Galloway with words
The smell is unmistakable, the dark-suited tie-free figure is borderline iconic. "We'll have to go somwhere I can smoke" he growls his Dundee brogue before conflagrating the remnants of a Cuban cigar. Even his smoking materials are socialist.
So here he is. A working class icon and firebrand revolutionary peacenik, this is the man expelled from the Labour Party for refusing to toe the party line regarding the war on Iraq. The 54-year-old is a celebrated figure on the left, a maverick whom everyone on the Westminster square mile has an opinion on. Dapper and charming, but uncompromising with it, he takes a huge drag before lambasting me for even suggesting hostilities in Iraq could perhaps be entering their final stages.
"It's not over as anyone who lives in the world of TV or reads newspapers knows," he growls.
"It's not the beginning of the end, it's the end of the beginning."
Asked how he felt when the team of 600 elite American soldiers from the Fourth Infantry Division and US Special Forces found Saddam Hussein in al-Dawr, Galloway has just one word.
"Unmoved."
This is the man who has met the brutal dictator twice, who in January 1994 said in Baghdad: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability."
Probed how he feels the situation in Iraq will develop, he says tens of thousands more people will die.
"The situation in Iraq is spiralling out of control. There is the violence of the occupiers and violence within Iraq. All of this was predicted by me, and people who think like me.
"There were those who had been holding out for fear of the return of Saddam and had been holding back. But those who had been loyal will re-double their efforts.
The now-independent MP for Glasgow Kelvin predicts more of the same in Iraq, further attacks on Western countries and the growth of further factions within the Middle East.
"There will be Balkanisation of Iraq and the broader region."
However he has high hopes for the year ahead, and for those who came to hear him at the 'British Politics at the Crossroads' event at the Town Hall in St Aldates on Monday night.
The meeting met to discuss the formation of a unity coalition, an electoral force to take on New Labour and "their policies of war, racism and neo-liberalism."
"I predict that by the end of this year Bush, Blair ... and Berlusconi will have gone," says Galloway, predicting that Tony Blair will be replaced by Gordon Brown, George Bush by Democratic candidate Howard Dean (who Galloway says he supports) and Italian prime minister by a centre-left contender.
Galloway predicts the rise of Social Democratic groupings not only in Britain, but in the US, Italy and further afield.
Turning to domestic issues, Galloway says he is dismayed at his expulsion from the Labour Party last year. Ian McCartney, a fellow Scottish MP and Chairman of the Labour Party was perhaps most vitriolic in his comments on Mr Galloway.
"He's the same Chairman of the Labour party who I beat to become full-time Labour organiser in Dundee 35 years ago by 21 votes to three," says Galloway with a smirk.
But there appears to be genuine dismay in his voice when he speaks of the party he "devoted 36 years of my life to.
"I tried to stay inside it, I'm not going to rubbish it now," he said.
He also rules out a Ken Livingstonian prodigal return to the fold. There will be no slaughter of a fatted calf for this disobedient son.
"But it's politics. Never say never." I'm sure I see his majestic eyebrows, perhaps his only similarity to Norman Lamont, twitch heavenward for the briefest of seconds.
But the attacks on his former party start again.
"The party has been hijacked and is being flown to destruction by a clique."
I ask him who is in this alleged clique. Another drag on the crumbling Cuban. He's staying silent for the moment, and refuses to be drawn on the exact membership of the alleged clique.
I ask if Jack Straw, in Oxford this week and interviewed on the opposing page, is a member of the ruling clique. Clearly Galloway has plenty of bile left.
"Jack Straw is a zero, a cypher. He's a man of straw."
But there is some admiration in him, this time for for another Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook.
Galloway praises Cook as a man of substance, although makes no secret of the fact that he has many criticisms of the former Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons who resigned over the war on Iraq.
Galloway predicts that Cook will stand for leadership of the Labour Party.
"I would hope people would support him," he says, a change of tune from such previous comments on Cook as: "A small man intoxicated by being allowed to run around with the big, aggressive, powerful boys after so many years as a corduroy-clad peacenik."
But he still pours scorn on Blair, and once famously said: "The difference between me and Mr Bush and Mr Blair is that I am against all dictatorships all of the time, not just some dictators some of the time."
Asked on a more current issue, that of the furore surrounding daytime TV host Robert Kilroy-Silk and his allegedly racist attack on Arab nations in the Sunday Express newspaper, Galloway leaps into a monologue on the issue, as he was the subject of Kilroy-Silk's vitriol in the first edition of the column, which was reprinted, apparently erroneously, on January 4.
"I was one of the few people who were annoyed at the article first time round. There were five paragraphs about me in it (the April edition) and they took them out for the second.
"People who buy the Sunday Express deserve anything they get anyway," said the columnist for the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday.
Galloway argues that Kilroy-Silk, who is a former Labour MP himself, should never have been given a programme in the first place.
"I hold strong opinions. They wouldn't give me a current affairs programme on the BBC."
I stumble down the stairs of the Town Hall with notebook in hand and think for a second what a Galloway-fronted show could be. Not quite Jerry Springer, perhaps Galloway is more of a Trisha-type.
They both push for diplomacy, trying to solve heated arguments with a wit and slightly patronising set of opinions. And they ask for trust in relationships, something which appears to be lacking in today's Labour Party.
22nd Jan 2004