It was showdown time and last week George Galloway, recently elected Respect MP for Bethnal Green & Bow, came out guns blazing. Marching into the Senate in Washington on Tuesday he gave, as promised, “both barrels” to the senators who had accused him of profiting from secret oil deals with Saddam Hussein.

“I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington,” Galloway said, opening fire on Norm Coleman, the former prosecutor who chairs the Senate subcommittee on investigations. “But for a lawyer, you’re remarkably cavalier with any sense of justice.

“I am here today, but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world . . . without any attempt to contact me whatsoever, and you call that justice.”

In a passionate speech Galloway denied he had “many meetings” with Saddam and robustly rejected all allegations that he had traded, benefited or been aware of illegal deals involving Iraqi oil.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld (the US secretary of defence, who met the Iraqi dictator twice in the 1980s). The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions.”

As for the Iraqi documents brandished by Coleman — several of which purport to show Galloway listed among recipients of lucrative oil allocations from Iraq — the MP told the senator: “You have nothing on me . . . except my name on lists of names from Iraq, many of which have been drawn up after the installation of your puppet government in Baghdad.” He went on to rubbish the White House’s conduct of a “disastrous” war in Iraq, to sneer at US treatment of prisoners in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail and to mock American politicians’ obsession with fundraising.

Galloway was cock-a-hoop and made no secret of it, having in the eyes of his supporters bearded the lion in its den.

Within hours he was on a flight back to London and a rapturous reception at Friends Meeting House in Euston. As 1,000 supporters stomped their feet and chanted “Respect! Respect!” he regaled them with the story of how he had smoked a Cuban cigar, which it is illegal to import to the US, in the Capitol.

“I even blew the smoke at the White House,” he shouted above the cheers. “And I think we blew them away, didn’t you?” Fidel Castro would have been proud.

The following day he appeared on the BBC’s Question Time in Edinburgh, where he stole the show, receiving loud applause for every comment. He would, cried one member of the audience, “make a better prime minister than Tony Blair”.

It was a remarkable recovery of fortune for a man notorious for shaking Saddam’s hand and saluting his “courage, power and indefatigability”. But that is Galloway’s point. Apart from that quote — which he claims has been taken out of context — he says he has been a consistent opponent of Saddam.

“I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas,” he told senators. “I used to demonstrate outside the Iraqi embassy when British and American officials were going in and doing commerce.”

Is that true? Had the man who told the Iraqi dictator in 1994 “I would like you to know that we are with you until victory, until Jerusalem” been taken out of context? Was he Saddam’s friend or foe?

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