‘Gorgeous’ is back... but is George the man to shake up HOLYROOD?
Iconoclast, orator, provocateur (oh, and hypno-birth ‘midwife’), Galloway returns... with a plan to ‘f ix Scotland’
BY his own admission, not much can faze former MP George Galloway, who has spent a lifetime dodging flak over his controversial stances and notably even socked it to a US Senate committee. But helping to home-birth his youngest child during the pandemic appears to have achieved what many of his adversaries failed to do during decades of political bouts – and temporarily rocked him on his heels.
Six months on, with his daughter, Òban, crawling on the floor around his feet and his fourth wife, Dutch-born anthropologist Gayatri, by his side, the 66-year-old admits: ‘I was anxious. For me, it was like the old cowboy pictures, someone delivering the baby at home with towels and hot water.
‘But having a home birth contained no fears for Gayatri. She’s a devotee of hypno-birthing since our other daughter, Órla, was hypno-birthed in hospital. In the end, it went flawlessly. We had a big birthing pool in the bedroom and, thank God, it all went very well. She’s now a boisterous six-month-old.’
However, it is flawless deliveries of a different kind that Dundonian Galloway is better known for – he is often lauded as one of the UK’s greatest orators – and, after a lengthy political career in and out of Westminster, the flamboyant figure has now set his sights on a seat at Holyrood.
There are those who love him and many who loathe him, but any who doubt his determination to succeed do so at their peril – as he has demonstrated over the years with a number of political comebacks after being written off by those in power.
Since moving back to Scotland last summer and setting up home near Dumfries, he says he has seen
I believed in a Scottish parliament... it’s been a ghastly mistake
‘first-hand’ the SNP Government’s ‘corrosive influence’ on a nation once admired for its education and legal systems, with both now dominating the news headlines for all the wrong reasons.
Back in the 1990s, as Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead and, later, Glasgow Kelvin, Galloway remembers writing and campaigning enthusiastically for the re-establishment of a Scottish parliament and the feelings of ‘elation’ when devolution took place in 1999. Now, he says, it has ‘all turned to ashes’.
Last month, he told his hundreds of thousands of social media followers: ‘I believed in a Scottish parliament with all my heart. I gave some of the best years of my life to fighting for it. It was a ghastly mistake. It has ruined Scotland.’
He now says: ‘It’s the saddest tweet I’ve ever made and I can’t tell you how heavy my heart was but I think it’s true. In 1999, I was writing, campaigning and elated when this was achieved and it’s turned to ashes in our mouths.
‘Scotland, by any measure, is less of a country now than it was when we started.’
He cites the ‘failing’ education system and the ‘crisis of credibility’ now facing the Crown Office.
The latter’s impartiality has been brought into question amid allegations of political interference relating to the slow release of evidence to the Holyrood committee investigating the Government’s flawed probe into two harassment claims against Alex Salmond.
The result was a £500,000 bill for the taxpayer for his legal costs.
Galloway says: ‘We had a worldclass education system that people used to boast about. We used to talk about our separate legal system and look what’s become of it.
‘We were a world-class shipbuilder and now we can’t build two ferries. We had a health service to be proud of but now isn’t.
‘We had a media that held the Government to account but the BBC, in particular, seems to have forgotten what the first letter in its acronym stands for... British.
‘They’ll report a cat up a tree before they will report the chief executive of the SNP, husband of the First Minister, has been caught dissembling in front of a parliamentary committee.’
Pointing to the current ‘civil war’ within the SNP, with loyalties split between Nicola Sturgeon and Mr Salmond, and the party’s obsession with a second independence referendum despite the pandemic, Galloway says: ‘If this group of people had somehow succeeded in separating the country back in the independence referendum of 2014, imagine where we would be now?
‘Salmond would have been overthrown in a coup, the media would have been cowed and civil society would have been eroded.
‘We’d now be in a nightmare and probably on the road with our mattress on our back, heading south.’
Galloway, a self-confessed football addict who admits he would watch two pub teams playing in the local park if it meant seeing a game, says it was as he stood watching his son, Toren, now six, in a match that his vision for a pro-Union ‘fightback against the separatists’ was born.
