When you tell people you work in or around politics, and if you can break through the initial contempt or boredom, one type of question tends to surface first: ‘what is so-and-so really like?’ There are three answers to that question, only one of them good:
- ‘They’re exactly how they come across on telly‘, which — unless you’re the likes of Boris Johnson or William Hague — is usually not a compliment. It tends to mean the individual is the kind of wooden, humourless, unthinking, battery hen politician that makes the public yawn, scream or both;
- ‘They’re a total (uncomplimentary word)’. That word might refer to their private behaviour towards colleagues, staff or civil servants; their obsession with self-adoration and self-promotion; or their excessive indulgence in various vices, from frequent hard liquor to casual sexual harassment; or
- ‘You’d really change your mind about them if you met them in private‘. This is always the hardest response to give because it challenges people’s deepest perceptions and most inbuilt prejudices. I know it to be true of individuals like Ed Balls, Gordon Brown and Tom Watson, all individuals who bear no relation in private to their public caricature.
The harder thing is having contact with individuals from outside Labour and realising I have made the same mistake with them: the likes of Grant Shapps, Michael Gove, Liam Fox and Douglas Carswell. They won’t enjoy being grouped together, but they are all overflowing with civility, kindness, good humour and that most attractive trait in politicians: a touch of self-awareness and internal reflection.
This brings me to George Galloway. Over the last ten years, he has become one of the best-known political figures, and one of the most comfortably-caricatured. Look at the reaction to his announcement today that he will stand as a candidate to succeed Boris Johnson as London Mayor: a surge of anger from the left; a wave of mockery from the right.
His announcement fit the iconoclastic, attention-seeking, self-promoting, left-dividing, carpet-bagging caricature to a tee. And let’s be clear: George has been happy to play up to that image when it suits him in the chase for anti-establishment votes and YouTube hits. But the George Galloway I have briefly come to know in the space of a few encounters on the fringes of TV studios is a totally different character.
He is no less passionate or committed to his cause than in public, but comes across as a much more thoughtful, generous and downright likeable man than people understand, far happier giving compliments than receiving them, and — above all — one of the best analysts I have ever heard of the challenge facing the left in Britain, and what it must do to respond.
Galloway has made a latter-day career of defying expectations, from his bold and correct call on the lies that led to the Iraq War and the horrors that have followed to his shock victory in the 2012 Bradford East by-election, which — in retrospect — can be called a foretaste of how Labour totally misread the polling signals ahead of the general election.
He may yet defy expectations in the disruptive effect he can have on the London mayoral election, especially when he is given a chance to let rip in what — last time round — were entirely anodyne debates among the candidates. But to start, he should defy his caricature in the way he has done whenever I have met him.
If people saw the real George Galloway I have seen, my goodness, they would start to change their mind about him. And in that scenario, Labour London needs to watch out. They didn’t see Nicola Sturgeon coming, and the blinkers are on again.
Damian McBride is a former special adviser to Gordon Brown
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