Galloway's 'Daily Record' column

[faceless]

WE NEED A FRANCIE, NOT A REV I.M. JOLLY
25 June 2007

THE first time I met Gordon Brown, more than 30 years ago, he was weighed down with more newspapers, magazines and policy papers than any normal man could possibly carry, never mind read. But the clue is in the N word. Normal. Brown, who follows Bonar Law, Campbell-Bannerman, Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas- Home and Tony Blair into No.10 as a British premier of Scots descent (not bad for an OPPRESSED small nation) is no normal man.

I mean that kindly as well as unkindly. Ir'n Broon has a completely abnormal single-mindedness - every step he has ever taken has been with this week's trip to the Palace in mind. He is a policy worker on a par with Bill Clinton, though Brown's idea of a good time in his office is a study of endogenous growth theory rather than erectile expansion. He has a brain the size of Hampden, intellectually he is Bertrand Russell to Tony Blair's Bob Monkhouse (who said: "Once you can fake the sincerity ... the rest is easy.")

He is as straight as a son of the manse should be. Not for him the Cool Britannia pals and his missus will never secretly snap up nice flats in Bristol or get down and muddy for a spot of re-birthing with a con-man's floozy. Neither will the new PM holiday with the likes of Mrs Robin Gibb, a bisexual Druid priestess from Northern Ireland (ah, but which team does Mrs Gibb support, I hear some readers ask).

But Brown's main problem with the N word is that he is, as Alistair Campbell allegedly said, indeed "psychologically flawed". In fact, I knew from that first day I met him that, like many a brain-box before him, he is asocial cripple. Painfully shy, no small talk, dour to the point of sullen, unable to suffer fools gladly, he is a Rev I.M. Jolly when what the modern stage needs is Rikki Fulton's amanuensis, a Francie. Hullowrerrrr, nor anything like it, will ever trip off the lips of the new PM.

All of this could be carried to victory nonetheless if Gordon could just jettison the albatross of war, privatisation and the alienation of Labour's core vote which has seen them lose four million votes since that "New Dawn" in 1997. But it can't and won't be. Because Brown is the co-architect of all that and it's too late to do anything about it. For me, therefore the script is tragedy, Shakespearean in scale.

Betrayed by his friends Blair, Mandelson and Reid, when they knifed him before the great John Smith was ere interred, Brown is "in blood stepped in so far, that should he wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er". The Jim Callaghan of our times, he will likely have inherited his life-long goal, the Prime Minister-ship not Paul Gascoigne's, only in time to lose it.

I'M SCENT CRAZY BY MY CHANELLE NO.1

FOLLOWING my week hosting Big Brother's Big Mouth (or foul mouth judging by last week's "celebrity" host Leigh Francis, aka Keith Lemmon) I've had to keep abreast in case they ask me back. I have a Big Sister in the house, anti-war activist Carole. But my eye has focused on Chanelle. The pulchritudinous 19-year-old has surely secured her future as a face. As pretty as a picture and with a strong provincial accent, she is as fragrant as the flower she looks. The main problem is she's lumbered, and to a pretty boy called Ziggy who no doubt spends more time in front of the mirror than she.

SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL

NOT a lot of people know, thank God, that parts of Glasgow's busy international airport are just not covered by CCTV. Or that if you call the police at the airport it will take them so long to get there that by the time they arrive, all the witnesses to an incident will have left the building. That's what happened to me when I was "munstered" by thugs masquerading as Orange Walkers in the middle of a busy afternoon at the airport decorated with billboards exalting "Scotland... the best small country in the world".

The police have traced the Munsters, and they've insisted that they had only crowded round me to give me the benefit of their ecclesiastical take on my radio-show on TalkSport. And if I seemed to lurch forward a couple of times well, I must just have been unsteady on my pins. I was confident that the truth would out because it simply never occurred to me that in the middle of a "War on Terror" in an airport patrolled by machine-gun toting Polis and festooned with hundreds of cameras, there could possibly be a part of the airport where Big Brother wasn't watching you.

Alas I was disabused in a call from Strathclyde police - though not yet in writing - who explained there are no cameras in the baggage hall in which the incident took place. Let's hope Bin Laden doesn't read the Record.

