My question for George Galloway was this: “Which potential outcome of the mayoral election do you think would please Jeremy Corbyn most? A victory for George Galloway or a victory for Sadiq Khan?”

Historical perspective matters here, as do recent political events. Galloway is, famously, a former Labour MP who was expelled from the party in 2003 for bringing the party into disrepute in the way he had conducted his opposition to British participation in the Iraq war. The insubordinate Dundonian dubbed the proceedings that sealed his fate “a show trial” and retaliated by winning the London East End parliamentary seat of Bethnal Green and Bow in the 2005 general election for the newly-formed Respect Party after a bitter battle with Labour’s Oona King.

Since then, Galloway has been a roaming plague of his former comrades, unsuccessfully contesting a different Labour-held East End seat in 2010 but handsomely winning a by-election in Bradford West two years later at his former party’s expense. Defending that prize at this year’s general election, Galloway accused his Labour opponent Naz Shah of, among other things, lying about the age she’d been when pressured into marrying a cousin in Pakistan. He lost to her. But he soon confirmed his intention to contest next May’s London mayoral race.



That was before anyone dreamed that Jeremy Corbyn would, on 12 September, succeed Ed Miliband as Labour leader and, in so doing, create a whole new setting in which the mayoral battle will unfold. When Galloway was a Labour MP, he and Corbyn were fellow members of the parliamentary left’s awkward squad: war-opposers, all-purpose leadership-defiers, anti-Blairites incarnate. By the end of July, when a Corbyn win had become a stunningly large possibility, Galloway declared to LBC’s Iain Dale his enthusiasm for re-joining the Labour fold. And since Corbyn’s amazing ascent to the Labour throne, Galloway’s public conduct of his mayoral business has been, to put it mildly, intriguing.



There have been two conspicuous strands. One has been his expressions of pleasure in Corbyn’s triumph and accompanying disclosures about his closeness to Corbyn and members of his team. These claims of intimacy scaled a new peak over the weekend when the Sunday Times reported him describing Seumas Milne, my fellow Guardian writer who’s taken leave to become Corbyn’s executive director of strategy and communications, as his “closest friend” with whom he has “spoken almost daily for 30 years.”

The second conspicuous strand of Galloway interviews has comprised cutting personal attacks on Khan, who is, of course, Labour’s mayoral candidate. He’s called him a “very boring man”, a “flip-flop merchant”, a “product of the Blairite machine”, an accomplice in Blair/Brown “crimes and blunders” and an “unprincipled speak-your-weight machine” who “went into what can only be described as a swoon over kissing the queen’s hand.”



Galloway also appears to consider Khan, a Muslim, an inadequate practitioner of his faith, telling the Evening Standard that the Labour man erred by holding the Koran “in his left hand” when he met the monarch and that this “wasn’t missed by people who care about these things”. He’s taken issue with Khan’s criticisms of Corbyn’s economic policies, saying, “I know that it hasn’t been popular in Corbyn’s circle,” and has named the MP for Tooting as his prime target: “It’s me versus Sadiq Khan for the centre-left vote.”



What’s he up to? Notwithstanding recent good approval ratings for Corbyn among Labour members, it is widely held that the party leader’s position will be weakened if Khan fails to defeat Conservative Zac Goldsmith, the only other mayoral candidate who looks to have a serious chance of winning the race for City Hall. Yet here is Galloway, a professed Corbyn admirer, doing all in his power to damage Khan’s chances. Does he believe that his conduct is actually helping Corbyn or is something rather different going on?

Such was the backdrop to my question, which I put to Galloway during a public meeting held on Tuesday evening at the Orford House Social Club in Walthamstow, E17. His answer began with a metaphor he often favours. “Sadiq Khan supports Jeremy Corbyn like the rope supports the hanging man,” he said, winning a ripple of laughter among the 100-plus people present.



It was an interesting crowd: very diverse ethnically and covering a pretty wide age range. Behind me sat the always-friendly Oliur Rahman, leader of the Independent group on Tower Hamlets council and erstwhile deputy of that borough’s fallen former mayor Lutfur Rahman (no relation).



Galloway proceeded to batter Khan some more, pointing out that he had nominated Corbyn for the Labour leadership race yet hadn’t voted for him, and then, after Corbyn had won, “gave a series of interviews in the Mail on Sunday, that well known friend of Labour, and the Jewish Chronicle, ditto, in which he denounced Jeremy Corbyn in the most withering terms.”



The Respect man said that Khan had accused Corbyn of “encouraging terrorism in London by his relationship to the Palestinian resistance and by his past relations with the Irish Republican Movement.” He continued: “I have no doubt whatsover that Sadiq Khan is part of the cabal which is seeking to bring Jeremy Corbyn down.” Then he said: “So, I don’t know the answer, Dave, to your question, because I’ve never asked him...”

