georgecuriousFamed for his antics on Celebrity Big Brother, out spoken and often-controversial politician George Galloway talks candidly to Buzz about the man behind the orator and his Holyrood ambitions

Words & Photograph David Walsh

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22 Summer 2011

T he old maxim warns that you should never judge a book by its cover, regard-less of whether or not it is mauled and mottled around the edges. Prejudge-ment is often unavoidable,

particularly when meeting someone whose reputation precedes them, and my host is by no means an exception to the rule. Collected on the corner of Glasgow’s Waterloo St and whisked off to a luxury pad hugging the River Clyde, the similarity to a rendezvous with a mafia kingpin was yet to lose its lustre in my imagination. The figure that greets me at the top of the stairs though, does so with a frank smile and a firm handshake, and although he may hold himself with formidable posture, he holds no illusions of regal self-importance.

He has been called many things through-out his career, but mobster and self-impor-tant are not traits traditionally attributed to

George Galloway. The latter would certainly not sit well with the would-be msp. His political pursuits have been spent defending those in turmoil or oppressed both abroad and at home. In exile from Glaswegian politics for the last five years, Galloway is back in his native Scotland in the midst of his latest political comeback. On the familiar streets of Glasgow, he is currently orches-trating his campaign to represent the city in the Scottish Parliament.

Although the former Labour and Respect mp has spent more than 20 years as a parliamentarian in London, Galloway’s politics were never confined to the corridors of Westminster or his former constituents in Glasgow. In more recent years, he was per-haps the most enraged and outspoken critic of Blair’s decision to invade Iraq. In more recent months, he has voiced his support for the peoples of North Africa in throwing off their shackles of autocracy. One only need look at his heroes to understand what stokes

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the fiery temperament of this infamous Scot.“I think it is important to have heroes,

important to realise the importance of he-roic leadership figures, but of course a leader would be nothing without the led. You wouldn’t be a leader if no one followed you and Guevara was one of the greatest men of the twentieth century no doubt about that.”

As many of us do in paying homage to the idols of our youth, Galloway imitated the style of the folkloric figure of the Cuban revolution, Che Guevara, by growing out a moustache. He has also amassed a unique collection of original photographs of the revolutionary leader, and during his brief time living in the Cuba’s capital Havana, he was the neighbour of Guevara’s son Camillo. ‘El Che’ is someone who has arguably im-pacted on his political outlook.

“Guevara, through his internationalism, was a great inspiration for me. As I say in speeches, he was not a Cuban but he was ready to give his life for the Cuban revolu-tion. He was not an African but he went to the Congo to fight alongside Patrice Lumumba. And he was not Bolivian but he gave his life in Bolivia. He did not recognise national boundaries. He fought, and really fought – not just rhetorically fought – for freedom in different continents, different countries none of which was his own.”

In much the same way, Galloway flexed his muscles getting involved in campaigns out-side the borders of his home country. One of the first campaigns that he became involved in supported those touched by the effects of the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, he was one of the first Britons to travel to apartheid South Africa. Working underground as an agent of the African National Congress, he travelled undercover across the country distributing

funds and information to undermine the regime of the then-segregated nation.

Unlike his hero Guevara, Galloway is of more lowly stock. Nevertheless, politics too coursed through his family’s veins and set the trajectory for the young would-be politician’s life. Born in Dundee, the infant George was raised in a very political house-hold by his factory worker and trade union-ist father and his Irish immigrant mother. His political career began in earnest as an Election Day activist, distributing Labour Party leaflets to prospective voters outside the polling station as a six-year old child.

The importance of being a parent himself is something that is visibly etched on his fatigued features. The demands of a long political career beginning to toll; time with family is a precious commodity which is felt no less so in political households. “You have to make time. It would be easy not to but I do. Although I’m missing a family get-together this day with my daughter and her children and my own son and I’m feeling a little painful about that but my son sent me a voice package on here of some of the chat-ter – a sort of message from him.”

He gestures toward his iPhone lying on the table in front of him as he laments being elsewhere for the occasion. The tone and tempo of his speech slows and falters as he tries to sound his words, a rare glimpse of the man usually masked behind polished and impassioned oratory. “I think that people who can’t find it within themselves to spend time with their families are probably people best avoided.”

He evidently holds his own parents in high esteem, encouragement from whom would one day see him become the darling of the Labour Party. Such was his meteoric

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24 Summer 2011

rise that Galloway was the youngest to hold many of the prestigious offices of the party. “I was always the youngest ever this or that; I was the youngest ever constituency secre-tary, the youngest ever constituency chair-man, the youngest ever full-time organiser of the Labour Party. I was the youngest chairman of the Labour Party in Scotland and sadly I’m not now the youngest ever anything.”

