Gwyn Topham, Available for everyone, funded by readers. They are complete strangers. "Blood is thicker than water." Mr McCartney accused Mr Galloway of "a premediated smear on the quality and independence of the inquiry members".

Then we moved to Millbank and there was a John Smith suite in Millbank and now we've moved again and there's not even a John Smith chair. Doesn't it ever get lonely being George Galloway. Which is not to say that he's not a brutal dictator. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. There’s only one George Galloway. In the last few days, something like 25 Iraqi demonstrators have been shot dead by American forces.

Iraq is the most Anglophile of all the Arab countries with their HP sauce, their Quality Street, their red London buses and three-pin plugs. I believe in every word of it." So you have a small part in this legal action I'm involved in. So I think I was always slightly unusual." I later discover that you can't get much more "top of the label" than Kenzo. "Too old now, mate. Does he think the name did for him as a serious politician? It should come as no surprise; this is the way they do things. ", The British public may have been astonished that the Iraqis were scoffing Quality Street, but Galloway says that just reflects our ignorance.

Heroes and family. Galloway has always claimed he was addressing the Iraqi public rather than the leader, and that it was most infelicitous to use "you" instead of "youse". That's one of the ironies of the whole thing. "Labour will rue the day that they took this decision, as they rued the day to rig party elections in London to get rid of Ken Livingstone." He accused Mr Blair of being "a conspirator and a liar". The CSM documents had me on the payroll of Saddam more than one year before I ever set foot in Iraq or met any Iraqi official; they had me collecting $3m in cash on a day I was sitting here with you in my office. When not defending himself against the senate report's allegations, Mr Galloway attacked the morality of the post-Gulf war sanctions on Iraq and the wisdom of the 2003 US-led invasion. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe.". He really has done everything that he can to ensure the reelection of the most rightwing fundamentalist American president the country has ever seen. On the way out, I spot a letter on the wall that Harold Pinter sent him after he'd written an article lambasting the government. The account may have been widely ridiculed, but Galloway is probably the only British politician who would be granted such an audience. Galloway is known for his suits, for his fat cigars and expensive cars. "John came into the room clutching his tray, picking his things. "I am on the anti-imperialist left." "There would be disagreements within a family whereas the people running New Labour have nothing to do with our family. He smiles, and tells me about his dad, an old-fashioned trade unionist, somewhat to the right of him. But the party chairman, Ian McCartney, insisted the disciplinary action against Mr Galloway had been a unique case prompted by his refusal to apologise for urging the killing of British troops in conflict. I could have said he had a brutish handshake, but he didn't. "Mr Blair's response to the disaster of the war is to attack those who stood against the war and to root them out of British politics. We first spoke on the 14 January, which is an auspicious date. He revealed how Saddam had offered him Quality Street chocolates, told him how much he admired British buses. Young children in Iraq are throwing rocks at occupation forces and receiving volleys of automatic fire in return. I don't think they can even if Mr Blair had a Damascene conversion tomorrow, and - heaven forbid - had second thoughts.

At the 1987 general election, Galloway was elected as the MP for Glasgow Hillhead gaining the seat for Labour from the SDP defeating Roy Jenkins with a majority of 3,251 votes. The three were selected from a 12-strong panel elected by party conference. Party officials will anxiously wait to see whether Mr Galloway's removal turns him into a martyr and focus for resistance, or, as they suspect, he finds himself unable to rally support outside a narrow spectrum of the left.

"I certainly feel I have far more friends in the Labour party than I had four or five years ago. "Our headquarters were called John Smith house. Perhaps. "They are rank and file members elected by party conference who were sitting because of an unprecedented level of complaints by party members and supporters," he said. If John Smith had lived, we would now be in the fifth year of a Labour government. He told the Guardian: "This is not an issue of free speech. I said that when Baghdad falls, as fall it must given it's being assailed by two such superpowers, that will not be the beginning of the end but just the end of the beginning. Wed 21 May 2003 15.01 EDT I'd be lying if I said there was a way they could undo this damage. He was found guilty of inciting Arabs to fight British troops, inciting British troops to defy orders, threatening to stand against Labour candidates and backing an anti-war candidate in Preston against the offical Labour candidate. "He didn't have a chocolate either, which is interesting. Is that a designer label? Years ago, he was regarded as a future cabinet member. Until 1991, Iraq was the only Arab country he'd not visited. I think that was because we were both Labour people.". Galloway, also known as Gorgeous George, is beautifully coordinated. The classic case was at War on Want, which he raised from an unknown, impecunious outfit to being a major charity.

Cracking article. We pass on to Che Guevara, whom he calls his ultimate hero. All the bright young things were sitting upright hoping that he would come and sit beside them. He says his father, God rest him, was the same, and what's wrong with a little self-respect? He says he would have loved to have used whatever influence he has to help Blair and Bush to a resolution, but he's convinced it's too late now. John Lennon sits at a piano wearing his "People for peace" armband.

