Posted on 04/23/2003 2:59:00 PM PDT by river rat
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George Galloway
by Tom Baldwin
WHEN playing cards depicting the “most wanted” members of Saddam Hussein’s regime were handed to coalition troops in Iraq, Tony Blair could have been forgiven for slipping a joker into the pack.That card would have shown a man with a moustache, as well as a taste for the better things in life of which any Baathist would have been proud. But yesterday George Galloway was not hiding in some Baghdad bunker or sheltering with the Syrians. Instead, he was topping up his tan at his villa in the Algarve and painting himself as a victim of some unexplained conspiracy.
The Government would love to be shot of a man who has not been so much a thorn, as a piece of shrapnel, in the side of successive Labour leaders. Of the 139 Labour MPs who rebelled over Iraq, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin is undoubtedly the “most wanted”.
Yet there was a wariness over the latest allegations within Westminster last night, where officials fear that the charred documents found in Saddam’s Foreign Ministry — or at least the interpretation put on them — might be too good to be true.
“Gorgeous George”, after all, has got away with it before, time and time again. He has always escaped deselection despite saying he doesn’t “give a f***” what the Prime Minister thinks, mourning the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “biggest catastrophe” of his life, describing Ché Guevara as his “ultimate hero” and receiving boxes of Havana’s finest Cohiba cigars from Fidel Castro, a friend.
His mistakes range from the malign to the ridiculous. Mr Galloway joined Gerry Adams on a Troops Out march long before the Sinn Fein leader talked of peace. At a press conference called to rebut corruption charges over his management of War on Want, his now ex-wife was less than pleased by his confession of having “carnal knowledge” of a Greek woman he met on a charity trip.
He has one child from his former marriage to Elaine and has subsequently married Dr Amina Abu Zaid, a Palestinian biologist at Glasgow University.
He says that, at 48, he is “too old” to stray again, saying that his idea of perfect happiness is “a hilltop in Portugal with the Atlantic shining below, a long Havana cigar and a Palestinian scientist running her fingers through my hair”.
All this is nothing, however, compared with the opprobrium he has earned for a role in the Middle East, and Iraq in particular. Even before the latest claims, Labour whips were preparing to throw him out of the parliamentary party for remarks about the war on Arab television in which he described Mr Blair and President Bush as “wolves”.
When Ben Bradshaw, a Foreign Office Minister, said last year that the MP was “not just an apologist but a mouthpiece” for Saddam, Mr Galloway pointed out that he had always supported democracy in Iraq and the removal of a “bestial dictator”.
Well, perhaps not always. After his most recent visit to Baghdad this year, he described Saddam’s “gentle handshake”, his offer of Quality Street chocolates and a conversation that began with the dictator accurately pointing out that Mr Galloway had lost weight since they had last met.
Most famously, on a trip to Iraq in 1994, he told Saddam: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know we are with you until victory, until Jerusalem.”
Mr Galloway claimed initially that he had said “so” instead of “sir”. Later, his explanation was that he had been saluting the Iraqi people — in the Glasgow sense of “youse” — not “you”, Saddam.
Those who choose to disbelieve him point out that he has sometimes adjusted his life story to suit himself. His claims to have been “born in a slum tenement” and to have first worked in a tyre factory have been challenged by friends who say his parents were comfortably off and that he worked for only seven weeks at Michelin during the school holidays. He is even said to have lied when he joined Dundee Labour Party by pretending he was 15 when he was 13.
But the “MP for Baghdad Central”, as he is known to colleagues, is notoriously good at defending his reputation. He has won at least 20 such cases, earning about £250,000 and boasts that one such victory, against the late Robert Maxwell, enabled him to buy a red open-top Mercedes.
Such moments have fuelled persistent rumours about his high-rolling lifestyle. He has property interests in Portugal and London, a restaurant business in Cuba and a liking for Kenzo suits.
According to the latest parliamentary register of interests, he has other legitimate sources of income, including £70,000 a year from The Mail on Sunday for his regular columns. He lists 12 trips abroad, more often than not to the Middle East and paid for by “friends of Iraq” or groups campaigning against sanctions. He makes no mention of using funds from the Mariam Appeal, raised initially to treat an Iraqi girl’s leukaemia, but which has since been used for a political campaign against the “might of the British and American State”.
Mr Galloway says that he has paid a high price for his commitment to the Arab cause in the Middle East.
This began in 1974 just after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, as unfashionable a time as any to start espousing the Palestinian cause. He met a young Palestinian called Sahal Jabaji and before too long was getting his first bad headlines for publicly embracing Yassir Arafat.
His early political career saw him orchestrate a left-wing takeover of Dundee Labour Party and he succeeded in twinning the city with a Palestinian town. His views on the Middle East have made him many more enemies than friends. When the Hollywood actor John Malkovitch was asked with whom he would like to have a fight, he named Mr Galloway, adding that he would prefer just to shoot him.
He is acknowledged by one and all to be a clever man, a superb debater, with a Blair-like instinct for the modern media.
There is a certain wistfulness in him about what might have been. “Sometimes I wish that my life had been smoother,” he says, acknowledging that he has made mistakes, if only because of his “verbal infelicity”. But he insists that there is no point in “living a lie to climb the greasy pole”.
Mr Galloway’s childhood ambition was to be a Labour Foreign Secretary, and even his enemies among Scottish parliamentary colleagues say that he could have gone even further. Whatever the truth of these latest allegations, few MPs doubt that the Government will find an excuse to take the Labour whip from him if he does not beat it to it by resigning from the party. Maybe he could have gone all the way to the top. But instead, during the war in Iraq, it appears that he has gone over it for the last time..
And worse! He is a relative of Arrafat, heads up Moslem lobby groups, such as the Pakistan-Kashmir pressure group, and is a weekly contributor to the "Orient Magazine", churning out articles such as WHO WILL CHAIN THE MAD DOG OF WASHINGTON?"!
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