After the silly season comes the serious stuff. On Monday, parliament returns after a bumper five-party conference season. But while both Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch can claim to have cemented their position with well-received speeches to their respective followers, two party leaders now look to be in major peril. Zack Polanski, the leader of the Greens, and Sir Ed Davey, his Liberal Democrat counterpart, are facing internal revolts for different reasons.

For Polanski, the reasons are threefold and all related. The first is the transformation of the party membership that he has overseen in the past 13 months: many more members but plenty of undesirable types too. The second is the ‘Zionism is racism’ motion passed at conference last week, a debate from which he very publicly abstained. The third is his loss, by a double-digit margin, in today’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election, after........

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