By my reckoning it’s been about a year since I have been a member of the Green Party. It is fair to say that it is one of the less demanding organisations seeking to win state power.

By way of comparison, I frequently see clusters of Jehovah’s Witnesses being ignored by passers by from 8.30 in the morning virtually every day of the week. In Albania, Spain, Italy and London you can spot them a mile off. Groups of young Revolutionary Communists are to be found at bijou farmers’ markets and in depressing urban shopping streets. The SWP go out flyposting come rain or shine.

My main activity in the Greens is looking at the local WhatsApp group and deciding how long to mute it for, though there was quite a nice offer of an unwanted bed and mattress a little while ago. There are also regular invitations to go door knocking on week nights feigning an interest in dog mess and lampposts.

 In a year there have been two in person meetings and one of them started half an hour late because the man with the key hadn’t turned up. I dread to think what might go wrong when the moment comes to storm Buckingham Palace.

Most organisations, and I don’t just mean steely-eyed Bolsheviks seeking to overthrow the bourgeois state, but community gardens, pigeon fanciers and archaeologists understand that you need to meet up from time to time to sort things out. For political groups they should be wanting to survey the world situation, look at things that can be done locally and develop an internal life. My experience of even the Labour Party was that it was quite good at this, even if I never worked out who was really pulling the strings.

The bizarre thing is that at the last general election the local Green candidate got 15% of the vote without so much as posting a single tweet. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth, loads of us worked our socks off for a very good and locally prominent candidate who didn’t even get 5% of the vote for the Socialist Alliance.

By contrast, Reform is putting a lot of effort into building branch structures and local organisations. On paper there is not a huge amount of difference between the Green and Corbyn programmes, but at least Corbynistas understood the importance of meeting up with each other, having a beer or five, engaging with political opponents and the rest of society. The Green methodology is rather more homeopathic than I am used to.