The damning of Gorgeous George

In a burning Baghdad building a journalist finds 'proof' that the Labour MP and Saddam apologist was in the pay of the Iraqi regime. Andy McSmith pieces together the full extraordinary story and asks: was he or wasn't he?

On a Saturday afternoon in Baghdad, while other correspondents worried about the looting of museums or the disorder in the streets, the man from The Daily Telegraph went to the Foreign Ministry to have a rummage.

The ministry building was in a bad state. It had been hit by a cruise missile and ransacked by looters, and unlike other important government buildings, was not being guarded by American troops.

The looters were hammering away, removing the light fittings, when David Blair (no relation to Tony) and his Arab translator arrived in a first-floor room adjoining what had been the office of the Foreign Minister. The Daily Telegraph says that he was on a fishing expedition, not knowing what he might find.

Scrambling in the grime and soot, he found boxes dumped on the floor, possibly by looters, with their contents undamaged by the fire and smoke that had ruined part of the building. The boxes were labelled. Mr Blair pointed to one label after another, asking, "What does that say? What does that say?" against the background noise of looters crashing about in other rooms.

They came upon a box marked "Britain", containing four blue folders. In the first was a letter written by the Labour MP George Galloway, nominating the Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zureikat as his representative in Baghdad, and a letter from Sir Edward Heath. Both documents are genuine.

Eventually, Mr Blair and his translator gathered up three boxes marked "Britain" and one marked "France", containing about 4,000 documents in all, and carried them out of the building – an act which, examined in the wrong light, could be described as looting. The Daily Telegraph defends their unorthodox action by saying that, "by then, the documents did not really belong to anyone".

Back in his hotel room, Mr Blair enlisted a second translator and had them both skim-read as many documents as they could. As well as being quicker, having two of them was a safeguard against mistranslation.

On Sunday morning, he rang in with the sensational news that he had found a document, written in Arabic, which suggested that George Galloway had had dealings with Iraqi intelligence and had been in the pay of the Iraqi government.

The document suggested that he had received 10 to 15 cents per barrel from the sale of three million barrels of oil under the United Nations oil for food programme – or a total of between $300,000 and $450,000 (around £190,000 to £285,000) – every six months. Using the lower figure, the Telegraph calculated that Mr Galloway had been trousering "at least £375,000 a year" of tainted money. The document also suggested that he was asking for more – a request which was turned down, according to another document, after Saddam Hussein decided that Iraq could not afford him.

The Labour MP is not a popular figure at The Daily Telegraph. It does not like his left-wing opinions, his ferocious championing of Arab causes or his practice of aggressively calling in his lawyers whenever he is under attack.

It was partly out of respect for his litigious ways that the newspaper did nothing that Sunday, holding off until the editor, Charles Moore, and the libel lawyers were in the office, and until – most importantly – they had had a chance to put their allegations to Mr Galloway.

On Monday, a political correspondent, Andrew Sparrow, got through to Mr Galloway on his mobile phone at his holiday home in Portugal, and spoke to him for 40 minutes. The story was judged to be worth five full news pages and a thunderous leader the following day, and similar treatment for the rest of the week.

So was it a first-class journalistic coup – or will it be remembered as one of those great fakes like the Zinoviev letter?

If the documents prove to be genuine, they will certainly destroy the political career of George Galloway, taking out one of the Government's most articulate and most hated opponents. Even those who share Mr Galloway's views on the Middle East could not be expected to tolerate greed on that scale.

Three days after they appeared, the Telegraph's allegations were dwarfed by another, made by The Christian Science Monitor, published in Boston, which claimed to have seen other documents giving details of payments to Mr Galloway of more than £6m, which would make him one of the richest men in Parliament.

There was also a foretaste of the use to which the scandal would be put, namely to discredit the whole anti-war movement, in Tuesday's Daily Telegraph editorial, written by a Tory MEP, Daniel Hannan, an ally of Iain Duncan Smith.

Mr Hannan turned on its head the familiar accusation that the war in Iraq was fought for oil, suggesting that the war party had been motivated by a disinterested concern for Iraqi citizens, while "the anti-war activists – or at least their leaders – were acting for profit". He also appeared to lament that the European Convention on Human Rights had caused Tony Blair to abolish the death penalty in treason cases, thereby sparing the Labour MP from being hanged.

Mr Galloway, meanwhile, has fiercely denied that the letter is genuine. His first reaction was to suggest that The Daily Telegraph might have forged it.

A day later, using the columns of the left-wing newspaper Tribune to defend himself, he was more reflective. "I don't know the provenance of these documents," he wrote, "or how the Telegraph came to stumble, in a burning, destroyed, looted building, upon such a find."

Another explanation put forward by Mr Galloway's defenders is that the document may be a scam by someone in Iraqi intelligence who was trying to obtain money dishonestly from the regime by pretending it was for Mr Galloway.

Others just think it is too convenient that when the coalition powers were having to face awkward questions about looting, about Saddam Hussein's whereabouts and about the missing weapons of mass destruction, domestic opinion is suddenly diverted by a highly damaging story about a prominent anti-war campaigner.

The Daily Telegraph's senior journalists are confident that the find is genuine, especially since other documents from the same trove have been authenticated. They dismiss the possibility that intelligence agents could have created an elaborate forgery and left it in a box in a damaged building, along with genuine documents, in the hope somebody would find it. Although Mr Galloway says that he will sue, his lawyers have not yet served a writ.

But if he does not go to court to clear his name, it is difficult to see what future Mr Galloway can have in politics. Up to now he has led a charmed life, lurching through one crisis after another, strongly defending himself at every turn.

In addition to his aggressive debating style, he has the reputation of a man who likes money and foreign travel. He enjoys fast cars, expensive suits and top-of-the-range cigars, and revealed during the week that he has mortgages totalling around £366,000 on two properties in London and Portugal, suggesting he faces monthly repayments that would make an appreciable dent in a backbench MP's salary of £56,000. However, Mr Galloway supplements his MP's income with at least £70,000 a year from journalism.

In 2000-01 he made 11 trips which were paid for by the Mariam Appeal, a trust he founded to help a young Iraqi girl receive treatment for leukaemia, which is now being investigated by the Charity Commission. These were only some of his trips, almost all paid for from Arab sources.

When he was a young secretary of the Dundee Labour Party, his early career was dogged by allegations of financial irregularities in the running of a drinking club. More allegations cropped up when he was general secretary of War on Want. An auditor cleared him of misuse of funds. He repaid £1,720 in contested expenses.

Soon after his arrival in the Commons in 1987, after he had unseated Roy Jenkins in Glasgow Hillhead, Mr Galloway admitted to having conducted two extramarital affairs while he was a charity worker, helping earn him the nickname Gorgeous George. His first marriage ended that year, and he later married a Palestinian biologist, Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, who is assumed to provide much of the inspiration for his fierce support of the Arabs.

Soon afterwards, he faced a selection contest inside the Hillhead Labour Party, in which a majority of party members voted for other candidates, having apparently tired of Mr Galloway. He was, uniquely, saved by the combined votes of the Scottish trade unions.

Whether the unions or anyone else can save him again is open to doubt. Labour's General Secretary, David Triesman, had already opened an investigation that could lead to Mr Galloway's expulsion from the Labour Party before last week's allegations surfaced.

Staff at Labour Party headquarters say that they received "hundreds" of com- plaints after Mr Galloway was seen on Abu Dhabi television, describing George Bush and Tony Blair as "wolves". Whether the documents found in Baghdad prove to be genuine or not, Mr Galloway's days as a Labour MP may soon be over.