DISMAL DES IS FOR THE HIGH JUMP

I PRESENT a nightly TV show called The Real Deal at 5pm on Sky Channel 171. Last week I had Nick Pope, who used to head the UFO unit at the Ministry of Defence, on the show. Now I knew the MoD harboured aliens - like Adam Ingram, the grizzly Armed Forces Minister - but in 20 years in the House I never knew the unit existed.

But no one should be afraid of the unidentified object flying from the top floor window of the Ministry in Whitehall later this week. That's just the hapless Mr Magoo, Des Browne, being "re-shuffled". As suits go, he may not be as undistinguished as those in which our Royal Naval heroes came home from captivity in Iran. But never can an emptier raincoat have stepped into a ministerial Montego.

LA VIE EN ROSE

LA Vie en Rose, the new Edith Piaf film, sees the sparrow fly again in the plumage of a fine new French bird Marion Cotillard, right. Though more classically beautiful than our own Terry Neason, the big yin's award-winning one-woman show, Piaf, is hard to beat on all other scores. Ex 7/84 star Terry isn't so big any more. The last time I met the under-rated songstress she was selling slimming products in London with no plans but a few dreams of a return to the stage. She insisted, though she missed the roar of the crowd, she'd no regrets. The regrets were all mine and should be Scotland's.

AND FINALLY

THE first time I met Mohammad Sarwar, he was a travelling salesman going from shop to shop with a board of eggs carried on his head. He retires as Britain's first Muslim MP, a multimillionaire and a figure in the land having survived many a rotten egg thrown in his direction over the years. I recruited him, promoted him, coached him and stood by him when others were scrambling for cover. Now the House of Lords beckons, the yolk is on his detractors and I predict he'll make the souffle rise twice.

----------------

[Comsatangel]

Very interesting. Thanks for that

[faceless]

WISEGUY BROWN GETS HIS REVENGE
2nd of July 2007
GORDON BROWN'S reshuffle was chartbusting. Not since the Night of the Long Knives, when Harold Macmillan proved that in politics greater love hath no man than he lay down his friends for his life, has there been such slaughter. Gordon settled his scores with his tormentors with the sangue-freddo of an Al Pacino. Some, like John Reid, took their own chibs into the billiard room and topped themselves.

Others, like Tessa Jowell, were humiliatingly given small provincial casinos to run and banished from the big time for ever. Margaret Beckett, the worst appointment since Caligula's horse, was last seen weeping in the Crawler Lane heading off on endless caravanning until her demise. Patricia Hewitt was sent down under to look after "elderly relatives" in the antipodes, the political equivalent of "sleeping with the fishes". Even "Setterday Sanny" Ian McCartney, the misfit who expelled me from the Labour Party, was dumped in the trunk of a Robin Reliant and left on Wigan Pier.

Proving for me the magnificence of Ho Chi Minh's great nostrum that "if you stand by the banks of the river for long enough, the bodies of all your enemies float by", David Miliband, whom I tipped years ago as the next Labour PM, is an inspired choice for Foreign Secretary. "Privately" he opposed the Iraq War (there will be a lot of them emerging from the privvy, dear reader), he knows as the son of anti-Zionist Jews that Palestine is the heart of the matter and as a youth he knows he will have to live later with what is done today.

His mandarins and those throughout Whitehall are wiseguys enough to know Miliband is Andy Garcia to Gordon's Godfather. That one day all the family business will be his. This gives him the clout of a snub-nosed Beretta and makes him the most powerful Labour Foreign Secretary since Jim Callaghan. One who is on the way up. If he uses this, and the fact that the Prime Minister's pre-occupations will be domestic, he can change the world. His father, the late Marxist Ralph, would approve of that.

COUNTRY SEEMS TO BE IN A RIGHT STATE
I ONLY ask ... how come the Secretary of State for Defence is now considered a part-time job? When we're in wars throughout the world, Captain Mainwaring, aka Des Browne, became the only man in the Cabinet to stay in the same job and was ordered to moonlight as Scottish Secretary as well. This is either an insult to Scotland or to the armed forces, or possibly both.

Now the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and all those ranged against Anglo-US occupations, know their adversary's eye is half off the ball and scheming of ways to dish not them, but the singing shortbread tins of the SNP. Incidentally, I see that John Reid has joined Brian Wilson on the board of Dermot Desmond's Celtic. Browne will one day join them. They have all changed their stripes these fellows, but at least they're still behind the Hoops.

