With friends like these…

feaTure name
george galloway
pleAsed to Meet You
This page, clockwise
from top: with tariq
Aziz, then deputy prime
minister of iraq, 2002;
meeting saddam hussein
in Baghdad, 2002; with
fidel Castro, 2006;
and embracing ismail
haneyeh of hamas, 2009
hero Worship
Left: Galloway at home
in west london, with
portraits of his idols,
clockwise from top
left: president sukarno
of indonesia, ho Chi
Minh, Che Guevara,
Yasser Arafat and
Winston Churchill
With friends
like these…
George Galloway charmed Castro and became
hugger-mugger with Saddam. Now he wants all
of London to embrace him as he runs for mayor.
Camilla Long finds out what’s really going
on beneath his trademark fedora
Photography by Andrew Whitton
14 • The sunday Times magazine
STI22Y1GG_014_Galloway.indd 14-15
The sunday Times magazine • 15
11/12/2015 7:32:50 PM
GEORGE GALLOWAY
“i don’t believe in capital
punishment,” he says. i’m
not sure about that. he has
already bellowed, “i am The
Exorcist! devils beware!”
solidarity parade With Muslim leaders and scholars
celebrating the birth of the prophet Muhammad, leyton, 2004
neVer sUrrender seizing a photo opportunity at an anti-nuclear
weapons protest at the Faslane submarine base, scotland, 2001
N
ow that I am home
and collapsed and
no longer panting,
I can safely say that
nothing, not even
a whole week’s
spooning with Tom
Cruise, could have
prepared me for exactly how small George
Galloway is. He is not just small, but
Hollywood tiny, possessing a defiant
sub-Amis weaselishness that radiates from
every inch of his proud, obstinate little body.
Part of the problem is the insistence on
sporting things that somehow manage to
make him look even smaller: enormous
poseur’s coats and natty shoes and diddy
waistcoats and (the ultimate giveaway) a
cigar, but, most notably, a giant fedora that
is now permanently clamped to his head.
The fedora appeared just over a year ago
after he was brutally beaten up in west
London. He initially wore it as part of an
attempt to hide the scars, but now they are
all healed up, the fedora has stayed
(conveniently also covering baldness). It is
a finishing flourish so sexy and debonair
that a mysterious Saudi woman (“an
admirer”) recently offered him £3,000 for it.
He thinks this says “Saudi women adore me”;
I think it’s more “where’s my fishing rod?”.
16 • ThE sundAY TimEs mAGAzinE
STI22Y1GG_014_Galloway.indd 16-17
red alert Galloway regularly appears on
the state-funded tV network russia today
FoUrtH tiMe lUCKy With his wife, Gayatri,
outside the Houses of parliament, 2012
For Galloway is not only unremittingly
gnome-like, but also very, very odd. It is rare
for me to arrive at an interview and feel no
warmth, no connection, no real emotion —
not even the pang of friendliness. The former
MP for Bradford West is civil but entirely
wrapped up in himself, tottering around his
kitchen in Kensal Rise, face glued to phone,
barking for “shirts” as his Dutch-Indonesian
wife, Gayatri, skivvies after him.
“Darling, is there any more coffee?”
he bellows. “I had to give the guests
second rate.”
Gayatri is 30 years younger than
Galloway, but after three years of marriage
still apparently dazzled by her ancient
celebrity husband. “It is fantastic being
married to him,” she coos. Before she met
him, she “didn’t know who George Galloway
was”. By now I dare say she has found out.
It is true that the Saddam-loving,
Bush-hating, Blair-baiting, Nicorettechomping, powerfully teetotal Dundee
Growler is only ever really alive in front
of a television camera, or a photo lens, or
sweeping through the streets like an
overdressed vampire, preying on the poor,
the lonely, the angry and the alienated.
He has found fertile feasting grounds in
his last two seats, Bethnal Green and Bow,
which he lost in 2010 after five years as its
MP, and Bradford West, which he held for
three years, but lost in May.
