Profile George Galloway: George Galloway said Celebrity Big Brother would help him spread his anti-war message. Instead, the British public have rounded on the messenger, writes Shane Hegarty
When the doors of the Celebrity Big Brother house opened on Wednesday night, and George Galloway stepped forward to be greeted by flashbulbs, jeers and hand-painted insults, there was a moment when his face visibly dropped, his moustache wilted and his confidence shrivelled. John McCririck, the racing pundit and former Big Brother contestant, later described it as a Ceausescu moment. Galloway had primed himself for adulation, only to stand above the crowd and find that his waving did not mute their howling.
Galloway quickly fixed his smile and continued forward. But three weeks after entering the television reality show it seemed that he had finally realised what everyone else had known for some time: it was a very bad idea.
The irony is that he had entered the house while at the peak of his popularity.
This was "Gorgeous George", the pugnacious anti-war activist who had become a champion of the left for not only facing down the accusations of a US senatorial committee but also rhetorically pulverising his accusers. Here was a man whose popularity had withstood fawning encounters with Saddam Hussein and who had successfully sued the Daily Telegraph for libel over alleged links to the oil-for-food scandal, a man whose anti-war stance saw him expelled from the British Labour Party in 2003, but who started a new party, Respect, and returned to defeat one of Tony Blair's most able MPs.
Galloway had gone into the Big Brother house to promote his politics and reach out to a younger audience. Here was the chance to speak to five million people every night and to boost the anti-war cause. His constant references to his own intelligence and eloquence, and to his fellow housemates' admiration of him, reveal why he believed his personality would win over the British public.
Instead, he came across as arrogant, vain, petty, abusive and hypocritical. He proclaimed himself a defender of the weak, but he did not intervene when other house members were being bullied and he mocked Michael Barrymore's alcoholism. He said he wanted to reach out to youth, but he rowed repeatedly with the younger residents of the house. He will be remembered not for political wisdom but for an extraordinarily cringeworthy sequence in which he pretended to be a cat, purring and licking imaginary milk from the hands of actor Rula Lenska. Or the night he wore a leotard and acted out, through the medium of robotic dance, "the emotion of bewilderment when a small puppy refuses to come to heel". Oddly, it was the same expression he had when he left the house.
And ultimately, a man who had defeated the New Labour electoral machine, been successfully litigious and embarrassed a phalanx of American senators was brought down by the combined might of an indie-band singer, a former glamour model and a Welsh joke-rapper whose own mother calls him Maggot.
Quite what all this says about the British public is another matter altogether. It has had plenty of reasons to reject Galloway before Celebrity Big Brother. He has, as his critics point out at every possible opportunity, kept far worse company.
SO FREQUENT A visitor to Iraq was he during the early 1990s that he earned the nickname "The Honourable Member for Baghdad Central". He met Saddam Hussein in 1994 and, addressing the dictator, said: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." Although he has maintained that he was saluting the Iraqi people, he spent the Christmas of 1999 with Saddam's deputy, Tariq Aziz, and new footage emerged this week of a meeting that year with Saddam's son, Uday. Galloway and the deceased rapist, murderer and torturer are seen joking about thinning hair.
Galloway interviewed Saddam for the Mail on Sunday in 2002, and wrote of the dictator's gentle handshake and love of Quality Street chocolates.
Despite campaigning against Saddam's regime during the 1970s, and more recently describing Saddam as a "bestial dictator", he always defended these meetings as necessary, claiming that he was there to work on behalf of Iraqi people suffering under international sanctions.
But just as he never shied away from excoriating the US and British governments, he has been equally obsequious about some dodgy leaders and regimes.
Syria is "lucky to have Bashar al-Assad as her president," he told the Syria Times, referring to a man whose government has been implicated in state assassination and which continues to jail dissidents.
After the 1999 coup in Pakistan, Galloway wrote that "in poor Third World countries like Pakistan, politics is too important to be left to petty squabbling politicians . . . Only the armed forces can really be counted on to hold such a country together". (Ironically, when his Celebrity Big Brother housemates last week voted that Galloway be denied a chance to nominate for eviction, he fumed that he would "never forget" being denied his democratic rights.) Tacked to the political left since his early teens, he has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest catastrophe of my life". And given that he first grew his moustache at the age of 15 to mimic his hero, Che Guevara, and that he enjoys a fat Havana cigar, it is no surprise that he praises Fidel Castro's Cuba.
