George Galloway’s awfulness

George Galloway’s awfulness falls into two categories. First there is the serial dictator-licking. This is a man so profligate, not to say promiscuous, in his affections that he has in succession fawned over Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Then there is the personal vileness — pretending to be a dirty cat on live television (still, after all these years, impossible to watch), explaining his curious notions of when rape is, and is not, rape, and using vulgarly dismissive terms about disabled people.

The strange thing about this is that though the former is, I suggest, in the great scheme of things the worse stuff, it is always the latter that gets him into trouble. So, for instance, he has felt compelled to issue a rare back-track for the recent ‘window-licker’ comments but has never done so for his support of numerous oppressive dictators.

I suspect the same will be true of his latest appearance. The video above of his lucrative first programme on a Syrian propaganda station — is simply unbelievable. With a weirdly newly-adopted Arabic-inflection he berates a young man in his audience for not supporting jihad enough in the places that George would appear to want it in. The only feeling that could possibly be stranger than that of a British voter watching a British MP doing this is what young Syrians and their contemporaries across the Middle East must feel when watching it.