GEORGE Galloway yesterday urged Labour to readmit him after Jeremy Corbyn hinted in an interview that the party may open its doors to the controversial politician again.

In a series of tweets, the former Labour MP said he would not “apply to rejoin” and that the party should “rescind” his expulsion.

“The Blairites queuing up to declare ‘over my dead body’ on my return to Labour would be attacking Corbyn on something else if not this,” he added. “I will always be Labour. I was born that way and will die that way. I oppose Labour’s enemies within and without. I support Corbyn.”

Galloway was booted out of the party in 2003 for comments he made against the Iraq war while MP for Glasgow Kelvin, including calls for British troops to “refuse to obey illegal orders”.

He has since been elected as an MP for the Respect Party in two different seats, and is running against Labour’s Sadiq Khan in an attempt to become Mayor of London. Speaking in July, Galloway said he would rejoin Labour “pretty damn quick” if Corbyn became leader.

But in an interview with the Huffington Post yesterday to mark his first 100 days as Labour leader, Corbyn said: “There is a five-year rule. If he applies in five years’ time, it goes to the National Executive, they decide. Not me.”

Pressed on whether he would be opposed to him rejoining, the party leader said: “Let them decide.”

While for some his comments around the Iraq war might be consigned to the past, for many his more recent intervention on the rape allegations made against the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange cannot be. In August 2012 he said that if a woman consents to sex once, and then wakes up to find the same man having sex with her again without her consent, it is not rape. “Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion,” he said.

He added: “It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘do you mind if I do it again?’ It might be ... bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning.”

He later insisted he regarded non-consensual sex as rape.

Earlier this year he also made a number of ferocious attacks on Naz Shah, the Labour candidate who unseated him in Bradford West at the General Election in May. He accused her of lying about being forced into marriage at 15, claiming she was 16. She produced a document that backed her claim, and in her maiden speech to Parliament described Galloway as “misogynistic, vitriolic [and] very dangerous” but in a reference to his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother complimented him on “his taste for leotards”.

Writing last month on the website of Progress, a Blairite pressure group, the Labour MP Dawn Butler, who chairs the Women’s Parliamentary Labour Group, warned: “Galloway has an ugly track record in opposing Labour women. I have spoken to Jeremy Corbyn and he has told me he is not in favour of letting Galloway back in. Suggestions that George Galloway should be readmitted are rather bewildering. I am sure that there would be an almighty revolt.”

Elsewhere in the Huffington Post interview, Corbyn suggested Labour MPs who go against the will of local party members could lose their seats.

He also said Labour’s pro-Trident policy could be changed by an e-mail poll of party members, in the same way he gauged opinion before the Commons vote on bombing Syria.