Loved This BitIn Christopher Hitchens'
evisceration of George Galloway:
In a small way--an exceedingly small way--this had the paradoxical effect of making me proud to be British. Parliament trains its sons in a hard school of debate and unscripted exchange, and so does the British Labour movement. You get your retaliation in first, you rise to a point of order, you heckle and you watch out for hecklers. The torpid majesty of a Senate proceeding does nothing to prepare you for a Galloway, who is in addition a man without embarrassment who has stayed just on the right side of many inquiries into his character and his accounting methods. He has, for example, temporarily won a libel case against the Daily Telegraph in London, which printed similar documents about him that were found in the Oil Ministry just after the fall of Baghdad. The newspaper claimed a public-interest defense, and did not explicitly state that the documents were genuine. Galloway, for his part, carefully did not state that they were false, either. The case has now gone to appeal.When I visited England during my college years in 1976, one of the classes we took was instructed by a Labour MP, who was on occasion able to get us into Parliament to observe it in session. What immediately struck me the first time was the biting, sarcastic way that speakers were treated, with catcalls and derisiveness. If somebody from the Tory side said anything vaguely patriotic, the Labour MPs would cynically humm "Rule Brittania", while a Labour MPs musings about the common man might get a few bars from the "Internationale" from the Conservatives. It was like a particularly rowdy high school class full of very smart and cynical kids.
Galloway gets this description:
He had had to resign as the head of a charity called "War on Want," after repaying some disputed expenses for living the high life in dirt-poor countries. Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing's too good for the working class: what the English call a "wide boy."Uriah Heep, in other words.
