Pizzas galore!

Those who choose to disbelieve him point out that he has sometimes adjusted his life story to suit himself. His claims to have been “born in a slum tenement” and to have first worked in a tyre factory have been challenged by friends who say his parents were comfortably off and that he worked for only seven weeks at Michelin during the school holidays. He is even said to have lied when he joined Dundee Labour Party by pretending he was 15 when he was 13.

But the “MP for Baghdad Central”, as he is known to colleagues, is notoriously good at defending his reputation. He has won at least 20 such cases, earning about £250,000 and boasts that one such victory, against the late Robert Maxwell, enabled him to buy a red open-top Mercedes.

Such moments have fuelled persistent rumours about his high-rolling lifestyle. He has property interests in Portugal and London, a restaurant business in Cuba and a liking for Kenzo suits.

According to the latest parliamentary register of interests, he has other legitimate sources of income, including £70,000 a year from The Mail on Sunday for his regular columns. He lists 12 trips abroad, more often than not to the Middle East and paid for by “friends of Iraq” or groups campaigning against sanctions. He makes no mention of using funds from the Mariam Appeal, raised initially to treat an Iraqi girl’s leukaemia, but which has since been used for a political campaign against the “might of the British and American State”.

Mr Galloway says that he has paid a high price for his commitment to the Arab cause in the Middle East.

This began in 1974 just after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, as unfashionable a time as any to start espousing the Palestinian cause. He met a young Palestinian called Sahal Jabaji and before too long was getting his first bad headlines for publicly embracing Yassir Arafat.

His early political career saw him orchestrate a left-wing takeover of Dundee Labour Party and he succeeded in twinning the city with a Palestinian town. His views on the Middle East have made him many more enemies than friends. When the Hollywood actor John Malkovitch was asked with whom he would like to have a fight, he named Mr Galloway, adding that he would prefer just to shoot him.

He is acknowledged by one and all to be a clever man, a superb debater, with a Blair-like instinct for the modern media.

There is a certain wistfulness in him about what might have been. “Sometimes I wish that my life had been smoother,” he says, acknowledging that he has made mistakes, if only because of his “verbal infelicity”. But he insists that there is no point in “living a lie to climb the greasy pole”.

Mr Galloway’s childhood ambition was to be a Labour Foreign Secretary, and even his enemies among Scottish parliamentary colleagues say that he could have gone even further. Whatever the truth of these latest allegations, few MPs doubt that the Government will find an excuse to take the Labour whip from him if he does not beat it to it by resigning from the party. Maybe he could have gone all the way to the top. But instead, during the war in Iraq, it appears that he has gone over it for the last time.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• All that glitters is not sold in Wright’s world
• Believe it or not, Big Brother is your friend