“Polanski’s Green cult is luring Britain’s youth,” screeched the Telegraph on polling day. A few days earlier, the same publication suggested the Green leader had “exposed the despicable cruelty of his party” after he suggested that whether or not he supported a motion on whether Zionism is a form of racism, which was put forward by some of the party’s grassroots activists for debate at its spring conference, would depend on the definition of Zionism.

On the ground as well as in the papers and on the airwaves, this was a campaign wrought with dirty tricks. But the racist briefings and fake tactical voting sites reportedly deployed by Labour in Manchester will soon look very tame compared to what the political establishment will throw at the Green Party now that it has proven itself a viable challenger to the status quo.

We have seen this playbook before. When he was first elected to lead Labour in 2015, the British press cast Corbyn as a largely benign eccentric, pottering around in his allotment, espousing an outdated politics. He could safely be ignored, so the thinking went, once he had been played out for a few laughs.

It was only later, after his party almost won power in 2017 on an auti-austerity, pro-nationalisation platform, that the establishment changed tack entirely. It attacked Corbyn with more venom than perhaps any single figure in British political history. It sought to burn him, and succeeded. It is a testament to how effectively the British left was brought down that now, a single by-election victory almost a decade later, feels like its most significant moment since. But a victory is a victory is a victory, and this one offers hope.

Like Corbyn’s Labour before it, Polanski’s Green Party says they want to build a politics that shifts the balance of power back toward the majority and restores for the British people a settlement that, at the very least, means that working hard, in whatever form that takes, does afford a good life.

If any cause in politics is worth fighting for, it is surely this one, and the forces arrayed against them by the corporate, political and media elite will certainly provide a fight. Victory, much less any monument to it, is far from assured. But in bloodying the noses of the Labour government and Nigel Farage’s Reform in a single night, the Greens have struck a good first blow.