FREE TO FIGHT EVIL
I KNOW Glasgow Airport well ... only too well. For 18 years, I flew in and out of it virtually every week. Many of the staff became friends and on Saturday a fair number of passengers would have been too. Their sangfroid in the face of Saturday's evil is what matters most. When Clydebank was ablaze in the Blitz, steady in the ranks was the order of the day.

"Strong, united and resolute," was Gordon Brown's response to the bombers and he is right. These idiots are not the Luftwaffe, they're not even Bin Laden's 9/11 premier league killers. These were crazed fanatics, a gang who couldn't make a bomb explode so set themselves on fire instead. Sure, it could have been a big disaster. But it wasn't.

We could still snatch disaster out of the mouth of fiasco, however. If we further trash the freedoms which make our country worth defending in the first place. If we turn against our fellow citizens because of what they look like, when they came here or how they pray. If we do that, we will hand a victory to people who could never defeat us if we stay firm. A small group of desperadoes can never take away our way of life. We can only do that ourselves.

ALEX SALMOND
ALEX SALMOND has not put a foot wrong as First Minster. The po-faced hypocrites who criticised him for telling the Queen that he wanted an independent Scotland - like she didn't already know that - are the people who made the first two parliaments a laughing stock - the White Blether Club - Cumbernauld toon cooncil complete with Ikea flat-pack furnishings and run by dwarves. I don't want Scotland to split but if we ever did, I know I'd prefer my country to be run by Salmond than "somebody called Kerr", which is what we can look forward to when the dwarf McConnell is tossed.

GIRLS ADD A TOUCH OF SPICE
D'YOU know what? I really, really want the Spice Girls' reunion. It's fashionable to diss their DNA-tested, silicone breast enhanced and well-tucked present persona, but I'm a sucker for nostalgia. They were the original Cheeky Girls, a kind of Hard Day's Night era Beatles. Zany, British and fun. And since they didn't have much talent to begin with, at least we won't think they've gone downhill when they come back.

[nekokate]

[faceless]

I've always found those comments about her to grate as well - from the sounds of it I reckon she's probably more like Diane from Finchley than anything...

[luke]

its like the way he always mentions ming campbells age, that really bugs me - whats age gotta do with anything in poltics?! he does the same with hazel blears being short etc, theres no need for it

druids, bisexuals, short or old people - i've nothing against them for those things

[nekokate]

[Ash]

From 2nd paragraph

[faceless]

edit:

[nekokate]

Are you sure that was written by George? It is nothing like his writing style. Surely someone has put the wrong article next to his name?

[faceless]

well it looks like it could have been a mixup - I got that article from here: www.dailyrecord.co.uk/opinion/columnists/showbiz/georgegalloway/ last night, but it's changed now to something else that isn't Galloway either (unless he has a five year old son).

I just phoned the Record and they said they'd sort it...

[nekokate]

Conspiracy?

[Axlsbabe]

he might want to look at his own sexual behaviour before criticising everyone else’s.

[faceless]

What do you mean axls?

[faceless]

LET THE LIAR BLACK SING-SING FOR HIS PORRIDGE
16 July 2007

IT was the House that Black Built. Lord Conrad Black, formerly of The Daily Telegraph, on whose parent board sat Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, the Prince of Darkness Richard Perle, so rightwing he even frightened the horses of Ronald Reagan's White House, accused me of taking money illegally. In fact, it was him who was the thief, and last Friday a jury in Chicago found him guilty of fraud and obstructing justice. The Tory peer will now face many years in jail and all those who were his hired guns will, or should, hang their heads in shame.

Those who guzzled at his nosebags filled with truffles, caviar and vintage champagne, paid for by other people's money, those who courted him, held his hat and coat, those who fell for his lies stand now condemned. In his last public appearance in Britain he attended a party dressed as Cardinal Richelieu, his wife as Marie Antoinette. Let him eat porridge in Sing-Sing for the rest of his natural. As Uncle Ho said: "If you stand by the banks of the river for long enough, the bodies of all your enemies float by."

TIME TO WEIGH UP THE FULL SCALE OF ALASTAIR'S WRATH

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL was a friend of mine until we fell out when his powerful boss went overboard. Like Oscar Wilde's proverbial cushion, Campbell, whose diaries are everywhere these days, bears the impression of the last big man to sit upon him. And they didn't get much bigger than Robert Maxwell, the very fat man who watered the workers' beer and stole their pensions - including his. Campbell's job was to carry the hat and coat of the fraudster, and to monster his enemies in print.

