The gloating of Gorgeous George: How Galloway's cynical courting of young Muslims left Labour humiliated

The Respect founder secured 18,341 votes - a majority of 10,140

The Labour party is knocked into second place with just 8,201 votes

Bookies slash odds of Ed Miliband being sacked as leader after the embarrassing loss

Protester Thomas Johnson hurls up to a dozen eggs at Mr Galloway while shouting insults





Ed Miliband faces a leadership showdown this summer unless he improves Labour’s standing after George Galloway condemned the party to a humiliating defeat in the Bradford West by-election.



The Respect candidate romped to victory on a 36.5 per cent swing just hours after Mr Miliband’s aides had briefed the media on his plans for a Labour victory rally today.



Despite a terrible post-Budget fortnight for the Tories, Mr Galloway overturned a Labour lead of 5,000 at the last election to secure an emphatic majority of more than 10,000 votes.



He had relentlessly courted the votes of young Muslims and grandiloquently branded his win the ‘Bradford Spring’ – an echo of the uprisings in the Arab world.



Scroll down to see interviews with George Galloway and Ed Miliband

Unperturbed: George Galloway poses for the media before setting off on an open top bus tour of the city

He also boasted that it was ‘the most sensational victory in British political history’.



‘This is a rejection of the mainstream parties with their Tweedledee, Tweedledum, Tweedledee-and-a-half approach,’ he said.

He declared that he was a politician who didn’t ‘say one thing before an election and something different after’ and pronounced: ‘There is a tidal wave waiting to break all over the country, not just in Bradford.



‘There are very large numbers of people disenchanted and alienated from the political process and from all three major parties. If a backside could have three cheeks, then British politics is that three-cheeked backside.’

Flying high: George Galloway is lifted up in the air by his supporters after winning the Bradford West by-election

A word in your ear: Mr Galloway embraces one of his associates

He wished ‘political perdition’ on the Coalition government.

Labour had held the seat for more than 30 years. Not since 1960 has an opposition successfully won an overall majority after losing a seat in a by-election.

Mr Galloway, an ex-Labour MP who was expelled from the party in 2003 after urging British troops to disobey ‘illegal’ orders to invade Iraq, won 18,341 votes to the 8,201 for Labour candidate Imran Hussain. The contest in a seat where 43 per cent of voters are Asian was triggered by the resignation due to ill-health of Marsha Singh.

Mr Galloway was credited with mobilising the heavily Muslim population – 38 per cent of voters – with a febrile brand of anti-war rhetoric and capitalising on the anti-politics protest.

Respect my friend: George Galloway basks in the admiration of his supporters following his victory

Younger Muslims – attracted to his long-standing opposition to the wars in the Middle East, the fact he is teetotal and his outsider status – rejected the blandishments of their elders to back Labour.



Thousands of votes in Bradford were cast by post. Mr Galloway had complained that postal voting could have aided Labour because of pressure put on the young to support their parents’ choice. But analysts say younger voters simply decided to ignore their elders.

Mr Galloway's triumphal open bus tour to celebrate his landslide by-election win in Bradford West was disrupted yesterday after he was attacked with eggs.

Anger: Protester Thomas Johnson, 26, called Mr Galloway a 'parasite' as he threw eggs at him

Lone protester Thomas Johnson, 26, who lives in the city, yelled out that Mr Galloway was a 'parasite' as he pelted the Respect MP as he left his campaign headquarters.



Mr Galloway said it was too early for protests as Johnson shouted: 'He's a sycophant, he's a greedy leech, he's a parasite on this city.'

Attack: The new MP for Bradford West is forced to take cover as several eggs land close to him

Egging: Shell, yolk and white showered over the crowd, hit his election HQ and his open-top bus but did not land on Mr Galloway

Eggs exploded on the windows of the Chambers Solicitors office, where the campaign was based, and showered those standing below with yolks, egg whites and fragments of shell.



When asked why he was protesting, Mr Johnson shouted: 'Why would any city want a politician that got kicked out of two constituencies? Who hasn't got the common sense not to act like a submissive cat on television?'



He added: 'I wanted to insult him.'

Row: Supporters of Respect Party candidate George Galloway confront Mr Johnson, whose aim was to disrupt celebrations

Mr Galloway said the eggs had not hit him and said it would not tarnish his huge win.

'He wasn't very good,' he said, adding, 'Was he protesting? Against me? The man who got chosen by 56 per cent of the people yesterday?

'I've only just been elected. Unless he was protesting against the democratic process of the election.'

Labour’s own campaign came under fire from backbencher John Mann, who accused the leadership of having ‘no game plan and no strategy’ to win the seat.

Inquest: Labour leader Ed Miliband speaks outside his London home yesterday morning

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is widely touted as an alternative leader and she and husband Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, have built up a large group of supporters in the party.

