The suspension of Labour’s Rochdale by-election candidate has opened the door to a controversial possibility, George Galloway’s return to parliament.
The political firebrand is standing for the Workers Party of Britain in opposition to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer’s position on the war in Gaza.
He was expected to steal pro-Palestine votes from Labour candidate Azhar Ali, but the local councillor lost the party’s backing after being recorded making a string of antisemitic remarks.
It means Labour’s 10,000 majority in the late Sir Tony Lloyd’s seat is in peril, and a return for Mr Galloway is increasingly on the cards.
Who is George Galloway?
Mr Galloway was Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead from 1987, and after that constituency was abolished before the 1997 election, he became Labour MP for its successor, Glasgow Kelvin.
He was expelled from the Labour party in 2003 for bringing the party into disrepute, after he called the then Labour Government "Tony Blair’s lie machine", and said British troops fighting in Iraq should refuse to obey their orders.
He remained in his Glasgow seat until the next election, and then went on to join the Respect Party, representing it in the Bethnal Green & Bow and Bradford West constituencies.
Why is he a controversial figure?
He has long been an ardent supporter of the Palestinian people and staunch critic of Israel, calling for the dismantling of the "Zionist state".
But he has also been accused of antisemitism, including when he was sacked by TalkRadio in 2019 for congratulating Liverpool FC over beating Tottenham Hotspur FC in the Champion League final by tweeting “No Isra？l flags on the Cup!”
He was previously accused of racism in 2013 for walking out of a debate at Oxford University after discovering that his opponent was an Israeli citizen. “I don’t debate with Israelis,” he said
Mr Galloway has also done and said things which would have spelled the end of other politicians’ careers, including being vilified in the press for meeting Saddam Hussein. The ex-MP was criticised in 2012 for appearing to state that having sex with an unconscious woman would be “bad sexual etiquette” but not rape.
And, standing in Bradford West in 2015 against Labour MP Naz Shah, who had written about being forced to marry as a teenager, Mr Galloway accused her of lying about the details.
Adding to the controversy surrounding him, just this week Mr Galloway shared a fake AI-generated audio clip of Labour leader Sir Keir suggesting he did not care about Labour losing the Rochdale contest as long as he was “scoring points with Israel”.
Why is he standing in Rochdale?
Announcing his campaign, Mr Galloway said there is “no future” for Britain as a Tory Labour duopoly where both major parties “stand for entirely the same things… including on the supremely important issues of war and peace”.
He has painted the Rochdale by-election as an opportunity for constituents to send a message of support to “the people soaking wet, freezing cold hungry, living out in the open in Gaza”.
He insisted that “the people of Gaza would be voting for me in the Rochdale by-election” and urged voters to back him to send a message to Sir Keir and the “British political class”.
Can George Galloway win?
After Labour pulled its support for their candidate Mr Ali, bookmakers slashed the odds of a victory for Mr Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
They are now the odds-on favourite to take the seat on February 29, the first time the party would have held a Westminster seat.
Many voters will be voting by post and will have already received leaflets promoting Mr Ali, who will still appear on the ballot next to the Labour logo, leaving Mr Galloway with a mountain to climb.
But he has promised to “fight for every vote” and said “I expect to do extremely well”.
Other candidates vying for the seat include Reform UK’s Simon Danczuk, the ex Labour MP for the seat who was suspended from the party for exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a teenager.