The pied piper of politics retains the mollusc’s flair for squirting salt at anyone who tries to pick him up

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WITH a creak from the vaults and a swirl of graveyard sulphur there he was back in our midst, George Galloway, the pied piper of British politics. He was representing a different party and a different constituency, the fifth so far in his career. He even had a different wife in tow from last time I looked. This one is a demure Dutch-Indonesian about half his age.

Mr Galloway, 69, swore the oath in the Commons. The chamber reacted as if someone had let off a frightful pong. Swearing-in ceremonies are usually accompanied by hear-hears of congratulation. Not this time. Mr Galloway entered and the air seemed to be sucked from the room.

He grasped the Bible and the silence was so total, so disapproving, or so envious, you could have heard a frog’s ribbit.

Under a rule from 1688, new arrivals must be escorted by two sitting members. For want of other volunteers, the Father of the House, Peter Bottomley, agreed to be one. Jeremy Corbyn was going to be the other but, classically, got his diary in a muddle and was double-booked.

Had Neale Hanvey (Alba, Kirkcaldy) not stepped in to do the honours, Rochdale’s new member might have been barred. No matter what you think of last week’s result, that would have been a scandal.

It took a while for Mr Galloway to sign the parliamentary register. Maybe he was submitting dietary preferences (raw liver) or ordering a wake-up call. Throughout all this, the Commons watched in utter, sullen noiselessness. That husky, almost cigarettey voice hypnotised them.

Fifteen minutes later, in his black trilby, the great recluse vouchsafed his thoughts to some 50 reporters outside the St Stephen’s entrance. He seemed shorter and less springy but maybe that was age playing its tricks on both of us.

Was he wearing make-up? The skin was more sallow than the perma-tan of old. The eyes? A little milky. But the old capacity for trouble-making was undimmed.

He retains the mollusc’s flair for squirting salt at anyone who tries to pick him up. A bouffant BBC Bertie asked about Hamas and was told his question was ‘dripping with imperial condescension’.

GB News, represented by a cheery lad, was accused of pumping out anti-Muslim stuff. An innocent from Good Morning

Britain was given the bum’s rush. I do believe the Mail may even have come in for some minor treatment, too. We will probably survive.

Behind him, expressionless, stood his wife. Also: His press aide, a bearded, not unspherical chap who may be related to the late James Robertson- Justice. He was wreathed in adoration. Mrs Galloway may want to beware.

Discussion ranged from Lancashire postal codes and Rochdale football club to, more lengthily, the Israel-Hamas war. Events in Gaza were compared to the Holocaust. He accused Rishi Sunak of ‘trying to whip up Islamophobic fervour’. He promised to unseat Angela Rayner.

‘I speak for a very large number of people’ and ‘it has been an uneventful day because no one threw a tomato at me, rotten or otherwise’.

PLENTy were flying in the other direction, mind you. The more he picked fights, the more he enjoyed it. He proclaimed that he himself was the envoy of sweetness and light. A priestly pause, then ‘I pray for the social peace of our country’. His lips, mauve as on a fresh corpse, parted in a leer. Gargoyles grinned down from parliament’s crumbling walls.

Within sight of the equestrian statue of Richard the Lionheart, he averred: ‘The next election will be about Muslims.’ What, in Herefordshire?

I think I am right that there are more people in Britain who went to public school than there are who follow Islam. But the fluency of his patter, the Trumpian insistence of those milky eyes, was remarkable alongside the dullness of most of today’s political performers.

A gust of wind blew. Mr Galloway had to hold on to his hat. We may need to hold on to ours, too.