And now he is back — back for his
biggest ever bite of the political bum,
running as the Respect party’s candidate
for mayor of London against the Tory Zac
Goldsmith, Labour’s Sadiq Khan and the Lib
Dem candidate (me neither) — or “three
cheeks of the same arse”, as he recently
described them.
If it were a simple recognition contest
— a matter of hats — he would win, straight
up, he boasts. His appeal is “Boris-like” in its
magnificence. He only has to walk down the
Harrow Road “or any road, frankly… many,
many more people would recognise me than
them”. He has, he says, groping for a suitably
majestic phrase, the “recognition factor”.
The main problem today, though, seems
to be a lack-of-recognition factor: no money.
He is aiming to raise £100,000 for his bid,
but only has about “two or three thousand
pounds” from other people, roughly the
cost, as far I can see, of a quarter of the
luxury gadgets on the snazzy Jamie Oliver
kitchen counter behind him (the kettle
alone retails for about £130).
Galloway may be paid “the best part
of half a million pounds a year” for
screaming at other politicians and Nazis
on radio and TV shows (he recently called
portraits: andrew whitton for the sunday times magazine.
right: rex, ap, reuters. these pages: rex, getty images
leFt tUrn With tony Benn (left) and arthur
scargill on an anti-bombing march, 1999
one Holocaust denier from Essex a “foul and
atrocious animal — I feel unclean speaking
to you”), but no one seems to want to put
their money where his mouth is. Perhaps
they are jealous of his glossy rock star’s lair,
a shimmering shag pad decorated as if for
one of Kate Moss’s boyfriends, complete
with statement cushions and a treadmill
(he refuses to tell me his rent, although he
concedes, “I enjoy nice things”). Or maybe
he is just toxic.
Indeed, he says one of his first moves
as mayor will be an old-fashioned purge,
some “shock treatment” that includes
“unleashing” his (in my view bonkers)
economic adviser, Max Keiser, an American
financial pundit on Russia Today television,
“like a lion to prowl the streets”.
“Max believes in capital punishment,”
he breezes. He claims that Keiser — who can
be seen on YouTube proposing “capital
punishment for capital crime” — would
happily put felonious bankers “at the
Traitors’ Gate, at the Tower opposite City
Hall, and kill them, execute them”.
“But”, he insists, “I don’t believe in
capital punishment anywhere, any time, for
any purpose, any reason. So I will have to
restrain him.”
I’m not sure about that. He has already
bellowed at me: “I am The Exorcist.
Devils beware. I am The Exorcist. I even
dress like The Exorcist.”
“At the same time,” he sweeps on, in his
possessed Dundee staccato, like a thundering
medieval judge meting out horrific
punishments to both humans and animals,
he will beef up the police service to the point
of being a “force”, not just a “service”. That
way London can easily take responsibility
for itself, become autonomous, gradually
devolve from the rest of the country, until
— and I don’t think I am exaggerating his
vision here — it becomes a proud
totalitarian mini state with its own private
army and fedora-toting leader.
Bookies are currently placing him third
in the race. But then he hasn’t always been
the worst politician in the world. His star
only fell when, in 2003, he was kicked out
of the Labour party after he criticised Tony
Blair and the Iraq war (he later said that
a suicide bomb attack on Blair would be
“morally justified”).
He desperately tried to distract people
by going on Celebrity Big Brother, but the
nation watched in horror as the MP for
Bethnal Green and Bow crawled around in
a dressing gown pretending to be a cat. It
was a far cry from his “greatest day” as one
of our finest orators, when he faced down
the chairman of the Senate in 2005, calling
him a “neocon hawk and the lickspittle of
George W Bush”.
Now he is largely viewed as a hawk and
lickspittle himself. Angry, frightening,
unpleasantly litigious, he is a classic
cry-bully who claims he likes elections,
but doesn’t seem to be able to fight one
without suing someone or reporting them
to the police. Even today he uses his assault
two summers ago as an opportunity to
name-call.
