Andy McSmith's Diary: George Galloway goes down the wrong bus route

Sadiq Khan's comments that 'no offence, but I’m too clever to be a bus driver,' were too much for Galloway's supporters

George Galloway is campaigning to be Mayor of London in 2016 (Getty)

George Galloway and supporters were very aerated on Twitter over a remark attributed to Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate in the London mayoral election. “No offence, but I’m too clever to be a bus driver,” was the headline over an interview with Khan in The Sunday Times.

Galloway responded furiously: “The President of Venezuela was a bus driver. This man thinks he’s too clever... This man has just insulted 27,000 bus drivers and their partners and their children and their parents (including his own).”

In the account of the interview below that headline it says that Khan was asked whether his father, a Pakistani immigrant, was ever frustrated with his job as a bus driver. Khan replied: “My dad was never embarrassed of being a bus driver, but it was clear, in a non-arrogant way, that he was better educated. My parents wanted, again not in an arrogant way, but they wanted their children to do better than them. I don’t mean this as a discourtesy to bus drivers.”

Nowhere is he quoted as saying that he was “too clever” to drive a bus; the phrase was obviously concocted by the headline writer. And I think George Galloway is clever enough to have worked that out.

Chuckling over Corbyn

Perusing Rosa Prince’s newly published biography Comrade Corbyn, I am struck by the similarity of two quoted comments that appear in separate chapters. There is the former Labour MP Chris Mullin, who knew Jeremy Corbyn in 1981 when they were both campaigning to get Tony Benn elected as deputy leader of the Labour Party. He said: “If you’d said to me… he was to become leader, I’d have laughed out loud.”

Further into the book, we hear from Leo McKinstry, who knew Corbyn in the mid-1980s: “If you had said to me in 1985 that in 20 years’ time Jeremy Corbyn would have been Leader of the Labour Party, I would have just burst out laughing.” If nothing else, Corbyn’s rise to the Labour leadership has added to the merriment of the nation.

Tim who?

Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, was asked a question by GQ magazine often put to politicians but seldom answered with such honesty. “How would you like to be remembered?” he was asked. His reply – “Well, I won’t be.”

Haw Haw vs the law law

The human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has enraged readers of right-wing tabloids by telling the BBC that the execution in 1946 of William Joyce, the wartime broadcaster known as Lord Haw Haw, was a miscarriage of justice.

Those attacking him are missing the point. There is no dispute that Joyce skipped to Germany in 1939 to avoid being interned in Britain as a fascist, and chose to be a propagandist for the Nazis. The argument is over how whether he should have been convicted of treason when he was not a UK citizen by birth.

He was an Irishman, born in New York, who arrived in the UK as a teenager. Thirty years before Joyce’s execution, the future Irish President Eamon de Valera was sentenced to death for his part in the Easter Rising. It has often been written – though de Valera denied it – that his life was spared because he, too, had been born in the USA.

How good is your Russian?

If you have watched the BBC series and read the book but still have not had your fill of War and Peace, Pushkin House, in London’s Bloomsbury Square offers a unique chance to watch the entire Soviet-era Russian dramatisation of Tolstoy’s masterpiece on 6 February. Screening begins at noon and ends at 8.20. There will be subtitles, but visible only from the front three rows, so book early if your Russian is patchy.