Caroline Lucas: 'We've got to get better at painting a positive vision of a post-carbon world. This is not about sitting around a candle in a cave'
Decca Aitkenhead meets Green party leader Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, London. Photograph: David Levene/David Levene
Caroline Lucas should be the luckiest woman in politics. More than 20 years ago she joined a minor, leftfield party: today its defining issue has become the biggest political issue in the world. Bingo! Only politics, of course, is not that simple. As Winston Churchill famously pointed out, democracy has been described as "the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried", and if you really want to see what he meant, spend an hour with the leader of the Green party.
Less than three weeks away from the European elections, the dilemmas facing Lucas are daunting. If she campaigns on climate change alone, she demotes her party to the status of a single-issue outfit. However, if she broadens its platform with a comprehensive policy package, she risks exiling it to the unelectably leftwing wilderness. If the Greens ditch some of their policies in the interests of electability, they sacrifice their unique claim to integrity, and begin to look just like every other party. But their integrity is so precious to them that they have wasted the last 20 years fiddling over whether they can compromise their principles by putting on a suit and electing a single leader, while the planet has been burning.
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