George Galloway has spent most of his political career successfully fending off the calumnies and imprecations of his enemies. They almost always proceed to the same outcome: a tidy windfall for him; financial embarrassment for them. He is the embodiment of the legend first espoused by Vernon Johns, the American black civil rights pioneer: “If you see a good fight, get in it.”

You quickly form the impression though, that if you were to accuse of him of ‘neutrality’ on any offered subject he’d take it personally and hunt you down until you recanted.

To date, he’s gathered millions in damages and costs from some of England’s most powerful media groups. The misdemeanours and knaveries of which he’s been falsely accused are usually to do with his unflinching support – over many decades – for the peoples caught up in the endless agonies of the Middle East.

After one radio station made false accusations of anti-Semitism against him in 2008, he won substantial damages from them. In 2005, a powerful US Senate committee sought to make him walk the plank over claims relating to the UN’s Oil for Food Programme. When Mr Galloway appeared before two leading US senators in Washington he eviscerated them on live television.

In recent years his detractors seem to have got the message: if you decide to come the wide man with Mr Galloway, you do so at your peril.

He’s probably the UK’s most fiercely formidable supporter of the Palestinian people and is unequivocal in his condemnation of the Israeli Government for its current bombing campaign in Gaza. But he’ll brook no accusations of anti-Semitism.

“I have a great love for the Jewish people,” he says. “Some of my political and cultural heroes were Jews. Karl Marx was a Jew, Einstein was a Jew. They’re comrades of mine. I’ve got a decision of the High Court in London to testify that I’m not an anti-Semite. I sue people who claim that. It’s a grievous sin. I was born in the shadow of the Second World War and I know where real anti-Semitism leads: to Treblinka. There are many people who have never seen the flickering footage of fascism. I have and it’s evil.

“Anti-Semitism is real and the danger in calling anyone anti-Semitic who condemns some of Israel’s actions is that you end up giving a pass to the real anti-Semites who can crawl under the fence.

“I love Judaism and the Holy Books, but I hate the political ideology of Zionism, a political construct that failed. The Zionist construct of Israel has no more right to exist that any other political construct. I’d rebrand the entire territory The Holy Land and have one state between the river and the sea with equality for all.”

Others, who are similarly appalled by the casualties in Gaza, might suggest that this is a manifestly improbable prospect, given that historically, the Jews have been driven from most of the lands they once inhabited, including several of the states that currently surround Israel.

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His remarks on the Gaza conflict are chosen carefully, but are rooted in 50 years of campaigning and activism. He knows they carry added significance in the context of the Rochdale by-election which he is currently fighting on behalf of the Workers Party of Britain. His main rival for the seat, Azhar Ali, was disowned by Labour following remarks about the Gaza conflict. Mr Galloway knows he’ll never have a better chance of re-entering Westminster for the first time since 2015.

It’s reasonable to suggest though, that he’d much rather be doing so for Labour. He was the party’s youngest-ever chair in 1981 and took Glasgow Hillhead for the party in 1987 in a contest that has become part of the city’s vivid political folklore. He’s since represented four Westminster constituencies, including as a member of Respect where he took Bethnal Green in 2005. His loud opposition to the Iraq War rendered him beyond the pale for Tony Blair’s government, though recent history has since ratified many of his concerns.

His criticism of Sir Keir Starmer’s iteration of New Labour is voiced more in sorrow than in fury. “Under Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer an ersatz version of Labour has emerged. There’s nothing Labour about them. They should ditch the name. The only strikes they seem to support are air strikes on poor countries in the Southern Hemisphere.

“If Starmer was right-wing you could deal with it. I’m no friend of Tony Blair, but at least you knew what he was for. Starmer is like a sofa bearing the impression of the last person to sit on it.”

He describes a time when the settled will of the British people was a hazy and ill-defined centrism: a bit of improvement here and there, some pushing of the boundaries. He believes that the centre can’t hold now, though. The orthodoxy that allowed for some social democracy with a little state intervention and a modest improvement in living standards, he believes, is long gone.

“We’re in a situation of great peril, greater than at any since 1940. The nation has been cast adrift by a political class that’s given us Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. Our economy is in dire straits; we’ve made enemies of everyone. We have bams like Grant Schapps actually planning a war in Russia and seeking to conscript our youth to stand in Lithuania. This is a kind of madness.

“Those things that once made us proud are vanishing. The white working-class, including many areas here in Rochdale are very poor. How did this happen? It’s too easy to blame the immigrants and the Muslims, but it’s much bigger than that. We’ve been in death spiral that precedes all that.”

He tells me that one of his nominators in Rochdale is the nephew of Gillian Duffy, whom Gordon Brown referred to as “that bigoted woman” during the 2010 General Election campaign. The incident seemed to typify the way in which the UK political elites north and south of the Border have come to view the ordinary voters: with a measure of disdain and revulsion for perhaps not being fluent in their polished political argot or failing to choose the correct pronouns.

It fuelled some of the reasons why Mr Galloway, like many others on the left, supported Brexit: the sense that problems created by political haplessness in the face of rapid deindustrialisation and the collapse of core services were being dumped on them. And that they were being condemned for expressing concerns about unlimited numbers of eastern European migrants being paid immorally low wages and competing for fewer jobs.

“Support for the EU was often reduced to a better class of Barista; a cheaper plumber and smoother passage to Gstaad,” says Mr Galloway. “It was a lifestyle choice, but for many disadvantaged communities in the north of England it was much more than that.”

The sense that politics is being directed from above by a charmed and privileged white-collar aristocracy Gold Command also applies to Scotland and underpins his hostility to Scottish independence. “Scottish nationalism has become the antithesis of what I believe,” he says.

“Some fervent nationalists would have us believe that the English don’t like us. It’s simply not true. They love our culture and always welcome us warmly. Just ask the many thousands of Scottish professionals and skilled workers who have come south. I’ve worked in England since 1983, and I’ve never encountered any hostility, even when we might have deserved it after evincing hatred for England.”

Nor does he feel the recent performance of the Scottish Government presents a good picture of what a self-governing Scotland could look like. Here the political elitism and aristocratic disdain for ordinary people is evident to a harsher extent. “In Scotland, this political class is embarrassed by religion. I’m a Catholic and my socialism is rooted in that.

“Yet, if I stand up in the midst of this political class and say I believe in the Virgin Birth and in the faith of my fathers, I’ll be hounded as others have been."

The way in which the gender debate has proceeded in Scotland astounds him. “I’ve see most political and cultural convulsions coming, but I didn’t see this one: that veterans of feminism are now targeted and intimidated to an unconscionable level for defending the gains of the last 50 years.

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“Growing up in Dundee where I cut my political teeth I quickly realised I had more in common with the Sheffield engineer who stood for Labour than the kilted Ewings and their acolytes. I’m entirely opposed to the principle of separating Britain’s working people with a set of differences that are only marginal. Making the people of Rochdale foreigners is unacceptable to me. I suppose that recently it hasn’t really mattered though, as the SNP have grievously wounded their own cause.”

Mr Galloway has become the new favourite to win the by-election on February 29. One prominent betting firm has stated that in the wake of Labour’s retreat from their candidate 67% of all their bets are riding on the jaggy Scottish gladiator in the fedora.