Galloway vs Straw - The Battle of Blackburn

He is opportunistic, a rabble-rouser, has a huge ego and can often be very narrow-minded. He is also one of the finest orators Scotland has ever produced, a passionate man not afraid to stand out from the crowd and put his neck on the line. He is George Galloway and I quite simply love the guy.


And now, The Herald claims, Gorgeous George is considering standing against Jack Straw.


The man's sense of theatre is so astute that I am surprised he doesn't have his own sell-out show at the festival. His performance in the US Senate was incredible and the bemused faces of these old powerful Americans who didn't know what to do with this belligerent Scot was a sight to see.


Most people either love to hate him or hate to love him. Or both. Personally I think he's arguing a case that too many politicians are afraid to speak out about. Even the irascible Clare Short bottled her golden moment by resigning too late when she was well placed in the Cabinet to stand up for and make an example of what she believes in.


But I do wish more people would choose to love George Galloway. As much as I think Jack Straw does a fairly decent job as an MP, I hope he gets hammered by George if he chooses to stand.


So now, if this was a TV programme, I would insert his "best bits" to sign off, a plethora of footage including big cheesy smiles, handshakes, incandescent remonstrations and kissing of babies, all with a backing song of, I don't know, Rod Stewart's "Have I told you Lately" or something.

But instead, here's a bunch of George's best quotes for those who have stomached this post to this point:


"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong.”


"I would rather be eating cheese and reading Sartre on the banks of the river Seine than eating popcorn with a born again bible-belt fundamentalist Republican administration in Crawford, Texas, execution capital of the world.”


"I'm demanding that they charge me with contempt and with perjury, I'm demanding it.”


"Saddam Hussein greeted me with a handshake, which, again to my surprise, is surprisingly soft considering how many people that hand had dispatched, allegedly. I think he's quite a forbidding presence, too forbidding a presence to be charming. But he's interesting.”


"Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without having written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice."


"I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning."


"Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies."


"I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. 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, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his."


"Some believe that those aeroplanes on September 11 came out of a clear blue sky. I believe they came out of a swamp of hatred created by us."



"What you have witnessed since [Christopher Hitchen’s opposition to the 1991 invasion of Iraq] is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug."


"People like Mr Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood, and it's utterly and completely contemptible."