“The Speaker never wrote,” he sniffs. Ed
Miliband swept past “without a backward
glance”. Only Michael Gove got out of his
government car to see if he was all right.
Galloway was posing for a picture with
two Moroccans in Ladbroke Grove when, out
of the blue, a man delivered a kung-fu kick
to his head. “I heard screaming, shouting,
yelling, and then felt the first punch to the
side of my face.” He was stunned. “Then
blows started to rain... I could have survived
that relatively unscathed, but he got me to
the ground and began kicking me when
I was on the ground, and then he actually
climbed on top of me.” What was he
thinking? “ ‘I hope he’s not got a knife,’
because I would have been dead.”
He finally managed to get away,
following the man in a car with blood
pouring from his head. He ended up in
ThE sundAY TimEs mAGAzinE • 17
11/12/2015 7:33:17 PM
GEORGE GALLOWAY
“i heard shouting and then
felt the first punch to the
side of my face. When i was
on the ground, he actually
climbed on top of me”
hospital with a dislocated jaw, head injuries
and a broken rib. “It was horrific,” he says.
His attacker, a former drug addict and
(bizarrely) BBC manager who thought
Galloway was a “serpent” and “anti-Semite”
for his views on Gaza, was put away for 16
months. “He had threatened to cut my
throat that morning on Facebook.”
Only that wasn’t the end of his troubles.
He was punched in the stomach during a
trip to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park on
Christmas Eve last year. His bodyguard,
hired after the first attack, failed to stop the
assault. “My ex-bodyguard,” he says drily.
I ask why people seem to hate him so
much. He shrugs. His life is full of
“pantomime villains”, he says. People who
just appear, either in person or online, and
clobber him, although the man in the first
attack was clearly unwell (it was said in
court that he had a “pathological hatred”
of Galloway).
I don’t think he enjoys any of it — he
says he is frightened his children will see
him attacked — but I do wonder if he feels,
like all narcissists, that all this hostility is
actually a weird manifestation of love.
H
e is still under
investigation for
another strange
incident, what he
claims is a “pack of
lies” alleged by a
former researcher,
who has said that
while working for Galloway in 2012 when
he was Bradford’s MP, he got her to do his
laundry and buy his underwear.
“I have never sent anyone to buy my
underwear ever,” he thunders. “I knew what
was going on when she said that I wear size
small. It was an attempt to humiliate me.”
And does he wear size small? “I certainly do
not, Camilla.”
So why, in the face of such hostility, does
he keep going? He claims he had never
intended to run for Bradford a second time.
As it was, the campaign was a complete
disaster. He says he was “surprised” that he
lost to Labour’s candidate, Naseem Shah —
an understatement, given his election-night
tantrum — but I don’t think anyone else
scarred for life Galloway in his ever-present fedora, worn
since he was assaulted by a former BBc employee in 2014
was. Galloway alleged that Shah was a liar
for saying she’d been forced into marriage at
15, when he believed she had been “16 and a
half”. He disputed the fact that her marriage
was forced — “depends what you mean by
forced,” he says now — saying that members
of her family were present at the wedding,
so she can’t have been that unwilling.
He seems reluctant to see that he might
have been wrong, saying that he is still
pursuing his complaint against Shah,
lodged, with typical petulance, the day after
he lost. She was “economical with the
actualité”, he snaps, and “there’s enough
liars in parliament already”.
“But it’s all in the past,” he sighs. “I really
don’t want to revisit it too much.”
The real reason he ran for Bradford was
vanity — ever interested in personal
victories, he fantasised that Ed Miliband
(“a weirdo”) would face a hung parliament
and come crawling to him “needing one vote
for a majority”. He went so far as to draw up
a list of portentous demands he would have
made in exchange for that vote. These
included “recognition of the Palestinian
state”, which he thinks Miliband “probably”
would have gone for (during his time in
Bradford, Galloway controversially declared
the city an “Israel-free zone”). But it never
happened, and even the new Labour leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, thought his behaviour was
“appalling” (something he again disputes).
