george galloway - the big issue interview

[luke]

"I'M A LOVER AND A FIGHTER"
As he returns to the House of Commons, George Galloway discusses working-class culture, the evils of alcohol... and why he prefers the company of women

"Come in!" announces George Galloway, rather gorgeously, ushering The Big Issue into his homely, huge, red-brick townhouse in the strongly multi-cultural south London neighbourhood of Streatham. For a man whose PR has instructed his private life is “off limits”, he cheerfully introduces us to it: his new – fourth – wife, 27-year-old Dutch/Indonesian anthropologist Putri Pertiwi, approaches with iced biscuits and a beaming smile, while three of his grandchildren bundle past into an overgrown garden.

“Grandad!” pipes a boy.
Grandad: “Yes, my darling?”
“Your fish isn’t dead, it’s alive!”
“You better feed it then! I’d no idea, it was in deep hiding, a big goldfish, last one standing…” He can do metaphors, then, when he’s not even trying…

It’s exactly 13 days on from his Respect Party’s demolishing of Bradford West’s “safe” Labour seat and George Galloway is the most highly visible big fish in the fringe-politics pond.

“It’s been a tumultuous week,” he notes, a red stye of exhaustion circling one of those twinkling, ice-blue eyes. “For a small, left-wing party, the win was literally unprecedented.” He is a man who’s batted off a meteorite shower of media attacks “trying to belittle it”, and continuously remind us, of course, of his scarlet Big Brother unitard and “would you like me… to be… the cat?”

We know his politics: joined the Labour Party aged 13 in 1967, booted out of New Labour in 2003 for his anti-Iraq war views, took the US Senate to task over oil-for-food allegations in 2005, vehemently anti-imperialist left, pro-Europe, against Scottish independence – “it seems to me fatuous to invent a new state, a very parochial path” – and since Bradford West has coined a new term for Britain’s three-ish party system, “the three cheeks of the same arse”, something he believes is kickable, eventually, into history. But what of The Man?

Dressed all in black as ever (tidy shirt and trousers), he settles on a burgundy sofa with golden Arabic design, alongside two packs of Happy Shopper crayons, and constantly smokes his beloved Montecristo No.2 cigar beneath an impressionistic painting of a woman with bare breasts.

He is hypnotically eloquent, prone to both preposterous statement and solid sense, soon lying straight along the sofa with his head nestling on the armrest. Soon, your correspondent feels like feeding him grapes.

Your winner’s speech in Bradford wasn’t about you or Respect, it was about the Labour Party. Why?
Because every country needs a Labour Party and Britain hasn’t had one since Mr Blair seized control. I don’t hate the Labour Party, far from it. I loved it more than the people who kicked me out of it ever did. But it’s unrecognisable. The task therefore for us is either – and this I would much prefer – help engineer Labour becoming a Labour Party again, but if it doesn’t, then to try and make another Labour Party. When I first entered parliament in 1987 there were maybe 150 Labour MPs that had been miners and engineers and dockers and were deeply rooted in working class life in Britain. You’d be lucky if you found 10 such people now. People go to the best universities, become researchers, then MPs, suddenly they’re on the front bench and they know nothing about the lives of ordinary people. And if Ed Miliband is thrown out, he’ll be replaced by someone even more anti-Labour than him, either Yvette Cooper or by his brother – and Shakespeare couldn’t have made that one up. So it may not happen in my lifetime, but it will have to happen one day.

There’s a dearth of what we used to call the Working Class Hero everywhere in culture. Why is that?
It’ll come back. Funnily enough, having a young wife, I was telling her about the ‘80s, the vile Thatcherite period, but its counterpoint was a tremendous flourish of working class culture. I was playing her The Jam, explaining the songs. So there will be a response, from the oppressed, the poor, to the fact Britain is once again led by multi-millionaires. We’re back to 1963. The new Beatles are strumming in a Hamburg cellar right now.

