The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
‘Gaza George’ washes away his recent failures and Labour rule
From Left-wing prodigy to his win in Rochdale, the firebrand has never been far from the limelight
UNDER the leaden skies of Rochdale, George Galloway may feel that the Lancastrian rain has washed away both his own recent failures and 19 years of Labour rule.
The man once known as Gorgeous George, on account of his extramarital activities, rebranded himself as Gaza George for this bizarrest of by-elections.
Never far from controversy, the 69-year-old Scot stood on a relentlessly pro-Palestinian platform that featured personal attacks on Sir Keir Starmer.
Rochdale is the latest waypoint in a political career that has spanned five decades and never seen Galloway stray far from the national media spotlight.
Born into what he has described as relative poverty in Dundee in 1954, to a trade unionist father and a factory worker mother, he rose to become the secretary of the city’s Labour Party while still in his teens.
A Left-wing political prodigy, he became a member of the Scottish Labour Executive at 20, and two years after that was elected as Dundee’s youngest councillor.
Galloway’s colourful personal life came to the fore for the first time during that election, as a priest denounced him for “living in sin” with his future wife Elaine.
It was in his 20s that he first became associated with the foreign causes that would shape so much of his later career as an MP and campaigner.
He backed Dundee city council when it flew the Palestinian flag, and was involved in the city being twinned with a town in the West Bank in 1980.
In 1983 he became the general secretary of War on Want, a charity that led the way on channelling aid into war-torn provinces of Ethiopia that were hit by famine.
But once again, it was his extra-work activities that garnered the most attention, with rumours quickly spreading about how he was conducting himself.
At a press conference in September 1987, Galloway admitted to having sexual relations with two women at a conference in Athens two years earlier.
The story earned him the nickname in the press of “Gorgeous George” and also cost him his first marriage to Elaine, with the couple separating shortly afterwards.
But while his personal life was thrown into chaos, his political career took a leap forward as he was elected an MP for the first time that same year.
Galloway won the seat of Glasgow Hillhead in the 1987 general election, dethroning the Social Democratic Party’s Roy Jenkins to win the seat back for Labour by 3,251 votes.
He held the constituency in 1992 and then its successor, Glasgow Kelvin, in 1997 and 2001, significantly more than doubling his initial majority in the process. During that time he met Amineh Abu-Zayyad, a Palestinianborn biologist. The pair married in 2000 but divorced nine years later on the grounds of his behaviour.
He already had a son by Rima Husseini, his Lebanese researcher, whom he went on to “marry” in 2005 in a non-legally binding Islamic ceremony.
By then his political career was again mired in controversy over his views on the Iraq War, which prompted Labour to kick him out. The final straw was a TV interview he gave in March 2003, in which he “seemingly invited other Arab nations to fight against the British Army”.
He announced in December that year he would not fight for re-election in Glasgow, and in 2004 he set up the Respect Party, taking in a coalition of Left-wing groups. Galloway went on to fight against Labour in the east London seat of Bethnal
Green and Bow at the 2005 election, unseating its MP Oona King in a shock victory. His campaign was notable for his successful mobilisation of the large Muslim vote, with his opposition to the Iraq War said to have been the key factor in the result.
What followed a year later was the most bizarre episode of his career, when he swapped the bearpit of Westminster for the goldfish bowl of the house. Viewers around the globe watched with horror as, down on his knees, he pretended to be a cat licking imaginary milk from the hands of housemate Rula Lenska.
He lost his seat at the 2010 election when the Tories took power, but was back two years later when he once again seized a Labour heartland seat.
In the 2012 by-election, Galloway defeated his former party in Bradford West, another seat with a sizable Muslim vote. He campaigned for British troops to be withdrawn from Afghanistan immediately and called the result the “Bradford Spring” – a reference to the 2011 Arab Spring.
The same year he married his fourth and current wife, Dutch-Indonesian anthropologist Putri Gayatri Pertiwi, in a civil ceremony at the House of Commons. The couple have had three children, taking his total number of offspring from all four marriages to six – three daughters and three sons.
His three years representing Bradford West were to be his last as an MP to date, with him going on to cede the seat back to Labour at the 2015 general election.
A series of failed campaigns to get re-elected followed. He stood in the 2016 London Mayoral race for Respect, but lost and the party disbanded shortly after. Galloway had a tilt at Manchester Gorton a year later, coming third behind Labour and the Tories, and West Bromwich East in 2019, when he lost his deposit.
After the 2019 election and Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide defeat he founded his current movement, the Workers
Party of Britain, to champion Leftwing populism. He went on to contest the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election under its banner, coming third behind Labour and the Tories but still attracting 22 per cent of the vote.
The same year he also founded a second ill-fated party, All For Unity, to stand candidates in the Scottish elections against independence from the UK. It folded the following year.