So it seems unlikely he will be granted his
one true wish and be welcomed back into
the Labour party any time soon.
Or will he? He describes Corbyn’s spin
doctor, Seumas Milne, as his “closest friend.
We have spoken almost daily for 30 years.”
He has known Corbyn for “40 years”.
“My demand is that they must rescind my
expulsion,” he says.
I ask if he knew that Corbyn and Diane
Abbott (another friend) were having an
affair. He seems taken aback by this. Is he
unsure whether to claim to have known
and look good or tell the truth and say no?
“I knew that they were close,” he says
ThE sundAY TimEs mAGAzinE • 19
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GEORGE GALLOWAY
slowly. “Of course, no one knows whether
anyone had an affair.”
Of course, it was always Galloway who
was the left’s presiding king of shags before
Corbyn hip-swivelled onto the scene. He
earned the nickname “Gorgeous George”
after a bizarre press conference in the
mid-1980s in which he described his affairs
on a trip to the Greek island of Mykonos.
He explained how he “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.”
T
he Galloway lurve CV
runs as follows. He has
been married four times,
first to a Scot, then to a
Palestinian biologist,
then to one of his
researchers (an Islamic
marriage) and now to
Gayatri, an anthropologist.
Gayatri agrees that the “big” age
difference is unusual. “It’s not every day,”
she sighs. “It’s something you need to get
used to.” She hadn’t so much as had a single
boyfriend before Galloway rocked up
(complete with fedora and smokes) to the
Holiday Inn in Leiden for an “interfaith
thing” with the Indonesian community. He
spotted her in the audience when she
“shouted out the word ‘Confucianism’, which
showed her teeth beautifully”, he says.
“I asked if she would have coffee with me
after the lunch, and she said, ‘Well, I’m going
out to smoke.’ I said, ‘That’s even better.’ ”
“And then, four months later, we were
maaarrieeeed,” Gayatri squeaks.
She seems enthusiastic, but it must
have been a bit of a shock when his previous
wife turned up, claiming Galloway was still
married to her and that she had recently
given birth to his son (he has four children
in total, a toddler with Gayatri, two with his
third wife, and a grown-up daughter from
his first marriage).
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t, of course, as the
legal record shows,” Galloway murmurs.
“The mother of two of my children left me
some months before we met.”
He says things are now “warm” between
him and his previous wife, but none of this
can have thrilled Gayatri much. Is she fine
with her husband’s track record?
“Yeah, yeah,” she says, unsurely. But it is
the only moment she seems unconfident.
She seems otherwise pushy and flinty. She
can’t wait to become “how do you call it,
lady mayor”, she says, showing me through
her vast wardrobe, a den stuffed with
handbags, heels and designer goodies (“all
vintage”, she trills, except, of course, for the
stuff that isn’t).
So what does she do about the laundry
now that there are no researchers to help?
Does Galloway ever pick up a Hoover? She
looks horrified. “No.”
When it comes to assuming the role of
first lady of London, “Oh God, I’m ready,”
she says. She is far more left-wing than
Galloway, and a devout Muslim. I ask her
if she considers her husband a Muslim.
“Well, he is a true believer,” she says.
Galloway has always been cagey about
his beliefs — some might say cowardly,
afraid of frightening off voters. But it has
been claimed that he converted to Islam in
2000 in a hotel in Kilburn in front of
members of the Muslim community.
Today he denies any such “voodoo
ceremony” as “absolutely bogus”. But the way
his wife responds, and her insistence that
she could never marry a man who didn’t
“act Muslim” — not to mention the fact that,
in this interview, he appears to refer to
Muslims as “we” — convinces me that
Galloway, not Sadiq Khan, could easily be
our first Muslim mayor. Also, he looks
terrified when I ask her. “I’m a believer,” he
titters nervously. “I’m a true believer.”