The title of your biography, I’m Not The Only One, is taken from Lennon’s Imagine. Are you a hippy underneath it all?
I was never a hippy, I was a mod! And I was just showing her [his wife] the pictures. Small Faces hair, Harrington jackets, Ben Sherman shirts, like my friend Paul Weller. [Petri suddenly appears and announces in a heavy Dutch accent, “I’m liking the music, I’m fond of music in that spirit, I like Bob Dylan”, and disappears again]. I bought a Dylan album in Lochee aged 13 so Dylan is one of our points of contact!

Can you explain this “effect” you have on women? Is Gorgeous George hilarious to you?
I’m the artist formerly known as Gorgeous George. I prefer the company of women. Because I don’t drink, I don’t swear, I’m not crude, sometimes male company turns me off. And from an early age I was the person who drove everybody home and I always saved the prettiest girl to drop off last. Heheh!

At 18 you decided to never drink alcohol. That’s fairly extreme.
We were brought up to hate alcohol. My father used to take me to the window and show me our neighbours in the Scottish/Irish slum swaying their way home, and explain that the man had spent his wages on booze. 'Look at the state of him, his children could’ve had shoes,' my father would say. I have never tasted alcohol. Never in my life. An ideological choice. I feel the same about drugs. The stupefication of the masses through smoking joints is a major problem. We could… emancipate ourselves from mental slavery [chortles heartily at his rather good Bob Marley quip] if we were sober.

You can’t see the need for a recreational escape, a holiday from reality?
It isn’t an escape. Because you don’t just wake up in the same place, you’re worse. It’s like going on holiday when the bailiffs are at your door. You’ve got to come back. And your house has gone! And I know, because I am that man, that you can have a whale of a time in life without drink and drugs. Music, making love, children, it’s all you need, really. I love children very much and hope to have more. Your own children and grandchildren literally piling on top of you, on the sofa, is as good as it gets. It’s far more fun than getting tanked down the old Bull ‘n’ Bush.

Basically, you’re a lover, not a fighter?
I’m a lover and a fighter.

You’re attacked from every side, whether it’s The Telegraph or Jeremy Paxman. What’s at the heart of that?
In the 1930s someone said, ‘Thank God you cannot bribe or twist the average British journalist because when you see what he'll do un-bribed, you realise there is no reason to.' They automatically face in the same direction as the power. The media is largely an echo chamber.

Hence last week you were a bigamist, this week you’re a tax dodger.
Yep. Dogs barking. If I was a bigamist, I’d be under arrest. If I was a tax dodger, I’d be under arrest. I’m the most inquired-into individual in British politics. By a country mile. If I did things wrong, be sure I’d already be in big trouble. We have a prevailing orthodoxy: there’s a few inches of political life in which it’s acceptable to have a different view, but if you challenge the fundamentals of policy, you’re an outlaw. You’re Robin Hood. But at least he’s remembered more than who was Parliamentary Undersecretary for Agricultural and Fisheries in the 1951 government. To complete that joke I must try and find out who was.

You must have had scores of reality TV offers since Big Brother...
The last Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 4 offered me £250,000. And when I turned it down they were incredulous. ‘You are turning down £250,000 for 10 days’ work?’ ‘Yes’. How did that feel? Better for me than the bank manager. And the ex-wives. But once was enough. I knew they would contrive damaging situations, definitely go for a reprise of the [rolls eyes] cat scene and it would’ve been a signal that I was giving up on returning to parliament. I’m too young for that. You ain’t seen nothing yet!

Have you stayed in contact with any of your Big Brother housemates?
Pete Burns, for a while. I got him out of jail. I had to go to a police station and pay a sum of money, of surety, to get him out of the cells. A fracas? There’s been a lot of fracas. And Dennis Rodman, I became firm friends with. He has a beach house in Malibu to which he keeps inviting me, but I keep making the point that it probably wouldn’t be good for me to be hanging out at his beach house in Malibu. It wouldn’t be wholesome. Drink would be the least of it.

Blimey, if only people knew the kind of life you could be living, instead of kicks at three-cheeked arses.
That thought occurs to me now and again. If only this flame would dampen!

http://www.bigissue.com/features/interviews/909/im-lover-and-fighter