THE latest chapter in the turbulent parliamentary career of George Galloway, newly elected MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, began yesterday in the maverick style that is his trademark. He stayed in bed.

After a night of high drama and unrestrained emotion, culminating in a declaration speech just after 5am that was a diatribe against Tony Blair, Mr Galloway chose his first day as a Respect MP to recover from his exertions.

The man to whom Cherie Blair urged electors give a “bloody nose”, did not retire to his rented flat near Brick Lane until 10am yesterday.

By then, not for the first time, he had made a little piece of history. After founding a new party, fighting one of the nastiest campaigns of the election and winning by just 823 votes, he had dislodged Oona King, the sitting Labour MP and close ally of Mr Blair, with a war chest of just £10,200 and a single message.

He summed that message up in an incendiary acceptance speech. “Mr Blair, this is for Iraq,” he said. “This defeat and all the defeats new Labour have suffered are for Iraq.

“All the people you have killed, all the lies told have come back to haunt you and the best thing the Labour Party can do would be to sack you tomorrow morning.”

That may have been fantasy, but Mr Galloway is no fantasist: his brutally effective campaign, aimed at the constituency’s 55,000 Bengali Muslims, ended with the distribution of 10,000 postcards bearing the faces of Ms King, Mr Blair and President Bush, and an image of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The maxim was: ‘It’s the war, stupid’, ” a spokesman said yesterday. Asked if that was a worthy campaign headline, the spokesman replied: “Well, it worked, didn’t it?” While their new MP slept, his constituents were up early to take in his achievement. They did so with a mixture of elation, uncertainty and dismay. They said that they hoped that Mr Galloway, a politician famed for a less-than-active workrate in the Commons, where he took part in just 1 per cent of votes in the last Parliament, would prove an effective advocate for their thriving community. Many, however, were less than sure.

On Brick Lane, in the heart of the East End Bengali community, many Respect supporters were out celebrating — not only in honour of Mr Galloway, but also his promise that he would stand aside after one term for a Bengali candidate.

Others were more concerned about the immediate future, and what exactly Mr Galloway would do to address day-to-day issues such as housing, enterprise and crime.

“It will be a disaster for the area,” Mohammed Salique, chairman of the Brick Lane Traders Association, said. “He can make a lot of noise in Westminster, but who is going to listen to him? We do not want noise, we want more jobs, more investment in the area. The London Mayor, the local Labour Party and the Government will not want to cooperate with him, so it will be very hard for improvements to happen.”

Speaking yards from a Respect banner sweeping across the road, Mr Salique said that he could understand the appeal of Mr Galloway to a community that felt ignored by Labour and outraged by the war. But he said that he remained concerned about being in the hands of a political outsider.

Basha Mih, a Labour loyalist for more than 20 years, said that he had taken up the Respect cause in reaction to Iraq. He said that he felt the sense of empowerment that Mr Galloway had brought to Muslim voters had also consolidate support. “The main thing was Iraq. It is a question of humanity,” he said.

In his acceptance speech Mr Galloway, 50, raged about Iraq, but also electoral fraud. He claimed that there were hundreds of ghost voters on the electoral roll and called for the resignation of a returning officer who took seven hours to count just over 40,000 votes. But behind the anger, the Scot was delighted at his triumph. His smile was broad and his daughter was wiping tears from her eyes.

Moments later, a bullish, buoyant Mr Galloway found his television nemesis in an equally bellicose Jeremy Paxman. The interview lasted a few fraught minutes, before Mr Galloway unclipped his microphone and walked out.

As dawn was breaking outside the East Winter Gardens in Canary Wharf, he and his followers left for a delayed celebration in Brick Lane, the unofficial heart of his new political home — a home that had been Labour’s for the past 60 years.

Mr Galloway promised Respect would be “a new broom” in these parts. But politics and community relations have been poisoned by the nastiness of the campaign and it will not be an easy task.

Asked what she thought of her new MP, one drinker in the Coborn Arms opposite Respect’s headquarters said: “I want to move house.”

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