Despite that, he describes himself as centre-left, only considered extreme because the political landscape has narrowed so much. He actually deviates from some key issues of the left. A Catholic, he is anti-abortion and opposed the decision to let Terri Schiavo die.
CONTROVERSY HAS BEEN a constant companion to the 51-year-old. In the 1970s, he managed to convince the Labour Party in his home town of Dundee to twin with the Palestinian town of Nablus. The PLO flag flew over Dundee's municipal buildings and, as part of the twinning ceremony, the Mayor of Nablus was presented with a crate of whisky and a kilt. It was a farcical choice of presents for a teetotal Muslim whose legs had been blown off in a terrorist explosion.
As general secretary of the War on Want charity from 1983 to 1987, Galloway dramatically increased its revenue but was later accused of misusing his expense account by staying in expensive hotels while on foreign trips. He was cleared of dishonesty, although he would always be dogged by accusations of high living.
Having won his first seat, in Glasgow Hillhead in 1987, he quickly hit the tabloid front pages. During the War on Want probe, he said that while on a trip to a Greek conference he had "spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me". Galloway's second wife, Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, a Muslim Palestinian biologist whom he married in 2000, filed for divorce last year on the grounds that her husband, a self-confessed ladies' man in his youth, had cheated on her.
However, the press has sometimes been overly keen to embellish this reputation. The Sunday Telegraph once claimed that Galloway had staggered out of a Scotch Whisky Association function and assaulted two women and a policeman, before being arrested, convicted, fined and then sacked from the Labour front bench. It turned out to be a different George entirely. The teetotal Galloway accepted an out-of-court settlement.
In 2004, Times columnist Julie Burchill admitted that she had "wrongly accused him of breaking into an ex-girlfriend's flat, smashing it up and spitefully stealing some knickers".
HOWEVER, HIS GREATEST legal triumph came last year when he sued successfully for libel after the Daily Telegraph reported that documents had emerged in Baghdad purportedly proving that he had used his charity, the Mariam Appeal, to launder money from Saddam's regime during the oil-for-food scandal.
This was a system whereby Saddam gave oil vouchers to supporters around the world, particularly to prominent people who had challenged the sanctions regime. These vouchers could then be sold on to oil companies or traders at a profit, but the traders were expected to return a "surcharge" to Iraqi accounts.
This week, hours before Galloway's eviction from the Big Brother house, the newspaper lost an appeal.
But this issue has not died. Galloway may have turned in a stunning performance during US Senate hearings last May, denouncing his accusers with bravura, but the investigation still claimed that his former wife had received proceeds from the oil-for-food programme.
Although Galloway maintains that there has been an attempt to frame him, while he was a guest in the Big Brother house the UK's Serious Fraud Office was considering whether to launch a full investigation into his alleged links to the scandal.
Meanwhile, there may be a parliamentary inquiry into whether Galloway broke rules by not declaring benefits received from the Iraqi regime.
But first he must face the public. Having won his seat in London's Bethnal Green and Bow thanks largely to the support of its Muslim population, his antics in a red leotard have not been received well by some within that community. Because the House of Commons was sitting, he missed votes on issues important to his constituents. And if those people needed potholes fixing they could only see their MP by turning on a television set.
A website, Get Back to Work, George, kept a running total of how much taxpayers' money Galloway's Big Brother jaunt was costing. When he was finally evicted on Wednesday, the figure on the website had reached £3,358.25, only for Galloway to claim that he had not been paid his parliamentary salary during his time on television.
How much this misadventure has cost George Galloway's reputation will soon become clearer.
TheGalloway File
Who is he?
Anti-war politician and thorn in Tony Blair's side
Why is he in the news?
Evicted from the Celebrity Big Brother house on Wednesday night, he emerged to jeers from the public and more questions about his alleged role in the Iraq oil-for-food scandal
Most appealing characteristic?
Anyone who watched him for three weeks on Celebrity Big Brother will know that it's hard to find one
Least appealing characteristic?
Praises himself even more than he has some of the world's most corrupt regimes
Most likely to say?
"I salute my own courage, strength and indefatigability"
Least likely to say?
"I don't regret doing Celebrity Big Brother"