I interrupted the orator’s flow: “But what is your opinion? Which result would please Jeremy most?”

“This is what I’m going say,” continued Galloway. “It’s not a direct answer,” he admitted, with a certain impish complicity, “but it’s as good as you’re going to get. If you’re looking for a Corbyn in this election, it’s me. It’s not Sadiq Khan. I support all of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies. I might put them a little differently. If you don’t mind me saying so, I might put them a little better. But I support them. Sadiq Khan opposes them and makes no bones about doing so. So if I was Jeremy, I’d want me to win.”



This time the applause was more a wave than a ripple and it spoke of the opportunity I sense Galloway believes he has detected in this part of London, and no doubt in others too.



To his left on the platform sat Respect’s London Assembly candidate for the area Mukhtar Ghaffar and to his left Abdul Majid, vice president of the Waltham Forest Islamic Association. Candidate Ghaffar had been introduced as having felt the call to return to E17 after runnning a successful business in Dubai and setting up a charity for children in South Africa. He’d made a speech rich in talk of community solidarity, describing “the beauty of being an East Ender”, outlining his family’s 50-year association with Waltham Forest and concluding with an excerpt from a speech Princess Diana had given in 1993. “Deep within us all is a need to care, and be cared for,” it began. This was somewhat unexpected. In part because of that and in part due to a copy of Galloway’s biography of Fidel Castro being propped on the desk in front on him, it was also rather lovely in a particular way.



Ghaffar had reminisced about the Walthamstow market of his childhood and spoken about gentrification: “It’s not a bad thing, but it becomes a bad thing when it affects the people who have been living here for several years.” He’d spoken about housing, telling stories of a single mother he’d met having to move from place to place, and of locally-born young professionals still living with their parents because they can’t afford to move in to places of their own nearby.



Then he’d moved on to the Walthamstow “mini-Holland” cycling scheme, a substantial programme of street infrastructure changes introduced by Labour-run Waltham Forest Council using £30m awarded by Boris Johnson with the aim of promoting pedal power. It has not met with universal acclaim. While cycling campaigners have praised it, residents and small businesses inconvenienced by road closures and loss of parking space have protested outside the Town Hall. Ghaffar described meeting a large group of mini-Holland objectors on Saturday. He asked, rhetorically, where the elected local politicians had been. “If they’re not representing your interests, then whose interests are they truly representing?” He termed Galloway “a man of honour.”



Abdul Majid had spoken next, listing a top three areas of local concern: one, Islamophobia, drawing attention to a Facebook comment made by a Labour councillor back in January that led to his suspension but eventual clearing; two, “everyone’s favourite” the mini-Holland scheme whose parking regulations, Majid said, are “restricting our right to worship and affecting our local businesses across the board”; three, affordable housing especially for young people. Majid praised Galloway for his alternative vision and described him as “a great spokesperson on the Palestinian issue.”



I think you’re getting the lie of the land. This is firmly Labour territory: Stella Creasy is the well-established local MP and the council has a hefty Labour majority. But it is territory that’s changing fast in ways not everyone is comfortable with. Like other Outer London boroughs, Waltham Forest has experienced gradual, long-term demographic change, becoming more ethnically and culturally varied. It is also having to contend with higher rates of poverty, as so much of Outer London is.



Yet more prosperous people are also entering the mix, as the capital’s rocketing house prices have caused first-time buyers and young renters from elsewhere to look for places to live that lie further from the centre than they would have thought of settling in in the past (one of my own children for instance). At the south end of the borough, a place where the inner city in the form of east Hackney begins its transition into suburbia, an influx of more affluent people with tastes and values to match is re-altering the area’s social complexion. Rocketing house prices and a blossoming cycling culture - one being actively fostered by the council - are just the most conspicuous indicators.



In this lie seeds of local discontent and Galloway can see their potential. The meeting was his fourth visit to Walthamstow in four days, including one to the market and one to the Leabridge mosque. His speech, delivered with his customary brio, visited every sore spot represented in the hall, although it was set against “the backdrop of the gravest possible international situation.”



The shooting down of a Russian warplane at the Turkish border, which had, he said, “placed NATO at dagger’s drawn” with Vladimir Putin’s state and destroyed the UN security council’s post-Paris resolution to seek a ceasefire in Syria. “The action today incinerates any possibility of a united front of which we could even have been members in tackling this infestation of fanatic extremism known as ISIS and Al-Qaeda,” he concluded.



Galloway bemoaned police cuts at a time when London requires more security and urged people to not “confuse me with a liberal. I am not and never have been a liberal. The police will find a friend in me. If a terrorist turns up in London to harm people they will be shot down dead, and if I can I’ll pull the trigger myself.” This brought further applause.