Another Labour source said Mr Miliband should have spent more time campaigning in Bradford, rather than dreaming up publicity stunts to capitalise on the Government’s ‘pasty tax’ woes.



It was the most crushing defeat for Labour in a by-election since Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes seized Bermondsey in 1983 on a 44 per cent swing.

However, the party faces another major test in London in May when former mayor Ken Livingstone attempts to recapture City Hall from Tory Boris Johnson.

The Conservatives, who came third in the by-election with 2,746 votes, also saw their vote fall by more than 20 per cent. The Lib Dems lost their deposit.

Pressure: On the back of the result, bookies have cut the odds of Ed Miliband not being party leader at the next general election

Labour appeared complacent about victory until an hour before the ballot closed – unaware that their support had drained away.



John Mann, who went with his own constituency staff to help out in Bradford, revealed yesterday: ‘What was particularly disconcerting was having no Muslim doorknockers, no Urdu speaker, no Hijab wearing woman talking to Muslim women voters.’

The Labour leader promised to learn the lessons from the defeat, and said he would visit Bradford to find out what went wrong.



‘It was an incredibly disappointing result for Labour,’ said Mr Miliband. His aides attributed the defeat to ‘local factors’ and the ‘anti politics vote’ – pointing out that just four out of ten voters backed a mainstream party in Thursday night’s vote.



Tory party co-chairman, Baroness Warsi, said: ‘If Labour can’t win one of their safe seats in these tough economic times and in a tough week for the Government, how can they win anywhere?’

Atul Hatwal of the Labour Uncut website wrote: ‘Hell will freeze over before large numbers of Tories switch to Labour.’

THE 'BRADFORD SPRING' ROADSHOW

By DAVID WILKES

Anyone who witnessed George Galloway’s toe-curling antics on Celebrity Big Brother knows he can play the cat that got the cream with aplomb.

And yesterday the newly elected MP for Bradford West gave another eyebrow-raising performance, as he took to an open-top bus for a victory tour of the city.

Accompanied by an entourage including drummers, he puffed out his chest as he pointed out political landmarks and declared himself ‘the new broom that will sweep clean the corridors of power’.

Cars stopped as drivers leaned out to take pictures on their mobile phones and honked their horns. Pedestrians waved as the bus, adorned with balloons in green and red – the Respect party’s colours – lurched past.

Between twirling his cigar and flicking Churchillian V for victory signs, ‘Gorgeous George’ reminded the throng that his win was a ‘truly historic result which has never been seen in British politics before, and that’s saying something’.

When the bus got stuck in traffic, however, and the mic was off, even he admitted he had not expected to win: ‘Well, we won it which was quite a big surprise to everyone including us.’

Earlier, he had almost found himself with egg on his face – quite literally – after being ambushed by protester Thomas Chippendale, who threw a dozen eggs at the new MP as he left Respect HQ – but missed.

Mr Chippendale, 26, a salesman and Monster Raving Loony Party supporter, was then forced back along the street, yelling that Mr Galloway was a ‘leech and parasite’. For most, however, the day the ‘G-Factor’ came to town was a cause for celebration. Some women supporters spoke almost breathlessly of Mr Galloway’s ‘charisma’, and even Asian schoolgirls too young to vote got in on the act.

One claimed he had become the focus of classroom chat over his support for Palestine.

‘My friends talk about him as a role model,’ said Asma Shabir, 16. ‘His views on Palestine are a big thing for young people.’

Taxi driver Mohammed Yasin, 52, who has lived in Bradford since 1974, had only ever voted Labour. But this time he swapped allegiance to Mr Galloway.

‘I don’t know much about him, but I went to a few of his speeches,’ he said. ‘He says the right things. Shops are shutting down everywhere here. We need a new start.’

Among Mr Galloway’s women supporters was Maren Nisa, 36, a teaching assistant. ‘I’m impressed by the man, he’s dedicated, sincere. He is a people’s person,’ she said.

Shilpa Patel, 29, said: ‘I voted for him because he says there is going to be change so let’s hope there is.’

That sentiment, at least, was shared by those who did not vote for Mr Galloway. ‘There’s a saying here in Yorkshire: the proof of the pudding’s in the eating,’ said a businessman enjoying a pint in the sunshine.

‘He’s going round in a bus saying he’s going to put the boot up Bradford…but let’s see what actually happens.’

Showman, egotist and rogue, he always looks after No1

By RICHARD PENDLEBURY

Churchill he ain't: Mr Galloway adopts the victory sign as he puffs on a cigar

Last week I received a phone call from a man in Iraq. ‘Where is Mr George?’ he asked, plaintively. ‘I need to speak to Mr George.’



