George Galloway: You have to salute his indefatigability He is certainly its boldest, as he established in 2005 when he went to Washington and tore to pieces the Congressional committee which had falsely accused him of trading in Saddam's oil. For anyone else, other perhaps than his old foe Christopher Hitchens, that encounter on Capitol Hill would have been scary. For Galloway, with the ego and bravura to match the forensic brilliance, it was a treat. He humiliated the committee's neo-con chairman, Norm Coleman, and the ramifications were seismic. Three years later, Coleman lost his Minnesota Senate seat to the satirist Al Franken by a margin so minuscule (255 votes out of almost three million) that but for his Gallowegian skewering he would surely have held it. Franken's win gave the Democrats their filibuster-proof 60 Senate seats without which Obamacare would probably never have passed. One doubts that Galloway's pivotal cameo will dissuade the Supreme Court from striking out the legislation as unconstitutional, as seemed quite likely at this week's hearing. But it will remain the outstanding legislative contribution of this political Captain Scarlet. We know he is indestructible because the security services of Britain and America have wasted untold time and effort on attempting to prove him a crook, and Senator Coleman paid with his career for taking the rumours on trust. After Tony Blair expelled him from Labour for speaking what he saw as the truth on Iraq, the prime minister paid with Oona King's Bethnal Green seat, which Galloway took in 2005 for his Respect party. The following year, the assumption was that Galloway would himself pay heavily for miaowing on Rula Lenska's lap in Big Brother. He flipped that perceived catastrophe to his advantage, parlaying the infamy into a regular Talksport phone-in for which, with typical chutzpah, he chose the Top Cat theme as his signature tune. I should mention that for a while I was his stand-in on that defunct show, and that I know him slightly and like him personally. This is a minority opinion, to put it mildly, and it takes no giant leap of the imagination to appreciate why millions will be seething and frothing today. But one can hardly moan one minute about the beigeness and homogeneity of our neo-consensus politics, which must help to explain Bradford West, and regret the return of such a richly colourful figure the next. If you want the Commons to be a vibrant chamber packed with disparate, independent, eloquent voices reflecting every shade and tone of opinion, leave it to Little Ed to sit on the floor crying for mummy, and look forward to the fun. The comeback cat is on the prowl again, and kitty has claws.