He perhaps always looked mature for his age. This goes some way to explain how as a dynamic teenager, he was able to enter the political fray at just 13, succeeding in joining the Labour Party two years before he was of age. And so began a lifelong love affair with Labour until their acrimonious parting of company with his expulsion from the party in 2003.

Given his infamous career thus far, hav-ing been summoned before the US Senate and berated Prime Ministers across the floor of the House of Commons, does he ever feel exposed being a lone wolf? “No I don’t feel vulnerable. First of all, I’m not physically afraid of anything and secondly, I don’t want anything from the powerful. And thirdly, I don’t have anything that is of any importance to me that they can take away from me, so that leaves me as an indepen-dent man. Or as Burns would put it, ‘A man of independent mind looks and laughs at all that,’ and that’s what I do.”

As an independent man, Galloway certainly holds no high regard for people’s opinions of him. His appearance on Ce-lebrity Big Brother was testament to that sentiment. Up close and personal as actress Rula Lenska’s pet feline or frolicking in a skin-tight red leotard with housemate Pete Burns, Galloway has generated a multi-fac-eted public image. Can he be taken seriously by the Glasgow electorate as a candidate?

“The people of Glasgow will know that they’ve got somebody in parliament repre-senting them if they vote for me. I can’t say that they can really say that now. Glasgow has lost out badly in the era of the Scottish parliament. Despite Labour being in power

youtube moments

Perhaps in his most notorious television »appearance, Galloway went on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 where he infamously pretended to be Rula Lenska’s pet feline. “Would you like me to be the cat?” he purred. Meow.

Having won the seat of Bethnal Green and »Bow from Labour incumbent Oona King in 2005, Galloway walked off a live interview with Jeremy Paxman after he persistently asked the victor whether he was happy to have gotten rid of one of the only black female MPs in parliament.

While » mp for Glasgow Kelvin, Galloway was arrested in 2001 along with jailed perjurer Tommy Sheridan at the Faslane naval base on the River Clyde while protesting against Trident nuclear weapons.

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for most of the time and despite Glasgow being loyal to Labour for the best part of a hundred years, Glasgow has achieved virtually nothing out of the devolution era. Edinburgh has done very well.”

The view over the Clyde from our vantage point is dominated by new develop-ments of office and apartment blocks, none too dissimilar to the one we are sat in. The old and antiquated industrial landscape has been reclaimed to replace the docks and shipyards of a by-gone era with steel and glass structures of the future like many cities in the uk. To Galloway, this modern urban scene is tantamount to neglect, referring to the river as a mu-seum rather than the bustling hub of empire it once was; “the work-shop of the workshop of the world.”

“I can’t say I’ll get anybody a job or get a pothole filled or get a school built, but I can definitely promise that I’ll fight as hard as I possibly can for all those things and I think people know that if I’m fighting for something, everybody knows about it.”

As former Labour mp for both Glasgow Hillhead and Glasgow Kelvin, Galloway was a protagonist in putting forward the case for Scottish devolution at Westminster. But he is quick to voice his disappointment with the end product in our interview. He is not only scathing about the calibre of politicians elected to Holyrood but also the key policies of the Scottish Labour Party; the banning of Buckfast, mandatory jail terms for carrying knives, to name a few. Time obviously is not the great healer it purports to be.

“I am standing to put a bit of steel in the Labour ranks, to add a bit of speech-making class to the deliberations of Holyrood and

to hold Alex Salmond properly to account. Alex Salmond is head and shoulders above the others in the Scottish parliament, but he’s not that great. He only looks great because the rest of them are so small and if I get in, I’ll be able to go toe-to-toe with him in a more meaningful way I think.”

I get the feeling that sparring with the First Minister will be more of a challenge in terms of time restraints than having fodder

to fire at him. His ha-bitual brute and incen-diary self-confidence comes to the fore as he relishes the prospect of turning both bar-rels on Salmond. He points out some of the self-imposed rules the Scottish parliament has imposed on itself, including limiting three-minute speeches. “If they try to impose that on me, I’ll be in difficulty. I shall have to speak for three or four minutes in the chamber and then

continue on the stairs outside. But if I did, I think more people would be on the stairs lis-tening to me than remaining in the chamber to listen to the others.”

Black cab drivers are renowned for being chirpy and the driver who brought me back to Queen Street station was no exception. On asking where I had just come from, his reply on hearing I had interviewed Galloway was: “He’s a nice guy. I’ve had him in my motor a couple of times.” “Will you be vot-ing for him?” I asked. “Ha! No. I’m not really a voting man.” It seems George may have to rely on his usual fervour and energy to win over the hearts and minds of Glaswegians. Then again, it sounds like he is game for the challenge. When asked what his epitaph would be, his response is crisp and pithy: “Indefatigable.”

i think more people would be on the stairs listening to me than remaining

in the chamber to listen to the others

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