Digital Spy interview

[faceless]

George Galloway
Friday, May 11 2007, 16:32 BST
By Nick Levine

Glamour models, fading pop stars and mouthy south London harlots - with their mothers in tow - are the usual fodder for celebrity reality TV shows. However, for Celebrity Big Brother 2006, Channel 4 scored a real coup: they managed to persuade George Galloway - the MP for Bethnal Green and Bow - to enter the house. We caught up with the confrontational politician to discuss why he decided to appear on the show, what he made of the infamous saucer of milk incident and how CBB affected his career.

Why did you decide to appear on Celebrity Big Brother?
"Well, I wanted to achieve a substantial donation for the charity I had chosen...My charity was the Palestinian Refugees in Gaza, and there are not a lot of people queueing up to give them money. A very substantial sum was raised, more than half a million pounds. That part of my objective was handsomely achieved. I wanted to use the show and its vast audience as a platform for the views I hold, particularly about the war. That was frustrated by the playing of birdsong over anything serious that I had to say and I'm obviously very disappointed about that. The explanations given after the fact simply don't hold water. The third objective is that I'm the sole Member of Parliament for a small party with no money and with no ability to be publicised except by thinking outside the box. You can't get much more outside the box than (appearing on Celebrity Big Brother). That too was handsomely achieved. I'm now known by more people in the country than virtually any politician with the exception of the Prime Minister. Everywhere I go I'm besieged by people who want to get their photograph taken with me on their mobile phones. That doesn't mean they all like me or agree with my views but it's not a bad start. As soon as I came out of Big Brother I was given a national radio show. I'm now broadcasting to the entire country at least six hours a week and sometimes very much more than that. That's a mass audience of millions of people."

Do you harbour any regrets from your time on the show?
"I regret that Big Brother was smarter than me, and that he achieved his objective of meddling with my and every other person in there's minds, to the extent that things got out of proportion. That's the purpose of Big Brother and he achieved it."

What about the infamous saucer of milk incident?
"I honestly don't get that. It was a task for food - if it had not been performed it would have meant starvation for my housemates. I think the only thing I did was to do it too well."

Were you mocked at all when you returned to the House of Commons?
"Not at all, not a single jot. Despite all the predictions of saucers of milk or miaows, there was not a single incident."

At the time one of your constituents - a certain Oscar-winning British actress - suggested that you were abandoning your constituency by appearing on the show. What do you say to that?
"It's rubbish. Most Members of Parliament are not even known by their constituents, much less their whereabouts. Much of the show was during the parliamentary recess, and the best answer was given by my constituents just twelve weeks later, when in the local elections we swept the entire Labour leadership out of office."

Do you think it's affected your career at all?
"I don't have a career. As I say, I'm a sole Member of Parliament for a small party, trying to find some room in the British psyche. I do all sorts of things - I'm appearing on stage at (east London's) Hackney Empire on Sunday in the mother of all one-man shows. On Sunday, I'll be treading the boards at the Hackney Empire talking and answering questions from hundreds of people who've paid £15-a-head in order to see me in order that our message can get across."

Have you stayed in touch with any of your fellow housemates?
"I was in touch for a little while with Pete Burns and Dennis Rodman - they were the only two people I made friends with in the house."

Have you cleared the air with any of your adversaries from the house?
"I don't want to revisit that."

What did you make of the Jade Goody furore from this year's Celebrity Big Brother?
"Well, I thought it was unutterably boring until that point, and the viewing figures reflected that. It became interesting because of that, which is why the show put it out. It told us something about how young people in particular talk about issues like race. It was a mirror to the current state of British society on these questions. I thought it was hysterically overblown - I don't think that Jade Goody is a racist. Not everyone who makes a racist comment is a racist, certainly not irredeemably so."

Would you ever appear on another reality TV show?
"Well, that's a very big genre. I wouldn't go back into the Big Brother house, but I don't regret doing it."

What are your thoughts on the announcement we've just had from Tony Blair?
"Well, good riddance to bad rubbish, which I think is the message that most people in this country, even the Labour government, feel."

And what do you think of Gordon Brown?
"I'm the populariser of the description of Brown and Blair being two cheeks of the same arse."