This extract from Alwyn Turner’s All in It Together follows George Galloway’s path from Labour to Respect…

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Born into a working-class Catholic family in Dundee in 1954, George Galloway had joined the Labour Party in his teens and made an early impression, becoming the youngest ever chair of the Scottish Labour Party at just twenty-six. Elected to Parliament in 1987 (his victory in Glasgow Hillhead ended Roy Jenkins’s Commons career), he courted publicity with his extravagant persona.

He was a lifelong teetotaller, but apart from that he could have passed for a recently retired footballer: tanned, with a silvery moustache, fat cigars and Italian suits, as well as a ‘reputation as a ladies’ man’. He was happy behind the wheel of his red Mercedes convertible (‘I don’t feel as manly, somehow, being driven’), he described John Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ as ‘the ultimate socialist anthem’, and he named his favourite actor as Jack Nicholson. Inevitably, he was nicknamed ‘Gorgeous George’.

He was also one of the most fluent speakers in British politics – ‘the best natural orator in the House’, according to Liberal Democrat Vince Cable – and he relished the role of left-wing hero. Accordingly, he peppered his conversation with quotes from Lenin and Ho Chi Minh, and with regrets for the fall of the Soviet Union (‘the biggest catastrophe of my life’), and said his ultimate hero was Che Guevara (‘a person with poetry in his soul’).

He’d been committed to the Palestinian cause since he was twenty, and a quarter-century later, looking out across the river Jordan towards the West Bank, he recalled his fantasies of liberating the land from Israel: ‘I used to dream I would be part of the force that would wade ashore, Kalashnikov in hand, and return it to its rightful owners.’

He specialised in international affairs, and had impressive contacts in all the right places; he was on friendly terms with Gerry Adams, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro (who was ‘cool not cruel’). Most famously, he visited Saddam Hussein in 1994, ending their televised meeting with: ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.’ That had been in the days of John Smith’s leadership of Labour, and he’d almost had the whip withdrawn in consequence.

He’d opposed war with Iraq in 1991, and he did so again in 2003. So vociferous was he that he was expelled from Labour later that year for bringing the party into disrepute. The charges stated that he had ‘incited Arabs to fight British troops’ and ‘incited British troops to defy orders’, but the truth was that he’d become an embarrassment to the leadership. There were plenty of Labour MPs speaking against the war in Iraq, but none with the flamboyant eloquence of Galloway, nor with his platform: he wrote a column in the Scottish Mail on Sunday for seven years.

‘They will rue this day,’ he vowed as he was thrown out of Labour, and he stalked off to hatch his plans for a new party.

Galloway was no political soulmate of the SWP – ‘George has always hated and despised Trotskyites,’ pointed out erstwhile comrade Diane Abbott – but there was nowhere else much to go. And the creation of Respect did give him some status.

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