Who is George Galloway, the British politician who has won Rochdale?

How has the man who sided with Saddam Hussein over the invasion of Kuwait and dressed as a cat on Celebrity Big Brother overturned a Labour Party stronghold?

George Galloway, the firebrand veteran British politician, made a triumphant return to Westminster’s House of Commons on Monday after securing a thumping by-election victory in northwest England last week, largely as a result of his opposition to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

Galloway, who represents the hard-left, fringe Workers Party of Britain, which he founded in 2019, took the constituency of Rochdale with 12,335 votes or 39.7 percent of the vote.

The constituency was formerly held by Labour’s Sir Tony Lloyd, whose death in January triggered the by-election. In the 2019 general election, Lloyd won 53 percent of the vote in Rochdale. But on February 12, the Labour Party withdrew support for its candidate, Azhar Ali, after he was accused of making anti-Semitic comments and it emerged he had suggested that Israel had deliberately allowed the October 7 attack by Hamas to happen. The shunned Ali, who stood for election anyway, went on to poll just 7.7 percent.

In his victory speech after his headline win last Thursday, the Scottish-born legislator, who has a fondness for fedora hats and cutting put-downs, signalled local voters’ disillusion with the mainstream parties when he labelled the United Kingdom’s Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour’s opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer, “two cheeks of the same backside”.

It was a typically provocative statement from the four-times married Galloway, who, stridently pro-Palestinian, has campaigned against Israel’s war on Gaza in the Greater Manchester town which hosts a large Muslim minority.