Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of George Galloway’s Gorton by-election launch is apparent before even getting inside the venue.

The sight of his enormous campaign bus wedged into the end of the cramped terraced cul-de-sac off Albert Road in Levenshulme is arresting and mystifying in equal measure. Having just spent far too long struggling to navigate my own tiny car down the adjacent double-parked street, its presence seems to defy the laws of physics.

Gorton is likely to see a lot of that bus over the coming weeks, as well as giant banners of Galloway’s familiar black-hatted head on the sides of Labour clubs and curry houses scattered across the constituency.

The bus’s slightly retro message – ‘The Killings of Tony Blair’ spelt out in giant letters, the title of one of his books – is about as visible as trolling the Labour party gets. It is hard not to be slightly unnerved by Blair’s vast grinning face leering out at the campaign launch through the hedge.

In fact Galloway’s entire campaign is likely to be one long exercise in trolling the Labour party, having spent the last couple of weeks posting pictures of himself out on the Curry Mile and lurking ominously on the A6.

He is more of a Jeremy Corbyn fan than Corbyn’s own MPs, he tells the 40-strong mainly male audience assembled to hear him speak at Burnage Bowling Club. Copies of ‘The Quotable Galloway’, containing his alphabetised thoughts on everything from Jeremy Clarkson to Cuba, are on the table at the back.

“He’s in office but he’s not in power,” he says, referring to last summer’s parliamentary coup against Corbyn.

“The power lies with the 172 back-stabbers sitting behind him. Corbyn is unable to do the things that I’m sure that he would like to do.

“I have criticisms of his leadership and some of the policy decisions that he has been making but if I’m elected I will be one of the only MPs sitting behind Jeremy Corbyn without a knife in his hand.”

When I ask later why he didn’t just rejoin the Labour party, he says they won’t let him.

Much of Galloway’s hour-long speech dwells not on the specifics of the problems faced by Gorton itself but on the foreign policy stances that made him famous – and got him kicked out of Labour in the first place.

Most is firmly pitched at the seat’s considerable Asian electorate, following a tried-and-tested method in Bradford that saw him secure a shock victory there in 2012.

Galloway is not, he repeatedly points out, a member of Labour Friends of Israel, like the late Jewish MP Sir Gerald Kaufman but unlike the city’s other four MPs.

British Muslim society has been ‘polluted’ by extremism, he tells the audience, returning repeatedly to his warning that military involvement in Iraq and Syria would create ‘10,000 Bin Ladens’.

“Everything I said turned out exactly as I said it would,” he adds, in reference to Wednesday’s terror attack in Westminster.

Isis, Israel, Iraq, Palestine, Kahsmir and Syria provide the current for the speech, with local issues such as deprivation and fly-tipping – ‘there’ll be none of that if I’m MP’ – occasionally bobbing up above the surface before being swirled back into rhetoric about the ‘swamp’ of Middle Eastern conflict.

(When I point out the interesting repeat use of this word on Twitter afterwards someone immediately tweets the transcript to his appearance on Radio 4’s Any Questions in 2005, during which he said ‘we must drain the swamp of the grievances’ in Palestine – raising the prospect that Donald Trump may actually have nicked the phrase from George Galloway.)

“There’s nobody in history that has represented more people of immigrant background,” he adds.

How are you finding this, I ask one Asian guy in his late 20s or early 30s.

“The bus could do with a repaint,” he says, flatly.

“I’m not impressed. It’s like a being in a library and having 20 books and only preaching from one of them. It’s an old record.”

Others are more positive, although it is a struggle to find anyone in the room who is actually from Gorton. The political stances vary too, from right-wing to one man who six months ago was organising for Momentum.

“I quite liked the way he supports Palestine,” says a young Asian man from Sale.

“That was always a big thing for me. There’s a big Asian community here and I think politics has gone very tribal. You vote for your people.”

Another man, white and slightly older but again not from Gorton, says he might vote for him if he actually lived here.

“It’s interesting,” he says.

“I’m politically right of centre but intriguing for me is is his foreign policy stance. I think he’s been been proved right over the years and particularly on the Middle East position. And it’s the natural charisma of the guy.”

Charisma is a word that comes up a lot, including from one man who knows Galloway pretty well.

He admits that in Bradford – where he was eventually voted out in 2015 – there was criticism that he wasn’t actually in the constituency very much, a view he seems to suggest was largely accurate. But that, he says, is because he was out using parliament as a platform for the issues that mattered to the people of Bradford. That’s probably what he will tell you, he adds.

Galloway doesn’t say that.

“I was visible in Bradford,” he says.

Watch: George Galloway said he'd return to Labour if Jeremy Corbyn became leader

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“I did a surgery visit every Saturday morning for three years. It wasn’t true then and it wouldn’t be true now. I’ll live here, work here, serve here if I’m elected.” He adds that he is currently staying with his brother in Chorlton but would get a house and move his family to the constituency.

A quote of his from Total Politics magazine in 2013 declaring that he ‘liked elections more than serving’ was a misquote, he says.

What does he say to the view put about by Labour that he is just after publicity for his new children’s book?

“I wouldn’t even demean myself by answering that. I get plenty of publicity. I don’t need to stand in an election at my own expense. I’m going to spend a lot on this election.

“I’m speaking up for the left-behind. My voice is loud and clear and people sit up and take notice. If my opponent is elected here I feel Gorton will never be heard of ever again.”

He suggests Labour candidate Afzal Khan has blown around in the wind on issues over the years, supporting whichever bit of the party power structure was most convenient.

“You can’t easily check now because he’s deleted his Twitter and Facebook feed.

“But we do know some things and I think over the course of this by election many issues will emerge.”

So is it going to be a dirty campaign?

“No. Not from me.”

The two constituencies may have their similarities, but Gorton Labour’s machine is not in the level of disarray seen in Bradford in 2012 and Iraq is not the electoral issue it once was.

No Labour figures have so far spoken of Galloway as a threat, looking over their shoulder instead at the Liberal Democrats.

How far his tactic of courting the constituency’s substantial Asian vote will get when faced with the Pakistani-born Khan, who has been mobilising in Gorton for years, remains to be seen.

But residents can expect to be faced with Tony Blair’s looming grin quite a lot over the next few weeks. And if Galloway can manage to park that bus on that cul-de-sac, overturning a 24,000 majority ought to be a doddle.