Well done to the man in the audience on Question Time who in contrast to the smarmy congratulations handed to George Galloway by Alex Salmond of the Scottish Nationalist Party and Matthew Taylor of the Liberal Democrats, actually had the guts to ask the greying dwarf a tough question.
Until the intervention from the audience the programme had been a ‘George’ Appreciation Society gathering and even Labour’s Anne McGuire, the Works and Pensions Minister, was incapable of even raising the basic points about the charges against Galloway or his relationship with Saddam and Tariq Aziz, preferring instead an innocuous and irrelevent comment about how the diminutive Dundonian would maybe have had a harder time in front of a parliamentary committee. She even missed the obvious point that there is in fact a parliamentary investigation into Galloway.
With the mainstream appeasement of Galloway, reflecting the media’s current love-in with Saddam’s little helper, it was left to the man in the audience to ask whether he would keep his promise to make the accounts of the Mariam Appeal public and when Galloway blustered he followed up well by pointing out that the accounts had been sent to the Middle East. It is the first time this week anyone has put those two questions, that we have repeatedly posed here, to Galloway.
For once Galloway looked rattled rather than smug and nervously fell back on his “I’ve done better than that” diversion and the inaccurate claim that the Charity Commission had given him a “clean bill of health” and he was clearly agitated by the questioner telling him “You are not going to get very far with that one”. He pointedly refused to agree to keep his promise and make the accounts public.
Well done that man in the audience – you struck a nerve there.