I became one of those when, under the cloak of parliamentary privilege, I alleged that the then newspaper proprietor was an arms dealer, an agent of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, and had betrayed to them the whereabouts of the brave Jewish whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who was then kidnapped in Leicester Square, drugged and flown in a crate to 18 years solitary confinement in an Israeli dungeon for telling the world about their illegal nuclear weapons.

Campbell turned on me with a vengeance which has now lasted nearly 20 years. I had the last laugh when Maxwell's papers had to pay me a king's ransom in libel damages, but I still bear the scars. Campbell trod, hard, on my foot while we both listened to a speech by the late John Smith at a Labour conference. In a press versus parliament football match on astroturf he pursued me like a madman, scything me down on the burning plastic. I got off lightly. At the same time Campbell broke the nose - in parliament - of lobby correspondent Michael White of the Guardian, for the crime of whistling When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along.

I later gave evidence against Campbell in a Maxwell-related court case, after which the judge described the man who became the second most powerful in the country as a thoroughly "unreliable witness". I have enjoyed his diaries, and don't share the cynics' view that these are the scribblings of an unimportant man. When history's second draft is written (journalism being the first), it will be clear that Alastair Campbell is like those crazed Aryan fanatics who continued fighting in the Berlin bunker when all hope was lost.

He was content to take the criminals' shilling and none could complain they didn't get their money's worth, no employer could ever have purchased such loyalty as Campbell's. I thought at the time it was a pity Campbell was so loyal to Maxwell, the greatest British thief of the twentieth century. However at least nobody, but Maxwell, died as a result. Little did I know that the bag-pipe playing Campbell would go on to be complicit in much greater massacres. From Dr David Kelly, whose life blood drained onto an Oxfordshire field all the way to the bloody swamps of Iraq, the large size 10 footprint of Campbell is to be found.

At Nuremberg at the end of the WW2, "launching aggressive war" was the charge which saw the Nazi's swing. Their excuse, "we were only obeying orders", was rejected then and forever after. In truth, Alastair Campbell never needed orders. He was always perfectly attuned to his masters' thoughts. No matter who or what they were. He is a tortured soul. No wonder. It's a pity Campbell was so loyal to Robert Maxwell, the greatest British thief of the twentieth century.

MY TARTAN SPECIALS

A MAGAZINE just asked me, as a "famous Scot", a series of questions about our fair land, and you can save yourselves buying it by reading the answers here. My favourite place in Scotland is Glencoe, where the ghosts of the murdered MacDonalds, killed in their beds by the treacherous Campbells, seem to whisper in the mist.

My favourite Scottish author is a harder one. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, Kidnapped and his Child's Garden of Verse are hard to beat. And his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has been a strange case I've come across often in my life. And Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Kelman, Jeff Torrington and Irvine Welsh would all be in anybody's top 10.

My favourite Scots actor is difficult too. Sir Sean is obvious, but fellow Dundonian Brian Cox is a "rerr" turn, if a bit "up himself" (I once modestly dubbed him the "most famous" Dundonian and he made the mistake of believing his own publicity). I also rate Alan Cumming - who as one of Victor and Barry played at my victory party, gratis, 20 years ago in Partick Burgh Halls - Ewan McGregor, Denis Lawson, Robert Carlyle, Alastair Sim, Peter Mullan.

My best Scottish film is impossible too; My Name is Joe, the original Rob Roy, Trainspotting Sweet Sixteen, Ae Fond Kiss, Tunes of Glory and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie are among the best, as are Culloden by Peter Watkins or anything by Bill Forsyth. Come to think of think of it I don't know how I'm going to answer these questions. I need your help at g.galloway@dailyrecord.co.uk

ENGLISH SCHOOLS

ENGLISH schools have consigned Churchill to the dustbin. A slimmed down History syllabus has rendered the great man surplus to requirements. If not for Churchill I wouldn't be writing this column today, somebody else would, in German. But for the bulldog's determination to face the Nazi hordes, Britain would have become an occupied satrapy. Churchill should be the first item on the history blackboard, not erased in a puff of cretinous chalk.