Galloway, 57, weds fourth bride, 27
... and like so many of her generation, she loves to post images of her life online
AFTER his sensational by-election victory of last week, he might have been expected to pause for breath.
Instead, three-times-married ‘Gorgeous George’ Galloway flew to Amsterdam and took a fourth bride – a woman 30 years his junior.
The ceremony, in a hotel, happened less than 48 hours after the MP took the Labour stronghold of Bradford West with an astonishing 10,000-plus majority for his Respect party.
And it was a mere four months since his third wife had given birth to a son – their second.
The latest bride of 57-year-old Mr Galloway is anthropologist Putri Gayatri Pertiwi. At 27 she is two years younger than his first child, Lucy, a mother of two.
The latest bizarre development in the life of the flamboyant politician was confirmed
‘An old-fashioned scoop on your hands’
yesterday at his bride’s office in Amsterdam, where he was at her side.
The former Miss Pertiwi, a consultant with a Dutch research firm, had earlier been listed as his fourth wife on his Wikipedia site. ‘ Yes, it is true that George and I have married,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘ The service was on Saturday in a hotel in Amsterdam.’
Mr Galloway then took over the phone and added: ‘Well, it looks like you have an oldfashioned scoop on your hands.’
The former Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead went on: ‘Putri is an anthropologist and child rights specialist and we have known each other for about six months.
‘The next few months will be interesting because I will be working back in Westminster as an MP. But we will be moving around between London, Bradford and Amsterdam.’
Last night Mr Galloway arrived with his bride at his £1.4million house in Streatham, south London. She smiled and said: ‘Thank you’ when she was congratulated on the wedding.
The fourth Mrs Galloway is a Dutch-born researcher of Indonesian extraction who took a degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Utrecht. She also studied in Amsterdam before taking a masters degree in children’s rights at Amsterdam University.
She is widely travelled and spent 2006 studying at the University of Vermont where she concentrated on anthropology, women’s studies and child development.
She has spent the past three years working with Emic Research in Amsterdam.
It is believed she got to know Mr Galloway through his ‘Viva Palestina’ charity and this year accompanied him on a trip to Indonesia.
The pair attended a series of meetings in January including a visit to the offices of the Red Crescent, where Mr Galloway met three Palestinian doctors receiving training in Indonesia. Although his bride was born in Holland, her father is understood still to live and work in Jakarta – the capital city on the north-west coast of Java.
In recent years Mr Galloway’s new wife has been a voracious blogger and tweeter. On occasions she has used the name ‘Java princess’ as an online identity while last week she re-tweeted Mr Galloway’s own Twitter message when he won the Bradford by-election and stated: ‘By the Grace of God we have won the most sensational victory in British political history.’
Mr Galloway, a cigar- smoking, teetotal Roman Catholic, is now understood to be looking for a constituency base in Bradford.
Born in 1954 in ‘an attic in a slum tenement in the Irish quarter of Dundee’, he first worked for Michelin tyres before becoming chairman of the Scottish Labour Party at the age of only 26. After winning the Glasgow Hillhead seat in 1987 – ousting the former Labour minister Roy Jenkins, then a leader of the SDP – he soon earned the nickname ‘Gorgeous George’ after he was asked about a conference he had attended on the island of Mykonos.
The married MP replied: ‘I travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece.’
In 1994, three years after the first Gulf War, Mr Galloway caused outrage when he was filmed telling Saddam Hussein: ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.’
He was finally sacked by the Labour Party in 2003 after accusations that he had called on foreign troops to attack British soldiers in Iraq. After founding the Respect party in 2005 he won the Bethnal Green and Bow seat in London’s East End.
The MP invited ridicule in 2006 when he appeared on Celebrity Big Brother wearing a cat suit and pretended to lick cream from actress Rula Lenska’s hands. He lost his East London seat in 2010.