Green Party leader Zack Polanski has apologised after he came under fire from the head of the Metropolitan Police for sharing an “inaccurate” post on social media criticising the response to the Golders Green terror attack.
Keir Starmer was among the politicians who lined up to condemn Mr Polanski, calling his actions “disgraceful” as he said he was “not fit to lead any political party”.
The prime minister also said if he had been one of the officers who responded to Wednesday’s attack he would have thought the suspect had a bomb.
In a statement, the Green leader said: “Everyone in leadership has a responsibility for lowering the temperature at a time of such tension, and I apologise for sharing a tweet in haste.
“Police responses to emergency situations such as these do need later reflection in the right forums, but I accept that social media is not the appropriate channel for doing so.”
He also said he had invited Sir Mark Rowley, the head of the Met, to meet to discuss the police response and “wider issues” raised in a letter he sent the Green leader on Thursday night.
Mr Polanski faced a backlash from across the political spectrum, and even within his own party, after he shared a post criticising the arrest of the Golders Green attack suspect, which Sir Mark described as “inaccurate and misguided”.
Mr Polanski retweeted an X post accusing Met officers detaining the suspect of “repeatedly and violently kicking a mentally ill man in the head” when he was already incapacitated from being tasered.
In a rare intervention, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark hit out at Mr Polanski for sharing the post and later accused him of “undermining” the force.
Earlier on Friday former home secretary Grant Shapps told The Independent that Mr Polanski should apologise for what he called a “disgraceful intervention”.
The Green party’s Welsh leader, Anthony Slaughter, also criticised Mr Polanski during a debate ahead of the upcoming Senedd election on LBC.
While he said he had not seen the X post, Mr Slaughter said: “It does seem, from what I’ve read, (it) was inappropriate to retweet.”
The party’s deputy leader Rachel Millward, who was also challenged on the post, told the BBC’s Question Time programme that she was “extremely grateful” for the emergency service response.
“I’m sure it was beyond terrifying, and these people are brave, well trained in what they do, I’m sure they did a brilliant job,” she said.
Sir Mark said in his letter to Mr Polanski that he was “disappointed” in the politician’s decision to share the post, warning that it could have a “chilling effect”.
He said officers “are nothing short of extraordinary”, adding: “Without their efforts to stop him I dread to think what the outcome could have been.”
On Friday, Sir Mark said the officers were still “shaken” hours after arrest and insisted that his public intervention was not political, but instead an effort to prevent “undermining the confidence” of his officers.
He told LBC: “I’m not interested in politics but if somebody eminent… says something or does something which I see has a risk to undermining the confidence of my officers to act – because they need that sense of public support – they now need to intervene on that, and that’s what I did with that letter.”
In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Sir Keir said he had met the officers involved.
“I won’t put words into their mouth, but I want everybody just to imagine what it might be like,” he said. “You’re trying to arrest someone who has already attacked two people and has no regard for life. We know that tasers were fired. I know from my own experience with the police, that there are only two shots in a taser, and once you’ve shot them, there’s nothing left.
“There’s a guy on the ground, he’s got a rucksack on. And I don’t know what was going through the mind of those officers, but if I was there, I’d be thinking, he’s going to detonate something. He’s going to blow me up and everybody around here.
“In those circumstances, I think you can quite see why what could have gone through their mind is, we need to do whatever we can to disable this guy.”
He added: “Now, when I then see Zack Polanski come out and retweet or support a criticism of that, I think it’s disgraceful… He’s not fit to lead any political party.”
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