Odd.
He says he didn’t sue the publication
that claimed he converted to Islam because,
he spotted his wife at the
holiday inn when she
“shouted out the word
‘Confucianism’, which
showed off her teeth
beautifully”, he says
as he had told me earlier, “you can’t sue for
every lie”. This will probably come as news
to the scores of people on Twitter to whom
he sent legal letters earlier this year after a
few retweeted a mention that accused him
of inciting anti-Semitic feelings over Gaza.
But then it is often very difficult to get to
the bottom of what Galloway thinks. Does he
even know? He flip-flopped over Saddam
Hussein (a man who once wooed him with
Quality Street), at one point apparently
praising the despot for his “courage” and
“indefatigability”, but later saying he was
vile. He responds to the grooming-gangs
scandal in Rotherham (an official inquiry
reported last year that at least 1,400 children
had been sexually exploited, largely by men
of Pakistani heritage) by claiming that “the
overwhelming number of child abusers in
this country are not Muslim”.
If anything, I find his views on Islam
deeply confusing. But one thing that does
seem clear is his love for Palestine. He has
felt passionate about Arabs ever since he fell
in love with a woman he met in Lebanon in
1977. She was “a fighter”, now married with
“six children”, he says animatedly, but she
was the one who motivated him. He nearly
stayed in the Middle East — but eventually
went back to Dundee, flying the Palestinian
flag at the town hall (he also got it twinned
with Nablus).
Palestine has always seemed a rather
odd obsession for a tiny Scot born in a
Dundee slum tenement. Perhaps he
enjoys Islam’s strict rules — when asked
to describe his father, a trade unionist and
ferocious temperance man, he says he
was “a bit strict… let’s call him strict.
A bit unforgiving.”
He appears to have been in awe of his
father, in good ways and bad. But then
Galloway has always been the small man
with the big-man complex. His walls are
covered with pictures of Che, Churchill and
Ho Chi Minh.
He tells me a loving anecdote about
stealing into Jack Nicholson’s house with
Warren Beatty (a fan, introduced to him by
another fan, Sean Penn). They got as far as
Nicholson’s ground-floor bathroom —
whereupon Beatty started advancing
towards him “and began quoting chunks of
the speech I’d given at the US Senate. I had
to pinch myself to see if I was dreaming.”
After the interview, I travel to a
predominantly Asian borough in east
London to watch the big small man address
the crowds. I have been promised a classic
“soap box” experience outside a market that
Galloway personally saved when he was a
nearby MP (it is mentioned).
He arrives, neat coat, fedora,
microscopic shoes, and hunkers into his
speech like an old boxer, jab here, jab there,
pause to wheeze, gasp for water. Behind him,
Imelda, sorry, Gayatri stands, eyes shining,
bright-red manicure trembling around his
votive speech bottle. She stares at him so
hard, I fear he will fall, have a fit, and she will
hit him, screaming at him to get up and get
on. She tells me watching him “is like falling
in love all over again. I feel that tingle. As
Che Guevara said, ‘We tremble at injustice.’ ”
She is dressed in high-heeled Uggs,
clutching a Harrods tote. Next to her stands
the bodyguard, listening into an earpiece as
Galloway bellows about poverty. He seems
particularly angry about “Belgravia”, but it
is an old hatred, an old fantasy, an old whiff
of the old battle dog as he raises his voice to
an old cry: “Austerity they call it — I call it
class war.”
He will not win, and he knows it. But
that’s not the point. This time — every time,
all the time — it’s personal. Galloway’s
entire life is one deeply personal fight after
another, an unstoppable, spasmodic,
flamboyant grand opus of hatred n
gallows humour
watch george galloway’s weirdest
moments on screen, including his
Celebrity Big Brother cat impression and
his london mayoral election video at
thesundaytimes.co.uk/georgegalloway
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