions welcoming the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and refusing to join the condemnation of graffiti smeared across Sir Winston Churchill's statue in Parliament Square.
Tory assembly members were said to have seized the opportunity to put two urgent motions before the chamber, both of which passed — but not before Polanski and his Green colleagues Zoë Garbett and Caroline Russell broke away to vote against both.
The first motion took aim at the daubing of slogans including "Zionist War Criminal," "Stop the Genocide" and "Free Palestine" across the Churchill memorial in the small hours of Friday morning. The Express reported last week on how Caspar San Giorgio, 38, faces a criminal damage charge over the incident, which he contests.
The motion condemned the vandalism as an "appalling desecration" of a statue of "great national importance" and pushed the mayor to equip the Metropolitan Police with "the full resources" to keep the site protected going forward. Every assembly member bar the three Greens backed it.
The Express reached out to Mr Polanski for comment via email.
According to the Times, a second motion called on assembly members to "strongly welcome the removal of Ayatollah Khamenei from power," pointing to a record that included funding international terrorism, targeting British nationals, crushing citizens who took to the streets demanding freedom and pursuing nuclear weapons capability.
Polanski is reported to have said during the debate that he had no argument with the description of Khamenei's regime as "brutal" — but drew the line at the motion's broader framing.
The Express understands, he characterised the US-Israeli strike that killed the supreme leader as "an illegal and unprovoked attack by the US government and the Israeli state," and said the lines "warmly welcomes the celebrations amongst London's Iranian communities and strongly hopes that recent events mark the start of a new chapter for Iran" made the motion impossible for him to support.
The stance sits awkwardly alongside Polanski's own history. Just two years ago, in 2023, he was the one putting forward a motion condemning Tehran's security forces for their violent suppression of protesters inside Iran.
Conservative assembly member Emma Best, who brought the Khamenei motion, did not hold back. "It is a disgrace Zack Polanski voted against a motion which echoed the sentiment of one he proposed just three years ago," she is reported to have said.
"The supreme leader and his regime terrorised the people of Iran and its enemies across the world. It is not controversial to join Iranians, here and abroad, in welcoming the end of that regime. It is sinister that the principles of the Green Party leadership can so easily sway from what is morally right."
