In light of George Galloway returning to Parliament as the member for Bradford West, we’ve dug out Matthew Parris’s account of his infamous appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. And if you can’t remember his feline hijinks, the video’s above for your pleasure.
We each of us remember where we were when news reached us that George Galloway MP was to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house. I was on BBC Radio 5 Live. The time was 10.25 on the evening of Thursday 5 January 2006 and I was part of a panel discussing the shipwreck of Charles Kennedy, when all at once the interviewer astonished us with the Galloway bombshell.
There was no time to reach a considered judgment. We all floundered. But now I have reflected on Mr Galloway’s strange decision; and the longer I think about it the more insistent in my imagination become the awful echoes of the dying screams of the Rector of Stiffkey as a lion sank its teeth into him in July 1937 in a cage in an amusement park in Skegness: the last Christian to be killed by a lion in the course of a programme of public entertainment.
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