This is precisely the pattern of everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories. My own demand is for the withdrawal of foreign occupation forces, for an Arab League force to enter the country to help stabilise the security situation and to proceed immediately to free and fair elections - not a stooge, hand-picked government. Basically the Labour party was hijacked. George Galloway joined the Labour Party at the age of 13 and became a Member of Parliament in 1987. First published on Wed 21 May 2003 15.01 EDT, I hope Mr Blair is proud of himself. But if you ask me if that's going to happen, there's zero chance of that happening. Formerly. "It's famous, but not top of the label." Yes, but surely Saddam isn't as cuddly as he made him out to be in his interview? He predicted the decision would backfire in Scotland and in the Muslim community. That is the difference. The Americans are there to occupy the country for good, and they will until they are driven from the country. ", So what point was Smith making by not mentioning it? It takes Galloway back to war with Iraq. ", He promised: "The anti-war movement is not going to go away and we will continue to hold him to account for a war crime and a blunder of extraordinary magnitude.". His friends also accept that he is unusually accident-prone. ", What's Churchill doing there, with his two-fingered salute - hardly your classic leftie icon? I could have said that he was bombastic and loved the sound of his own voice, but that was not true. Even your friends say you're on the vain side, I say. They are here today, and will be gone tomorrow.". But I don't think I ever looked like a traditional politician. George Galloway, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin, was yesterday expelled from the Labour party after what he claimed was a kangaroo court hearing designed to root out honest opponents of the war in Iraq.

Now that's first a perversion of history, and second a great insult to his memory, and to those who loved him. Meanwhile, many of his enemies admit that he is smart, one of the most eloquent speech-makers in the commons, and charming. Yesterday he said that soldiers had a right to disobey illegal orders underwritten in international law since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders after the second world war. He's Saddam Hussein's sole friend in Westminster, believes the collapse of the Soviet Union was a tragedy and thinks his party has been hijacked. He was not expelled for his anti-war views, but for going unsolicited on an international television programme and inciting forces to cross the border and kill our brothers and sisters in the British army.". ", Sure, he says, they would certainly have their rows as they always did, but that's politics. Of all the people in the tearoom, in the epicentre of this row, the day after the bollocking, John Smith came down and sat opposite me to the evident dismay of the other suitors, and proceeded to sit with me for an hour, which ended with tears running down both our cheeks and laughter as Smith went through, for the umpteenth time, his court circuit stories. And because he was a person with poetry in his soul. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life.

Mr Galloway said he will stand as an independent at the next election, and has not ruled out forcing an early byelection in his constituency.

Husband, father of five children, Scottish of Irish background, honorary Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian… Since 1991 he has lived with Amineh Abu-Zayyad, a Palestinian scientist. There is no doubt that there are forged documents about me in Baghdad. Trouble has followed him most places he has gone. Doesn't he feel out of place in the Labour party? "Well if that means do I take care to look my best before I leave the house in the morning, if that's vanity, then I'm guilty of it." He is a brutal dictator."

"I never eat sweets, my dear. He says he feels rage - a word he likes - at the way Smith has been airbrushed out of Labour history. I believe in telling the truth as I find it. He says that people are desperate for politicians with a bit of life to them, and that is why Ken Livingstone triumphed as London's mayor. Mr Galloway said: "This was a politically motivated kangaroo court whose verdict had been written in advance in the best tradition of political show trials. "This is a foolish analysis of politics," he says sharply. I was a known opponent of the Iraqi regime because I was with the left, and the communists in Iraq who were shattered and sent into orbit in the late 70s. He was expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 by Tony Blair over the Iraq War, but subsequently elected back to Parliament twice as an Independent.

The pale blue eyes match the pale blue shirt and suit.

I ask him whether he's ever been tempted to toe the line. What a man, he says. As you read this, he should have arrived in Iraq with a handful of journalists on his latest mission to convince the world that Iraqis are human beings too. He stops. The artist formerly known as Gorgeous George."

Just look at the numbers who are anti-war, who are coming over to his side, who are telling him he was right all along, he says. No, there must be free and fair immediate elections, supervised by the Arab League.

However much devastation Saddam wreaks on his people, he says, it will be be nothing compared to war. After a two-day hearing, he was acquitted on only one of the five charges he faced: urging voters in Plymouth not to back Labour. Galloway smiles when I mention it. Mr Galloway won immediate support from Tony Benn, a character witness at the hearing. In recent years, the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin has become Britain's champion of the Arab world. "I was a very close friend of John Smith who had always been on the right of the party and I'd always been on the left, yet we were close friends. No, I never considered myself gorgeous.