WHEN playing cards depicting the “most wanted” members of Saddam Hussein’s regime were handed to coalition troops in Iraq, Tony Blair could have been forgiven for slipping a joker into the pack.That card would have shown a man with a moustache, as well as a taste for the better things in life of which any Baathist would have been proud.

But yesterday George Galloway was not hiding in some Baghdad bunker or sheltering with the Syrians. Instead, he was topping up his tan at his villa in the Algarve and painting himself as a victim of some unexplained conspiracy.

The Government would love to be shot of a man who has not been so much a thorn, as a piece of shrapnel, in the side of successive Labour leaders. Of the 139 Labour MPs who rebelled over Iraq, the MP for Glasgow Kelvin is undoubtedly the “most wanted”.

Yet there was a wariness over the latest allegations within Westminster last night, where officials fear that the charred documents found in Saddam’s Foreign Ministry — or at least the interpretation put on them — might be too good to be true.

“Gorgeous George”, after all, has got away with it before, time and time again. He has always escaped deselection despite saying he doesn’t “give a f***” what the Prime Minister thinks, mourning the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “biggest catastrophe” of his life, describing Ché Guevara as his “ultimate hero” and receiving boxes of Havana’s finest Cohiba cigars from Fidel Castro, a friend.

His mistakes range from the malign to the ridiculous. Mr Galloway joined Gerry Adams on a Troops Out march long before the Sinn Fein leader talked of peace. At a press conference called to rebut corruption charges over his management of War on Want, his now ex-wife was less than pleased by his confession of having “carnal knowledge” of a Greek woman he met on a charity trip.

He has one child from his former marriage to Elaine and has subsequently married Dr Amina Abu Zaid, a Palestinian biologist at Glasgow University.

He says that, at 48, he is “too old” to stray again, saying that his idea of perfect happiness is “a hilltop in Portugal with the Atlantic shining below, a long Havana cigar and a Palestinian scientist running her fingers through my hair”.

All this is nothing, however, compared with the opprobrium he has earned for a role in the Middle East, and Iraq in particular. Even before the latest claims, Labour whips were preparing to throw him out of the parliamentary party for remarks about the war on Arab television in which he described Mr Blair and President Bush as “wolves”.

When Ben Bradshaw, a Foreign Office Minister, said last year that the MP was “not just an apologist but a mouthpiece” for Saddam, Mr Galloway pointed out that he had always supported democracy in Iraq and the removal of a “bestial dictator”.

Well, perhaps not always. After his most recent visit to Baghdad this year, he described Saddam’s “gentle handshake”, his offer of Quality Street chocolates and a conversation that began with the dictator accurately pointing out that Mr Galloway had lost weight since they had last met.

Most famously, on a trip to Iraq in 1994, he told Saddam: “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know we are with you until victory, until Jerusalem.”

Mr Galloway claimed initially that he had said “so” instead of “sir”. Later, his explanation was that he had been saluting the Iraqi people — in the Glasgow sense of “youse” — not “you”, Saddam.

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