The Daily Mail's Investigations Unit, a crack team of 'journalists' who once spent three weeks proving that a Labour councillor's dog had looked at a Palestinian flag, has uncovered the truth: the Green Party is not, as previously believed, a collection of people who think buses should run on time and perhaps we shouldn't boil the ocean. No. They are "the Green Menace".
Not since the Turnip Winter of 1916 has Britain faced such an existential threat from produce. Consider the evidence:
Exhibit A: The Suspicious Houseplant
You bought it from Ikea. You named it Trevor. It has since grown three inches and now occupies a position from which it can observe your television. Coincidence? The Mail Investigations Unit would like a word with Trevor. And also with you, for harbouring him.
Exhibit B: The Hedge
Your neighbour's privet hedge has been getting ideas. It used to know its place. Now it's encroaching.. creeping, one might say. The word "lebensraum" has not been used, but only because hedges lack the vocal apparatus.
Exhibit C: That Weird Moss Situation Around Your Car Windows
A clear radicalisation pipeline..first the moss, then the lichen, then, before you know it, your Vauxhall is attending conferences and voting on motions about international law. You'll try to start the engine and it will simply quote Frantz Fanon at you.
The motion in question, for those who wandered past the headline into the actual words, concerns whether one particular nationalism should be treated as any other nationalism. This is, apparently, indistinguishable from "backing Hamas terror attacks" in the same way that noting Tuesdays exist makes you personally responsible for everything that has ever happened on a Tuesday.
But nuance is not the Mail's concern. Nuance is, itself, a kind of moss. It gets into the cracks and makes things complicated. Far better to print THE GREEN MENACE in a font size usually reserved for declarations of war and royal deaths, and let the reader's amygdala do the rest.
The Green Party may or may not pass this motion and it may or may not become policy. The specific wording concerns legal and political concepts that reasonable people can and do disagree about, thoughtfully and in good faith.
But that's not a headline, is it?
THE GREEN MENACE is a headline. THE GREEN MENACE shifts units. THE GREEN MENACE means your nan will ring you worried about Zack Polanski, who she's fairly certain was in that film with the computers, and why does he have a megaphone, and should she stop buying broccoli just to be safe.
The moss, meanwhile, continues its advance. It asks for nothing, explains nothing.
It simply grows, slowly, around the edges of things, while Britain's press furiously investigates whether photosynthesis is woke.
N.B: No vegetables were harmed in the writing of this piece, though several were looked at with deep suspicion.