CAROLINE LUCAS announced today that she will step down as co-leader of the Green Party.

Ms Lucas has shared leadership of the party with Jonathan Bartley since 2016 and previously led it from 2008 to 2012.

The Brighton Pavilion MP said she planned to focus more on her work in Parliament and her constituents, and said she believed she and Mr Bartley had strengthened the party’s “position as a leading force in progressive politics.

“We have not been eclipsed by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, but instead have used these unique circumstances to push for even more radical change,” she wrote in the Guardian.

But the Green Party of England and Wales received just 512,000 votes in last year’s general election — less than half the 1.1 million it won in 2015.

The party’s candidate for Cheltenham, who dramatically announced he was switching to Labour days after the result, was among many who felt Ms Lucas’s push for a “progressive alliance” including the Liberal Democrats had alienated voters.

“If an alliance is progressive what on Earth would the Lib Dems be doing anything near it?” Adam Van Coevorden told the Morning Star today.

While praising Ms Lucas as “a great campaigning MP” who had helped the Greens “push environmental policies further” than other parties, he said the party had felt less relevant now Labour offered radical change and that the Green fixation on reversing Brexit hadn’t helped.

“On the doorstep people saw Brexit as done and dusted and wanted to talk about housing, the NHS or schools,” he recalled. “Every party that tried to make the election about stopping Brexit lost ground.”