He revealed that earlier that day he’d put the “finishing touches” to his forthcoming documentary The Killings of Tony Blair. “I was recalling as I watched the final product that everything that has happened since 2002 and 2003 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq,” had been predicted by everyone “including our own security services.” And so: “If I’m the mayor, London will declare peace on the world.” Expression of this declaration would mean: “We will not roll out red carpets for the likes of [Narendra] Modi, the killer prime minister of India” or Egypt’s Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. The same would apply, he said, “to Netanyahu, the tyrant from Israel.”

When he was protesting against Modi at Downing Street, he went on, “Sadiq Khan was inside.” This is true. Galloway then said that Khan “has hired Modi’s chief public relations man [Manoj Ladwa] as one of the people running his mayoral campaign” This is not true, Khan’s team assures me: “Manoj Ladwa is someone Sadiq knows and who gave a bit of advice during the candidate selection contest on a voluntary basis, but has no connection with the mayoral campaign.”

Moving closer to home, Galloway pledged to fight for social housing, especially council housing, and to demand of private developers that 50% of all new homes they build be “affordable.” In this, his stance is, in fact, identical to Khan’s, though Galloway insisted that under him the developers’ “party will be over” whereas Khan, he noted, meaningfully, had accepted a campaign donation from one.



“Transport is the third great part of this triptych of issues,” he intoned, delivering that “tripych” with clipped relish. Not for the first time, he took a swing at taxi firm Uber and said that under a Mayor Galloway every school and college student would travel free on London buses and that all apprentices, police officers, firefighters, ambulance personnel and “other key essential workers” will “travel free on London transport.”



Denouncing what he mistakenly called the “little Holland” scheme required careful footwork from him, he quipped, “because my wife is Dutch.” But he likened the council to “a one-party state” that had ignored peoples’ concerns about the scheme’s effects. “Small businesses need footfall and the ability of people to arrive in cars, park for a short time and get what they need. In an area with a dense concentration of places of religious worship - not just mosques but many others - does it make sense to make that mosque inaccessible by car?”

There was a fruitful question and answer session at the end, which gave Galloway another chance to lambast his Labour opponent. A young man who described himself as “a very proud British Muslim” criticised Khan for his recent article in “the trashy Sun,” which argued that British Muslims have “a special role to play” in tackling Islamist extremism at home.



In it, Khan repeated points he’d made in a speech to the Commons press gallery two days earlier, a move I’d judged both authentic and shrewd. The young man, though, was incensed that Khan’s words had appeared in the same issue of the Sun whose headline had controversially read: “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis.” This claim was made on the strength of an opinion poll whose credibility has since been challenged, as has the Sun’s representation of its findings.

The young man thought the whole episode very divisive. Galloway remarked disparagingly on my article - the Guardian received a number of friendly mentions during the evening - and accepted the “salute” of the young man, who’d praised him as a conviction politician. “I have only one set of principles,” Galloway said. “I have only one set of beliefs. With me you know what you’re going to get.”



We’ll have a better idea quite soon if what Galloway is offering London is as stupendous as he claims - his new campaign website is to be launched in the next few days. Meanwhile, his two-track attitude to Labour - lauding its national leader and rubbishing its mayoral candidate - shows no sign of abating. And neither is there any outward sign of Labour re-embracing him, despite Corbyn being at the helm. Galloway’s desire to have has expulsion rescinded has, of course, not been met and Corbyn himself told New Statesman back in July that he had found “appalling” the tactics Galloway had used in losing Bradford West.



The Labour leader is not alone in feeling that way. Dawn Butler, Labour MP for Brent Central and chair of the women’s parliamentary Labour party, has criticized Galloway on the same grounds. There would be “an almighty revolt” if he returned to the Labour fold, she wrote. Significantly, she added: “I have spoken to Jeremy Corbyn and he has told me he is not in favour of letting Galloway back in.” Butler also wrote: “I have had it suggested that those arguing for his readmission want to stop him standing in the London mayoral election and damaging the prospects of our superb candidate Sadiq Khan.”

Butler briskly dismissed any serious threat to Khan’s chances, but Galloway clearly still has admirers in London. How numerous they are is hard to say, but he knows who they are and where they live. Every vote he wins next May that would otherwise have gone to Khan can only help Goldsmith in what could be a very close race. One senior London Labour figure reckons Galloway is seeing how much purchase with Corbyn his challenge to Khan might have: “I think he’s using it as a bargaining tool. He’s playing with the party to see what pans out.”

Well, you wouldn’t rule it out. To repeat: “If I was Jeremy, I’d want me to win,” Galloway said. I wonder what Jeremy wants.