He says: ‘Toren’s a fantastic footballer to watch for his age and teams are already looking at him but, of course, sometimes your attention wanders to your phone and I tweeted that there was a serious lack of effective opposition to separatism in Scotland and when I moved back I was going to get involved.’
Within an hour of posting his views, he claims, there were around 1,000 likes – telling him there was a market for his concept.
It led to the formation of the Alliance4Unity Party, which is hoping its candidates will get a seat in Holyrood via the list system.
He adds: ‘We now have candidates from Right, Left and Centre of all politics and all backgrounds, including a successful businessman, one of Scotland’s youngest advocates, and a retired Black Watch regimental sergeant major.’
He is now calling on all pro-Union supporters across Scotland to give their first vote to the strongest Unionist candidate in their area, regardless of party politics, while lending Alliance4Unity their second vote.
He says: ‘We need a government of national unity in Scotland to recover from 14 years of SNP rule.
‘If they get a majority in May, we’ll be off down the road to Catalonia, at best.
‘In Catalonia, it was only pushing and shoving for the most part, but it could be worse than that.
‘If you want to avoid that fate, then you must vote for the best placed pro-Britain candidate – whether that’s Tory, Labour or Liberal Democrat.’
But with that familiar Galloway edge, he adds: ‘I’m keen to foster as much unity as possible – but, if I could politely say, there has been a tendency among the opposition in Scotland to settle for being
the opposition, to accept that the Nationalists are there, that we’re never going to remove them and, therefore, what counts is whether you are second or third. Well, that is not the way to go.’
With recent polls showing support for independence – and satisfaction with Ms Sturgeon – may have peaked, Galloway says only time will tell if she can survive Mr Salmond’s allegations that she is at the centre of a ‘malicious plan’ to bring about his downfall, and guilty of breaching the Ministerial Code of Conduct by repeatedly misleading parliament.
Two weeks ago, the Crown Office found itself being dubbed the ‘Clown Office’ after being dragged into the row and Lord Advocate James Wolffe, QC, was forced to refute claims of political interference in Scotland’s legal system.
Galloway, a favourite to be elected an MSP on the South Scotland regional list, says: ‘Thank God people are now beginning to see through it all. The performance of the SNP in government has begun to turn the tide. The truth is, if we hadn’t been in the Union, Scotland would not have survived the economic crash of 2008 and the coronavirus calamity.
‘Within the SNP itself, they are fighting like ferrets in a sack.
‘Can Nicola Sturgeon survive? Richard Nixon survived the Watergate disaster but not for long. He won the election in 1972 in a landslide but within a year he was out and I’m sure the same will happen here. No one can survive this level of political disaster.’
Drawing on the similarities of the Labour Party power feud in the early 2000s between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Galloway says: ‘Whether it’s Blair and Brown or Salmond and Sturgeon, it’s ironic because, in both cases, you couldn’t really slip sixpence between them.
‘But it’s classic Freud’s concept of the “narcissism of small differences” [where two people in a close relationship engage in feuds to preserve a feeling of self].
‘Inside parties or organisations, small differences become magnified to an almost unbelievable degree and where there are no real differences discernible to the outside, in the case of Blair and Brown so obviously, inside they feel like the Union versus the Confederates in the American Civil War and will end up slaughtering each other.’
No stranger to conflict himself, Galloway’s strong views on anything and everything have seen him branded throughout his career as a ‘maverick’ and a ‘rebel’ – terms he is said to hate as they imply a ‘flibbertigibbet’ approach to politics.
One sobriquet that did stick early on, however, was ‘Gorgeous George’ – earned after a conference in Greece only weeks after he was elected an MP in 1987. His surprise admission that his trip, to Mykonos, had resulted in him spending ‘lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me’ led to him appearing on all the front pages.
In the fallout, his local party passed a vote of no confidence in him and he narrowly survived to win reselection the following year.
Then, in 1994, he was shown on television apparently praising Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for his ‘courage, strength and indefatigability’. Galloway insisted he was lauding the people of Iraq – not their leader – but few critics were willing to make the distinction.
