David Aaronovitch - Times Online - WBLG

My Dad Was a Communist

On BBC4 tonight, at 9.40.

I told you.......

I know, I know, but did you see it tonight? The same outraged intensity, the same rhetoric, the same resort to ad hominem abuse, except clearly in service of nothing more than George's envy and anger. As for unreconstructed, try - "Michael cried, Maggot cried, what kind of men are they?"  To remind you, I wrote..............

"So it hasn’t been politics triumphing over showbusiness or showbusiness over politics. Viewers have seen the triumph of psychology over both, of Freud over all the Marxes. They sense that it is George Galloway’s own Dundee demons that have him playing pussy, not the prospect of Palestine."

My daughter couldn't get through to vote for George to be evicted. The lines were jammed. And that, I promise, is the last I'll say about it.

George in the House

I should, of course, be ashamed that I am sitting, most evenings, with my two oldest and watching GG on BB. That someone should inflict something so catastrophic upon themselves and their rather horrid movement ON PURPOSE, adds a pathos to the extraordinary comedy.

Almost as funny as Geoge in a leotard or George being caught out lying, are the contortions of his supporters, including many on the web. It ain't so bad, he may still come through it, it's irrelevant compared to the suffering in (insert favoured location here), he'll sue you when he comes out, or - best of all - "it shows how petty you are for caring so much about this one flawed man appearing on an ephemeral TV show". Doesn't it, just! Fancy laughing at the truly comic!

This is the hero of Bethnal Green, the hero of DC, the hero of the Telegraph Trial, showing himself to be everything we said we was and that you insisted he wasn't. And this is how - saving an investigation or two into l'affaire Zureikat and the wife's oily bank account - he will pass into history.