Mick Hartley

An amusing item from the latest Private Eye (Issue 1507):

George Galloways's latest carpetbagging wheeze is to challenge Labour deputy leader Tom Watson in West Bromwich East in the next election. Galloway, who will run as a pro-Brexit independent, is enjoying the widespread media criticism of Watson for fanning the flames of the baseless Westminster paedophile scandal. 

"Why isn't the Nonce Finder General Tom Watson in the dock?" was the headline of a Mail column by noted, er, left-wing icon Richard Littlejohn that Galloway tweeted last week – one of five anti-Watson stories he shared over two days. But what of Galloway's own role in amplifying the lies of Carl Beech? He used his shows on Tehran-owned Press TV and Kremlin-funded RT to promote Beech's false allegations, and so burnish the profile of the hacks at Exaro News.

On Press TV in 2014, he thundered: "You get to the stage where you're asking yourself if there was anybody in a position of power and influence in Britain in the 1960s and 70s who was not involved in the kind of sordid, evil, wicked things that these allegations point to – which go as far, incidentally, as an allegation that a member of parliament murdered a small boy, strangled him to death in some peculiar, bizarre, wicked sexual game." That nothing had been proven and no charges brought, he said, was the inevitable consequence of "the government's cover-up of these allegations".

A few months later, he welcomed Exaro's Mark Watts to his RT show, opining: "This is the biggest scandal in Britain for, well, since the war."

Even in February 2016 – by which time Operation Midland was collapsing under the weight of Beech's deceptions – Galloway was still attesting to his belief in the conspiracy. Interviewed by the New Internationalist, he mused: "There's absolutely no reason to imagine that it's still not happening. There has been a cover-up, that's obviously true."