An ardent anti-war campaigner, he was later expelled from Labour in 2003 over his outspoken criticism of the Iraq war.
He exacted revenge in the 2005 General Election when, in one of the most remarkable results in modern British electoral history, he ousted the incumbent Labour MP to become the new Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, in London, and figurehead of anti-war party Respect.
Famously, he flew to Washington, DC a few days later to confront US Senators over false claims he had profited from Iraq oil dealing.
In a barnstorming performance, he accused them of ‘the mother of all smokescreens’, claiming they were trying to divert attention away from the ‘pack of lies’ that had led to the 2003 invasion.
One of his most bizarre appearances came in January 2006, however, when he appeared on reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, and in one scene pretended to be a purring cat, licking cream from actress Rula Lenska’s cupped hands.
Of that moment, he says: ‘It was 15 years ago – I’ve left it behind.
‘There are some people who can’t get it out of their heads but usually they are just using it in the hope it has some traction.
‘There will certainly be no more reality TV appearances by me.’
But thanks to the show, the interest in his personal life – often as colourful as his political career – increased dramatically.
At the time, he was newly married to his third wife, his Lebanese former researcher Rima Husseini, with whom he has two sons, Zein , 13, and Faris, nine.
His first marriage to teenage sweetheart Elaine Fyffe, with whom he has a daughter, Lucy, had collapsed in 1987, though they did not divorce for another 12 years.
His second, to Palestinian scientist Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, ended in an uncontested divorce, in which she cited unreasonable behaviour.
Now with his fourth wife, who is 30 years his junior, he appears to have finally found happiness. After
Within the SNP, they are fighting like ferrets in a sack. Can Nicola Sturgeon survive?
a whirlwind romance lasting around six months, the pair married in April 2012 in an Amsterdam hotel, less than 48 hours after he won the Labour stronghold of Bradford West with a 10,000-plus majority for his Respect Party.
The couple and their three children now live in a four-bedroom villa, once part of a much larger Regency property and accessed along a beech-lined drive.
Galloway laughs as he shamelessly admits to leaving much of the homeschooling during lockdown to his wife, who is of Indonesian extraction and has a degree in cultural anthropology, from the University of Utrecht, and a Masters in children’s rights from Amsterdam University.
‘It’s even more complicated than it sounds,’ he says, ‘because the children are multi-lingual, so the house has been a babble of Chinese lessons, Indonesian lessons, conversations with their grandparents in Dutch, and the normal English home-school teaching, as well as Arabic.
‘It’s going to be really useful to them when they grow up. Toren can already speak Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Dutch and English.
‘I’m rather older and can speak only one.’
As well as campaigning for the Holyrood election, he has been busily preparing for the premiere next month of his documentary on the mysterious 2003 death of a government chemical weapons expert, Dr David Kelly.
The scientist is alleged to have committed suicide after being exposed as the source of a leaked report, which claimed the Government’s dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, presented as central to the case for war, had been ‘sexed up’.
Galloway says his film, Killing Kelly, proves his death was a ‘reallife murder story’, adding: ‘People want an answer to what has been an enduring mystery.
‘They want to know what happened to Kelly and why. The why is the cover-up and the cover-up is almost always more serious than the original crime.’
It brings him neatly back to the scrutiny the SNP and the Scottish Government is currently under.
He says: ‘A Church of Scotland minister wrote to me recently about the importance of the separation of powers, of checks and balances, something which has been slowly eroded under the SNP.
‘If you destroy checks and balances, then you are on the road to Hell and a one-party state – something which would disfigure the face of Scotland and would be a horrible thing to look upon.’
Warming to his theme, he adds determinedly: ‘It cannot be allowed to happen. We need to fix Scotland. It is falling apart.
‘We need a strategy to remove the SNP from power before it’s too late. If we don’t – and I’m paraphrasing Hugh McIlvanney talking about the late footballer George Best’s decline – it will be, sadly, “like watching a beautiful woman take an open razor across her face”.’
We need a strategy to remove the SNP before it’s too late