Allen Lane £10 pp185

This is the sort of book we haven’t seen in this country for at least 50 years. Older readers will recall the screeching prose from those Communist Party and Left Book Club pamphlets of the 1940s and 1950s. Younger readers will be utterly bewildered, I imagine.

It is in many ways an atrocious volume. You turn each page convinced that in the next few paragraphs George is going to call someone a running dog, or a lackey, or an imperialist hyena. Every now and again he reaches such a pitch of apoplectic fury that grammar, logic and a sense of proportion desert him entirely. Take this, as an example: “The BBC — the Bush and Blair Chorus — paid for by a licence-fee poll tax of a people whose wishes take second place to the agenda of the powerful. Rupert Murdoch in all his guises: Australian outbacker, ‘Little Englander’, American Buccaneer; tomorrow perhaps — as the Far East beckons — Chairman Murdoch Ru Pert.”

Leave aside for a moment the lack of a verb phrase and thus a point to his paragraph and, indeed, the fatuous “pun”; one is left scratching one’s head wondering what the hell he is talking about. Does he really think the BBC is an uncritical supporter of Blair and Bush? Is he — a socialist — really opposed to the licence fee? And what does all that stuff about Rupert Murdoch actually mean?

And then, as you plough ever onward, there are the epic self-regard and self-satisfaction, the mixed metaphors, the cringe-inducing sentimentality and the language, beyond parody, of the revolutionary at the barricades: “As I told my daughter Lucy many years ago, when she asked me if I was Scottish or British, ‘My flag is red, my country is the future.’ ” Lordy! Well, there you go, Luce. Hope that’s cleared things up.

The encomiums on the back of the book come, of course, from John Pilger and Tony Benn. The work itself is dedicated to “all the children of Iraq and Palestine”, for which benediction, one imagines, the little mites will be beside themselves with gratitude. And — this is the clincher — the title is of course a quote from John Lennon’s Imagine, possibly the worst pop song written in the last 50 years. In case you missed it, George spells it out in the introduction: “I believe in justice and equality and that the earth and all who live upon it deserve respect. You may say that I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.”

Now, any sane person would stop reading the book right there and make a very rapid visit to the bathroom. That’s certainly what I wanted to do and, if I’m honest, I rather wish that I had. Because as you read on a horrible truth begins to dawn — which is that, despite it all, George Galloway is actually right rather more often than he is wrong on the big issues. He is certainly right about the extent of the government’s disgraceful deceit over the war against Iraq. And he catalogues with a cold precision each and every prime ministerial lie, both those we have remembered and those, shamefully, we may have forgotten. He is acute and moving on the subject of the sanctions against Iraq and the subsequent, bloody, military action against that country. And then you are forced to recall, a little uncomfortably perhaps, that George Galloway was one of the very few Labour MPs to stick his moustachioed head above the parapet and speak out, unequivocally, against the war — at some considerable personal cost, in the end. He was kicked out of the party that, patently, he loved, but possessed sufficient chutzpah and optimism to begin a new political party — named after one of the best pop songs of the last 50 years, Respect. And he still suffers state-sponsored vilification and defamation here and in America.

So, despite the rotten prose and the embarrassing revolutionary shibboleths, you end up wishing George Galloway the very best of luck and hoping that, against the odds, he will be around on the political scene for a long time. He has a sod-you, independent streak a mile wide, which, even by itself, is a valuable and almost unique commodity in our vapid, managerial House of Commons. Hell, if he ever stood for parliament in Wiltshire, I’d probably even vote for him, so long as he promised never, ever to quote from John Lennon in his speeches and instead continued to champion unpopular causes and annoy the hell out of the government.

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