The Daily Telegraph has reported that George Galloway MP, a long time supporter of Iraq (in his words, the people, in his opponents' terms, Saddam), has received as much as £375,000 a year from the Oil For Food programme, thanks to a dirty deal with Saddam's regime.

A Telegraph journalist, quoted on the BBC site:

I went to the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in central Baghdad on Saturday.

For much of the last week, journalists have been running around Baghdad going into government ministries looking for documents of any kind really.

I went into the foreign ministry.

I went up to the first floor of the building with my Iraqi translator.

We looked around. We came to small room that had a large pile of box files, most of them piled on the floor.

We searched through them and I asked my translator to look for any that were labelled with the arabic term for Britain.

We found two box files. We took them away. We looked through the contents, which was a time-consuming and laborious process, and then yesterday I came across this document in the middle of a pale blue folder.

It took - I guess in total - probably about four or five hours of work to go through two pale blue folders, each containing to the order of 50 documents. This one was midway through the second folder that we went through.

Let me describe the document to you.

It is five pages long.

It is bound in a pale blue folder alongside lots of other documents, most of which are very routine and, frankly, rather dull

It bears the Iraqi eagle crest.

It bears the crest of the Iraqi intelligence service.

It carries the signature of the chief of the Iraqi intelligence service.

It is, of course, in Arabic.

It is bound in a pale blue folder alongside lots of other documents, most of which are very routine and frankly rather dull.

Most of them are just correspondence across the desk of Iraqi foreign ministers during the year 2000.

The idea someone would have forged this document, bound it in a pale blue folder, buried it beneath lots of other folders in a blackened room in the first floor of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on the off-chance that a British journalist might go there and might search through it and might find it and then might translate it, strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable.

I'm not sure that it is too odd that it is coming to light right now.

After all, right now, for the first time, Iraq has no government and Iraqi government ministries are effectively open to anybody who wants to walk in and look for documents.

Hundreds of journalists have been doing exactly that for the last week."

Needless to say, Galloway's threatening to sue. He's probably going to lose, which is worse than if he just shut up and did nothing.

There's a document that says he took the money, and if the Telegraph is confident enough to print the allegations, the forgery's not quite as shoddy as parts of the infamous government portfolio for Iraq's WMDs.

If he loses the case, it will be legal for anyone in the country to say, 'George Galloway was a supporter and paid crony of Saddam Hussein. He was a sympathiser to a war criminal."

At the moment, it's still, "...allegedly."


Could be a forgery, I suppose, but it's not as if Galloway's been the most vocal opponent of the war (Robin Cook seems more in line for dirty tricks than anyone else), Blair's already got his post-Falklands polls boost.