ONE of the things I like most about Caroline Lucas, the Green Party’s sole MP, is that she is nowhere near as nice as she seems. The self-imposed task of giving direction to that quarrelsome assembly of semi-autonomous self governing identity groups that is today’s Green Party would try the patience of a saint.

And, in the various manoeuvrings that have seen the party’s leadership several times reconstituted and its policies realigned, she has operated with a skill-set that makes her a First Division practitioner of the Machiavellian dark arts. All this with the added utility of a sympathetic smile and a winning manner.

It is still possible to hold on to a fair measure of respect for Britain’s Greens. They played a mostly constructive part in the anti-war movement although Lucas did later resign as vice-president of the Stop the War Coalition when she encountered an imperial war waged on a regime of which she disapproved almost as much as war itself.