For a start, its election performance was much worse than had been expected, despite Green leader Natalie Bennett hailing it as “excellent”. It did, it is true, more than quadruple the number of votes it received in the 2010 poll – from 265,243 to 1,159,682. But this is growth somewhat less impressive than it seems, since it stood in many more seats – 535 compared to 310. More seriously the party heavily lost support during the campaign, ending up with just four per cent of votes cast – about half the level of support recorded by earlier opinion polls (one even put them at 11 per cent).