Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/22/2003 4:25:13 PM PDT by MadIvan
There was an air of grim satisfaction in the highest reaches of the Labour Party yesterday, tinged, it must be said, with huge relief that an uncomfortable force might be well on the way to being removed from their midst. While in public Ian McCartney, the new party chairman, was circumspect about the allegations, privately other senior figures were delighted at the news.
That George Galloway has continued so long in public life is a tribute not just to his roguish, but almost entirely phoney, charms but also to the propensity of the British Left to believe that every action of the British and American governments - most especially the latter - is evilly inspired. And the more Galloway has ascribed the vilest of motives to the governments in London and Washington the more he has been lauded for so doing.
Controversy - and much more - has dogged every step of his political career. As a fellow native of Dundee I have watched the rise and rise of the man, whose extravagant tastes led to his Gorgeous George nickname, with a mixture of awe and horror. He emerged - shot would be a better word - to fame as the 21-year-old secretary of the city Labour Party in the aftermath of a corruption scandal, which saw a councillor jailed over bribes in the mid-1970s.
From the outset Galloway said his mission was to clean up the city. Unfortunately, in succeeding years that city's reputation became ever more besmirched. "What we used to have was good old fashioned graft. With George we got something completely different," said one wizened Dundee council watcher last night.
Under the tutelage of Galloway, Dundee - that austere and generally depressed city on the north shore of the Tay - twinned itself with Nablus on the West Bank of the Jordan. It was an unlikely union that saw the PLO flag flying over the Gothic splendour of Dundee's municipal buildings, but it quickly took on a farcical air when, as part of the twinning ceremony, the Mayor of Nablus was presented with a crate of whisky and a kilt by the Scottish delegation. What use a strictly teetotal Muslim, both of whose legs had been blown away in a terrorist explosion, would have had for whisky and kilts was never made clear.
The local population was, in turn, appalled and embarrassed by the Galloway-inspired Labour Party. Questions were asked about a string of drinking clubs established throughout the city and which were said to have been used to bankroll the party, but which crashed spectacularly amid claims of widespread financial irregularities.
Then there was the newspaper, the Dundee Standard, set up by Galloway's Labour to rival the respectable and distinctly un-slavish Dundee Courier. It also crashed amid allegations of financial irregularities.
He didn't always get things all his own way. When he stood as a councillor in a supposedly rock-solid Labour ward, an Independent candidate - the splendidly named Bunty Turley - defeated him, thanks to support from more than a few Labour voters. And he was thwarted in his bid to get a council house for himself and his then girlfriend, amid allegations that the application was not all that it might have been.
I was working in London then and depended on my father for news of the latest outrages. He telephoned one day in a high state of excitement to say: "They've done it now - they've taken over." He was referring to the fact that giant pictures of Marx and Engels were displayed over the municipal buildings.
It had nothing to do with Galloway - merely the BBC using Dundee as a "double" for Moscow for the docu-drama about Guy Burgess, An Englishman Abroad. Still, the fact that the portraits appeared was a testament to the mood in the city at the time. And the fact that Galloway was blamed showed the extent of his influence.
Labour, by this time, was in a state of city-wide conflict. Cue the departure of its secretary. After a period as chairman of the Scottish Labour Party, where he earned the undying enmity of a certain Gordon Brown, Galloway then turned up at War on Want. Again that old favourite, "financial irregularities", raised its ugly head.
In 1987 he defeated Roy Jenkins to enter Parliament as MP for Glasgow Hillhead, and although he had none of his predecessor's style or taste he had all of Jenkins's love of the finer things in life.
At this juncture I should make a confession - I contributed to the Galloway coffers, albeit in a modest way. As editor of the Scottish Daily Express almost 10 years ago, I got him to write a column, believing that it might be quite fun to have a Labour-leadership-bashing Labour MP contributing to what was then a Tory-supporting newspaper.
It was an eye-opener in more ways than one. For instance, he told everyone - including, if memory serves me, the Register of Members' Interests - that I paid him £500 per week for his scribblings, when the real sum was closer to half that. When I challenged him about this strange behaviour he replied that he overestimated his earnings from journalism because, he said, it helped him keep upsides with that much more famous journalist-MP, Roy Hattersley.
However, if these were the antics of a braggart, his later behaviour in using a sick Iraqi girl, Mariam Hamza - brought to Scotland for hospital treatment amid a blaze of self-serving publicity - to further his political ambitions demonstrated that there were no levels of cynicism and ruthlessness to which he would not stoop.
These uncompromising traits came to the fore as never before during the recent Iraq conflict. There was, thus, a certain pathetic irony in the front page of George Galloway's home-town newspaper last night. One half of the front page in the Dundee Evening Telegraph was about the latest allegations. The other half contained moving details of the funeral service of Lt Cpl Barry Stephen of The Black Watch, killed in action on the road to Basra.
Regards, Ivan
Now THAT was bad!
It certainly piqued my interest. ;^)
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