It was the father of Mariam Hamza, a blind, leukaemia-stricken girl who became a symbol for George Galloway’s campaign to end UN sanctions – including the blocking of medical supplies – against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime in the late 1990s.



I had met Hamza Abd while covering the story for the Mail.



Mariam was the ‘candle that will illuminate some very dark corners,’ Galloway declared after he first discovered her in a Baghdad hospital. Inevitably, he had a TV crew in attendance.



In fact, what the photogenic Mariam best illuminated was Galloway himself. The little girl’s plight first made his name on the international stage. He has never looked back.



That was more than a decade ago. Today, Galloway is revelling in the warmth of what he called ‘the Bradford Spring’ – a self-congratulatory reference to recent Arab liberation movements rather than the clement Yorkshire weather.



Showman, rogue, opportunist, contrarian, ladies’ man, show-off and arch-egotist, Galloway, 57, has leaped from one high-profile cause to the next like a mountain goat.



What is most amazing is that, for all his arrogance and occasional buffoonery, he has hardly ever slipped. At least not badly enough to be hurt, unlike many of those who took him on.



Born in a working class neighbourhood of Dundee - which he later tried to twin with the Palestinian town of Nablus – Galloway’s first job was in a tyre factory.



But hot air, rather than air pressure was where his talents lay.



Landslide: A jubilant George Galloway celebrates with his Respect Party supporters following their huge margin of victory over Labour

A fiery orator in the classic mould, Galloway was chairman of the Scottish Labour Party by the age of 26 and elected to Parliament, beating the SDP’s Roy Jenkins to win the Glasgow Hillhead seat, six years later. Soon afterwards he earned his ‘Gorgeous’ nickname following a conference in Greece.



In reply to a question about his behaviour, he said: ‘I travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece.’



That sexist bombast earned him a vote of no-confidence from his shocked local party. But he survived, as did his reputation as a swordsman.



Married three times, (despite avowed strong Roman Catholic beliefs), he has never been short of young, pretty female admirers.



Much of his energy in the last 20 years has been focused on Middle Eastern affairs.

Publicity stunt: Mr Galloway brought Iraqi cancer sufferer Mariam Hamza to Britain for treatment

In 1994, he courted controversy when was filmed apparently telling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein: ‘Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.’



Galloway claimed he had been misinterpreted.



But his relationship with the dictator was of mutual benefit. When Galloway discovered four-year-old Mariam Hamza in 1998, Saddam allowed him to take her to Britain for treatment.



The Mariam Appeal was a political fund rather than a charity. It outgrew Galloway’s parliamentary staff and took on a life of its own as the MP basked in the limelight afforded. But all was not right.



Eventually, a Charity Commission investigation found that hundreds of thousands of pounds were paid into the appeal by its chairman, a Saddam regime crony called Fawaz Zureikat. He had paid kickbacks to the Saddam regime.



Under the terms of UN sanctions, this money from oil revenues should have been spent on food and other necessities of everyday life for the Iraqi people as a whole.



Galloway escaped from the ensuing controversy untainted.



Meanwhile, his often fraught relationship with the Labour Party finally ended in October 2003 when he was expelled for comments which allegedly ‘incited foreign forces to rise up against British troops’.



Galloway dismissed the act as a ‘politically motivated kangaroo court’.



But he had also been accused by the Daily Telegraph of receiving kickbacks from the ousted Saddam regime.

Mutual benefit: Mr Galloway with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz

He seemed to have his back against the wall. But once again he emerged triumphant. In December 2004, he won his libel action against the Telegraph, which had to pay him £150,000.



Standing for the anti-war Respect Party, he then pulled off one of the most extraordinary results of the 2005, or any other recent general election, by beating the much-favoured Labour Party incumbent, Oona King, in Bethnal Green and Bow.



King described it as ‘one of the dirtiest campaigns we have ever seen in British politics.’ Shortly afterwards Galloway went to Washington to give a bravura performance in front of a U.S. Senate Committee, which had accused him of profiteering in Iraq. He said the allegation was the ‘mother of all smokescreens.’



Typically, Galloway then almost immediately blotted his copybook as far as many of his conservative Muslim constituents were concerned, by taking part in Channel Four’s Celebrity Big Brother.

Paws for thought: George Galloway's portrayal of a cat, pictured having his ears stroked by Rula Lenska, has become one of the most famous Celebrity Big Brother moments

The low point came when he dressed in a leotard and pretended to be a cat licking milk from the hands of Big Brother house-mate, actress Rula Lenska.



After fighting and losing the newly-created Poplar and Limehouse seat in the 2010 general election, Galloway concentrated on his extensive media work.



Now he is back on the main stage in Westminster, what of the Iraqi girl whose plight made his name?



