First he triumphed against Oona King, now he sees off a challenge from Jodie Marsh. Truly, George Galloway has an electoral record of which to be proud. The decision of the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house has been criticised by many — not least the Labour Party’s Chief Whip, Hilary Armstrong, one woman towards whom George never behaved like a pussycat. But I for one am delighted to see George in da House.

His time there has been an educational process. For both of us.

The nation now seems united in the view that George is not an appropriate person to represent the East End in Parliament because, instead of voting on the Crossrail Bill last Thursday, he was on all fours before the actress Rula Lenska pretending to be a moggy lapping milk from her palm.

Speaking as someone who did vote on the Bill, on a motion that was won by 390 votes to none, I have to say that I don’t think George’s presence there would have made much difference one way or the other.

But it’s good to know that doing animal impressions is now considered hardly compatible with parliamentary office.

It’s a point I might make to the Labour Chief Whip the next time her backbenchers seek to contribute during Prime Minister’s Questions. It is also particularly interesting to find out that George’s moggy moment is the blackest mark against him in his so far tempestuous career.

Even before he entered the Celebrity Big Brother house we knew a fair amount about George. He had spent a Christmas holiday with Saddam Hussein’s former Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz. He had been a close ally of Fawaz Zureikat, a prominent Jordanian businessmen with Iraqi oil interests. He had worked with Zureikat on the Mariam Appeal, a campaign to end sanctions against Saddam’s regime, and that appeal’s accounts have since been “lost” in the Middle East. And, of course, we also know that George has praised Saddam’s courage, strength and indefatigability, as well as describing the fall of the Soviet Union as the “saddest day” of his life.

So you can fawn to fascists, work with sanctions-busters and shed tears for the collapse of totalitarianism and still be considered a worthy MP. But miaow in public and you’re beyond the pale. It’s OK to prostrate yourself before a mass-murderer, but go on all fours before Rula Lenska, and that’s it.

My sympathy for George, however, doesn’t just extend to the curious way in which he is being vilified for what must be among the very least of his sins. I also feel for him in his moments of enforced silence. Apparently George went into the BB house only to engage a wider audience in politics. Only to find after he was in that the broadcasting rules on balance required his political comments to be bleeped out because there’s no one there to counter them.

It’s understandable that George was unaware of these rules. He certainly wasn’t being naive in imagining that he could use Channel 4 as an unfettered platform for propagandising. After all, almost everyone else in the Channel 4 stable seems free to do so.

Channel 4’s spin-off, More4, has just finished a week of programs on the Iraq War that were so relentlessly anti-Blair, anti-Bush and anti-West that the new channel might as well have been called MichaelMoore4. On Channel 4 News (or Clause 4 News, as it might be renamed) Lindsey Hilsum presents a view of international affairs that does not take a genius to recognise is just a shade left of centre. And even Channel 4’s schools programmes betray a particular worldview. The series History in Action: Heroes or Villains, which is aimed at 11 to 14-year-olds studying GCSE history, is accompanied by teachers’ notes encouraging students to design posters celebrating Mao’s Long March, write a sympathetic obituary for the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh and write in defence of Yassir Arafat.

So, if the rest of the Channel can be a safe house for left-wing radicalism, why should George not be able to make the same sort of arguments in the Celebrity Big Brother house? Last Thursday night Peter Bazalgette, the guru behind Celebrity Big Brother, said that Channel 4 was hoping to ensure that someone else was parachuted into the house who could provide a counterweight to George and ensure a balanced discussion. Then we could hear George’s views uncensored as he was matched in open debate.

I look forward to the Celebrity Big Brother team inviting in an Iraqi Kurd, Shia or trade unionist to ask George why he was so generous to Saddam for so long. Then we could see just how much of a pussycat George Galloway really is.

Bad Heir Day and other idiocies

Thrilled as I am by the decision to reissue Jane Austen’s novels in “chick-lit” covers, complete with glossy titles, pictures of swallows and silhouettes of whip-wielding dandies, I can’t help thinking that the publishers are still missing a trick.

Why have they stuck with those dreary old titles, such as Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, which sound like the names of gated communities in the Home Counties? Why not attract even more new readers by properly rebranding the stories themselves? If Hollywood can turn Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, surely a truly 21st-century publisher can do better than reissue a tale of late-flowering lust with the dreary single-word title Persuasion?

So, how about renaming Emma Confessions of a Toffaholic, reissuing Pride and Prejudice as Bad Heir Day, turning Mansfield Park into The Plain Girl’s Guide to Having it All, making Sense and Sensibility into Divine Secrets of the OK-Yah Sisterhood, selling Northanger Abbey as Catherine Morland and the Overactive Imagination and attracting a whole new audience to Persuasion by pitching it as The Private Pleasures of Navel Contemplation?

Cosmetic trend

I notice that the number of cosmetic-surgery operations has risen by 34 per cent in the past year. Once we subtract Jordan, Jodie and Michael Jackson from those figures, we can see that demand overall may have stabilised.

The writer is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath.

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