With the Green Party now beating Labour into second place in a new poll by YouGov, nobody talks about a two-party system any more. Following Hannah Spencer’s sensational win at Gorton and Denton, the Greens are up four points to 21%, snapping at the heels of Reform.  Anthony Wells, head of polling from YouGov, has said that this is because the Greens – at least to younger people, and seemingly some traditionally Labour Muslim communities – now offers a viable political option and is less of a wasted or protest vote. The YouGov poll puts Reform UK on 23%, Greens on 21%, Labour and the Tories tied on 16, both down two, and the Lib Dems remaining on 14%. The poll makes the Greens the most popular party with all voters under 50. Even more remarkably, a staggering 49% of 18-24 year olds would back the Greens which must be putting considerable fear in Labour MPs, not the party supported lowering the voting age to sixteen. Writing in the Guardian, Green leader Zack Polanski has said that his party’s by-election win - in a seat that was 127th on his target list - has ‘changed everything’ in British politics with Green party energy ‘only gathering force now.’ Looking ahead to May 7th, with elections for local councils, mayors and the Welsh Senedd, he ‘predicted ‘a Green wave sweeping England and Wales’.  We are in uncharted political territory. Nobody doubts that May 7th will be a day of political reckoning for both Labour and Tories with grass-root demand for heads to roll. Indeed, the old two-party paradigm hasn’t applied for some time. But that was chiefly because of the rise of Reform since last May’s local election. Less than 70 days before the 2026 local elections, it’s now the Greens that are the political show stoppers. Gone are the days of the political classes sniggering about Zolanski's former career as a breast enhancing hypnotist.  With Greens and Reform expecting to wipe out Tory and Labour votes, can both main party leaders even survive the 2026 local elections? Does execution day loom in May? I think they will both survive, or at least have a prolonged stay of execution. After the 2025 party conference season, Starmer and Badenoch both bought political time after seeing off shadowy challenges from rivals – Andy Burnham and Robert Jenrick – with stirring speeches and some well received policy ideas (abolition of stamp duty went viral for the Tories). Jenrick’s presence had hovered over the Tory conference, biding his time with fringe talk of making a mean Sunday roast and taking up boxing.  But now he’s defected to Reform, the chances of any coup against Badenoch are slim, however bad the results.  The reason is not so much because she’s upped her game at PMQs, and united the party with some tough talk. The truth is that, exactly like Starmer, the main reason she’s likely to survive the May 7th slaughter is because few serious challenger MPs actually want to be leader after a Labour/Tory massacre that will make the Battle of the Boyne look like a Wind in the Willows riverside picnic.    ‘The reality is that nobody wants to seize the crown as they don’t want to become the captain of the party when it is a s*** show. If there’s going to be a challenge it will come much later ’ one former Tory Cabinet minister’s special adviser tells The Mace. The worrying truth is that for the Tory party – which thinks of itself as the party of business – many senior corporate lobbyists were noticeably absent last year in Manchester, while others whispered that they might not even bother in 2026. Having lunch last October at the Tory conference at the near-empty restaurant of the Midland Hotel with a former Tory councillor, my companion said: “You used to have to queue for a table here. It feels like a plague has wiped out half the Tory delegates.”  On Sunday, the exhibition area – parts of which resembled a Margaret Thatcher convention, with even her clothes on display – felt ghostly. One ex-national newspaper editor, swilling a glass of wine in the Politico pub, compared the mood to the 1975 Blackpool conference after an unproven Thatcher was elected Tory leader. Yet Thatcher went on to win in 1979, so one shouldn’t write off the Tories’ capacity for ruthless reinvention.  Even if Badenoch does survive assassination after May 7th, both of the two traditional parties will lose hundreds of seats in May, with both Reform and the Greens making more fatal inroads in the UK, as well as Wales and Scotland.  A change of leader may not even make much difference to the Tories’ ratings, which have been steadily improving. The latest YouGov poll puts them just a few percentage points behind Reform. The real problem the Tories face is not leadership related but a toxic 14-year legacy and a Tory selection policy that favoured “diverse”, soft-centred and non-traditional (i.e., not white Oxbridge public school types) candidates, meaning many “wet” To...