IT’S BEEN QUITE a month for George Galloway. First he becomes the new voice of the jihad of Bethnal Green. Within hours, still in the first flush of victory, he gets Paxoed before dawn, a stuffing that turns out, as it usually does these days, to make the victim look rather more sympathetic than the perpetrator. Then this week he takes on the full magisterium of the United States Senate.
I had thought that only Jeremy Paxman could elicit sympathy for men such as Galloway. But I had reckoned, of course, without the preening pomposity, the orotund turgidity of your typical US senator.
The Senate describes itself, without apparent irony or hint of self-awareness, as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Wherever they travel, senators are treated with a sort of scented deference that only a republic could confer on its leaders and not risk revolution. Fawning staffers strew petals in their path; highways are made straight for them; rivers are forded lest they get their feet wet. One observer noted that senators take themselves so seriously that “they’d wear togas if they thought they could get away with it.”
An entertaining spectacle in Washington these past few months has been the sight of members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee probing indignantly into the alleged managerial shortcomings of John Bolton, the Bush Administration’s nominee to be Ambassador to the United Nations.
Mr Bolton’s principal crime is that he is somewhat prone to the occasional bout of carpet-chewing in front of frightened and helpless young officials. On the north side of Capitol Hill, where Senate staffers labour for their bosses, this behaviour would not normally be regarded as disqualification for high office; indeed, anecdote suggests it is more or less obligatory.
When mortals appear before Senate panels, they are expected to show proper deference to these lawgivers of the American republic. But while senators may consider themselves Solons, Pericles they most assuredly are not. Going through life in an impregnable carapace of sycophancy is agreeable, no doubt, but as Marie Antoinette discovered, it does not tend to sharpen one’s skills in public argument. So when a feisty member such as Mr Galloway shows up in the midst of these august figures, the effect is a little like a character from a Damon Runyon novel let loose among the Gatsbys.
The average MP, schooled in the knockabout tactics of the House of Commons, is far better equipped to score points and persuade undecided minds. And Mr Galloway’s performance duly earned him some rave reviews, not least from startled American journalists who wouldn’t dare treat their betters this way.
But forgive me if I don’t participate in the adulation. As I watched, it wasn’t a grudging respect for the perfectly tailored and coiffed tribune of the masses that filled me, but a wave of nausea. His testimony left me with a renewed understanding of just how uniquely repellent Mr Galloway is.
It wasn’t just that the earthy rhetoric was well fertilised by the usual half-truths (his claim that the Charity Commission had in effect cleared him was an especially eye-opening one). Nor was it his deployment of the change-the-subject strategy when confronted with difficult questions. It was the spectacle itself: the sheer despicable irony of the man’s smiling defiance.
Here is a man who is now making a well-rewarded political livelihood out of a self-told story of his own courage in the face of powerful authority. He has faced down the dark forces mustered by the Tony Blairs, stood up for himself against the hectoring superciliousness of the Paxmans, and now flown all the way to Washington to clear his name in the presence of the high priests of the American Establishment. His whole performance this week was that of the little, resilient, Frank Capra figure, unafraid to speak truth to power.
Yet as he railed against the senators, I couldn’t get out of my head that spectacle of the same man smiling as he lauded Saddam Hussein. As he exploited the fustiness of the surroundings and the plodding lawyerliness of his interlocutors, I couldn’t help but remember how, in the face of a different sort of power, he had saluted its indefatigability and promised to march on to Jerusalem.
I also wondered what his and our life might have been like if he had deployed some of his little-man courage before Saddam; standing up for some of those other hundreds of thousands of other good Muslims — Iraqis, who could have done with a persuasive advocate there and then.
Perhaps in the end, if you’re a cynic you may find Mr Galloway’s asymmetrical approach to authority — a lapdog in the hands of the one who likes to watch as his victims are tortured; a lion in the face of those who threaten with questions and subpoenas — simply the familiar mark of the coward. If you’re an optimist, you might find it oddly comforting The Mother of Parliaments clasps him to her bosom. The world’s greatest deliberative body sits in embarrassed silence as he lectures it on its shortcomings. Nothing surely illustrates better the absolute superiority of the West’s system and what underpins it that we tolerate and even reward such lèse-majesté. We know what Saddam did to those who were brave enough to utter much more cogent critiques of his rule.
Me, though I’ll celebrate my opponent’s right to be wrong, I can’t suppress a slight regret that the price of our liberty is paid in the deference we give to men who excuse tyranny.
My sympathies are with those men, women and children who died because of Saddam’s indefatigable affection for torture and murder; with those who today are suffering still because of his successors’ indefatigable affection for the suicide bomb in the marketplace or at the mosque.
It is the tragic but hopeful people of Iraq who have shown us how to defy power and misery, and who, if we stand firm against the Galloways of this world, will one day get the Respect they truly deserve.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
