Certainly, the revelations were not the ideal background to his new career as the Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead, where, in the 1987 general election, he had claimed the shiny scalp of Roy Jenkins. Within months of his election there, he was facing attempts within his constituency association to deselect him. He survived along with the rancour.
Yet what made Galloway a politician of genuine importance was his views on the Middle East. These were developed early in his career (as early as 1977 he was happy to pose with PLO gunmen brandishing AK47s) and would inevitably bring him into conflict with New Labour. While he helped front the campaign to prevent the invasion of Iraq, he nonetheless stands apart from the image of a natural peace campaigner.
Particularly, it is the violence of his language that jars. Here is a Member of Parliament who thinks murdering Tony Blair would be ‘morally justified’ (albeit ‘counterproductive’). He turned up in a Syrian television studio to broadcast that Iraqis fighting the American-led coalition were defending Arab honour:
Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners: Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape.
His ‘Where are the Arab armies?’ cry is an oddly incendiary appeal from a Stop the War campaigner.
Even more damaging than the charges that he is a modern Lord Haw-haw are the allegations that he was directly or indirectly in the pay of Saddam Hussein’s regime. He has already scored victories in the libel courts on this matter, insisting that the incriminating documents supposedly found in the ruins of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad are either forgeries or concoctions of Iraqi corruption. Unquestionably, his finest hour came in Washington DC during the Senate hearings into the abuses of the UN’s Oil for Food programme when he made mincemeat of his inquisitor, Senator Norm Coleman. By the end of the exchange, Galloway’s name probably had higher international recognition than that of Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
But how hot was the trail? Understandably, Morley umpires the evidence rather than leaps in with his own theories. However, just when the facts presented in this book appear to lead us towards concluding that Galloway, whatever his faults, has been the victim of a giant smear, a hastily appended epilogue recasts doubt on his integrity. The findings of the House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges into how his ‘Mariam Appeal’ was funded were sufficiently damaging to ensure his parliamentary suspension — and his renewed protestations that nothing had been proven.
Morley commences this compelling and at times jaw-dropping account of Britain’s most controversial politician by pointing out that a continuous ‘catch me if you can’ game has been played throughout his career in the limelight. Following along the trail, the reader reaches the end of this biography with only one certainty — we have not heard the last of George Galloway. Despite all his efforts at maintaining objective distance, David Morley must surely be wondering whether he will soon be hearing from him personally.
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