Westminster 'whirlwind' Green MP's first hundred days - and his Starmer spat

When Adrian Ramsay confounded more than a century of Conservative hegemony in rural East Anglia to win Waveney Valley for the Greens on a wave of local enthusiasm, he might have expected to enjoy a pleasant political honeymoon.

- Patrick Barkham

Pledging to work constructively with the government, Ramsay's first significant parliamentary intervention at the inaugural PMQs, 20 days into his new job, was an innocuous inquiry about how Keir Starmer would show leadership at the Cop16 conference on nature. It was met with the football-loving prime minister's rhetorical equivalent of a two-footed tackle.

“He talks about leadership,” shot back Starmer. “I would ask him to show some, because it is extraordinary that having been elected to this house as a Green politician, he is opposing vital clean energy infrastructure in his own constituency.”

The attack came because the co-leader of the Green party, who is pro-renewables, had asked for the economic case for an unpopular new pylon route across his constituency to be reconsidered. More recently, Ramsay has been criticised by the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, as they clashed over Labour's plans for carbon capture and storage - described by Ramsay as “a fig leaf for fossil fuel”.

“I very much believe in working constructively with any other party or individual MP where I can agree and there's lots of examples where Greens have worked with others,” he said from his spartan Westminster office. “That's how I think the public wants politics to work. The prime minister has talked about restoring politics as a public service, and he has a lifetime of public service, so I believe that's what he wants to do, but yes, it is disappointing when any politician resorts to individual attacks.”