Apparently Mariam’s health is still poor, while money is short.



What her father still doesn’t seem to understand though is that as far as Baghdad is concerned, the Galloway Roadshow has left town. It’s simply moved on to West Yorkshire.



The Respect voters of Bradford West should be aware: Gorgeous George has always looked after Number One.



THE MANY ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF 'GORGEOUS' GEORGE 'Gorgeous' George Galloway's victory in Bradford West is the latest chapter in the career of one of the country's most controversial politicians. Mr Galloway was born on August 16 1954 in, to use his own words, 'an attic in a slum tenement in the Irish quarter of Dundee which is known as Tipperary'. In 1977, he was appointed a Labour Party organiser and at the age of 26 he became chairman of the Scottish Labour Party, one of the youngest in history. Mr Galloway won Glasgow Hillhead - ousting one of the new Social Democrat Party's Gang of Four Roy Jenkins - in 1987 but faced an almost immediate scandal. 'Gorgeous' George Galloway, smoking a cigar in the Celebrity Big Brother house, gave a notorious performance in the reality TV show He was asked about a conference in Mykonos in Greece and replied: 'I travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece.' The story was splashed all over the front pages and earned him the moniker 'Gorgeous George'. The executive committee of his local party passed a vote of no confidence in him in February 1988 and he only narrowly survived to win reselection the following year. In 1994, Mr Galloway caused outrage when he was filmed telling Saddam Hussein: 'Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.' He claimed that the praise was intended for the Iraqi people collectively. His contacts with Saddam Hussein, which earned him the nickname 'the honourable member for Baghdad Central', was a constant source of embarrassment for Labour. After publicly accusing Tony Blair and President George W Bush of acting 'like wolves' in invading Iraq, Mr Galloway was expelled from the party in 2003. He then founded the Respect party and won the former Labour stronghold of Bethnal Green and Bow in London's East End, another constituency with a high Muslim population, in 2005. He achieved notoriety for his conduct in the the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2006, where he demonstrated his ability to change from a roaring political tiger to timid domestic cat, by pretending to purr and lick cream from actress Rula Lenska's hands on the show. But in the following general election of 2010 he failed to win the seat of Poplar and Limehouse. In 2011 he said he might end his political career in Scotland if he secured a seat in that year's Scottish Parliament election. But his bid failed, leading him to Bradford. His notoriety brought him to the attention of the tabloids and earlier this year he accepted £25,000 in damages from News Group Newspapers after it admitted that private investigator Glenn Mulcaire intercepted messages left on his mobile phone.

AS GALLOWAY CLAIMS THE 'MOST SENSATIONAL IN BRITISH POLITICAL HISTORY', HERE ARE SOME OTHER NOTABLE BY-ELECTION SHOCKS :

Liberal Simon Hughes gained the highest by-election swing since the Second World War in 1983 1966: Gwynfor Evans gave Plaid Cymru its first seat when he took Carmarthen from Labour on an 18 per cent swing. 1968: Tories chalked up a 21.1 per cent swing to take Dudley on March 28 from Labour as well as marginal Meriden and Acton. This was possibly the first time in history that a party lost three seats at by-elections on the same day. 1969: Liberals captured Ladywood, their first Birmingham seat for 83 years, from Labour on a 32 per cent swing. 1977: The Conservatives toppled Labour in its Ashfield mining stronghold on a 20.8 per cent swing. 1983: Liberal Simon Hughes gained the highest swing since the Second Word War - 44.2 per cent - when he won Bermondsey from Labour. 1989: Labour's John Smith took the Vale of Glamorgan from the Tories on a 12.4 per cent switch - giving the party its most dramatic by-election win for more than half a century. 1993: The first by-election of the new parliament saw Liberal Democrats capture Newbury from Tories with 22,055 majority on a 28.4 per cent swing. This was followed by the Christchurch contest which brought the biggest recorded swing against a Government - 35.4 per cent from Conservative to Liberal Democrats. 1997: With the General Election barely two months away, Conservatives lost to Labour at Wirral South on a 17.2 per cent swing. Tories failed to win a single by-election between William Hague's victory at Richmond, Yorks, in 1989 and their success in the first contest of the new 1997 Parliament at Uxbridge. 2003: Labour suffered its first Commons by-election loss since it returned to power in 1997 when Liberal Democrats snatched Brent East, north London on a 29 per cent swing. 2009: Tory Chloe Smith became the youngest MP when she snatched Norwich North from Labour on a 16.5 per cent swing.

VIDEO: Polls apart. Both Labour leader Ed Miliband and Respect leader Salma Yaqoob admit the result was a surprise

VIDEO: It's a Bradford Spring claims new Bradford West MP George Galloway