Galloway: Fun to work for, but his paper was a shambles

As a first proper job after graduating, working for George Galloway was weird, unpredictable and fun.

He set up a newspaper in 1996 aimed at British Asians, called East, though no one quite knew why Mr Galloway had launched such a publication. So we had a white Scottish MP running it, with a hard-talking Scottish journalist acting as managing editor and an inexperienced staff. To spice things up, there was a former member of the anarchist group the Angry Brigade, a man who had once tried to blow up General Franco, working as a sub-editor.

The paper was a shambles. It was based in a small office above a Chinese restaurant near London Bridge.Mr Galloway would drive up in his Mercedes, his Armani suits and with a Cuban cigar in mouth, very much playing the media baron. There always seemed to be some intrigue and a grand Asian or Middle Eastern figure being given the office tour.

East's greatest moment came when we secured an exclusive interview with Osama bin Laden. It later emerged, as we had suspected, that a lot of the funds for the paper came from the government of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan – the paper was supposed to promote the cause of Kashmiri right of self-determination in return, I guess. When Ms Bhutto was toppled in a coup later in 1996, the money dried up.

One morning in 1997, most of the staff was sacked by phone. We got no redundancy, which seemed ironic given that someone who had spent his life promoting labour rights was such a prominent figure in the life of the paper. We sued the management for our money and won.

Mr Galloway's style was flamboyant and often charming. He would boast to confidantes, before his marriage to Amineh Abu-Zayyad, about his sexual "conquests". and to a charge of leading a hypocritical lifestyle he once said: "I'm not a champagne socialist, I'm a Bollinger Bolshevik".

Showing the extent to which Mr Galloway has "gone native" with his causes, when Mohammed Sarwar was elected to parliament, he rang him up to congratulate him, remarking "now there are two of us", meaning that he, George Galloway, was actually the first Muslim MP in the Commons – and Mr Sarwar was the second.