A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote for the Green party under its wonderful new leader, Zack Polanski. Bad as I tend to expect things to be, even I thought that surely things can’t be that bad. However I dutifully entered the terms ‘Polanski’ and ‘young women’ into Google, and promptly fell down a different rabbit hole.

Defining my search terms a little more clearly, it turned out that my informant was correct. So badly deranged are the youngest cohort of female voters in this country that a third of them really do believe that they have found their saviour in a man who until recently promised that he had a technique to inflate women’s breasts through hypnotism but who also thinks that J.K. Rowling is a crank.

It isn’t impossible to see a scenario in which the right is split and the Polanski-ites push through the middle

Interestingly enough, a similar phenomenon is occurring on the other side of the Atlantic. In November’s mayoral election in New York, four out of five young women voted for the socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani. In both of these cases, the skewing of this age and sex group towards the socialist left is especially extreme.

There are plenty of explanations one might give for this trend – most of which always land male columnists in the soup. But one thing that ought to be noted about both Polanski and Mamdani is they do use a consistent set of foundational........

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