A Scotsman With the Gifts of Gab and Jab

NYT

INCORRIGIBLE to the core, George Galloway is used to being threatened, ousted, libeled, filleted in the press and just plain reviled.

Over the years, the grand-père terrible of British politics has been called corrupt and treacherous; labeled an apologist for Saddam Hussein, a claim he forcefully rejects; portrayed as a Louis Vuitton-toting Socialist; and dismissed as a self-aggrandizing Labor Party turncoat.
"I could show you my scars," Mr. Galloway, 50, said from inside the ramshackle room where he sat, the stubby end of his Montecristo cigar a reassuring arm's reach away. "I am swimming against the stream. As Dr. Johnson once said, 'The grimmest dictatorship is the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy,' and I am fighting that orthodoxy. It's not that I relish it. It's that I am not afraid of it."

But since his appearance in May before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, where to the delight of many here and in America he flung scorn at two senators over Iraq, vilification has shifted to a modicum of admiration (even if it is grudging, at least in Britain).

Mr. Galloway, who is accused by the Senate subcommittee of enriching himself through the scandal-plagued oil-for-food program, volunteered to testify. Then, he swiftly turned the tables, he said. Entering the room, "not as the accused, but as the accuser," he ripped into the senators for ignoring central questions about Iraq and conducting what he called "the mother of all smokescreens."