Smackdown! A Brit unleashed in the Senate

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Rupert Cornwell

An American senator is no match for a British member of Parliament, said Rupert Cornwell in the London Independent. Americans learned that the hard way at a Senate subcommittee hearing last week. The subcommittee had naively invited MP George Galloway, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, to respond to its charge that he had received kickbacks from Saddam Hussein. It was “manifestly unprepared for what was coming.” Galloway let fly with some of the “juicy invective” that so enlivens British politics. The war, he said, was based on a “pack of lies,” the current Iraq government was “an American puppet,” and the investigation into the oil-for-food scandal was “the mother of all smoke screens.” The subcommittee chairman, freshman Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, appeared shocked, cowed, and “way out of his depth.” U.S. politicians, you see, are used to deference and respect. They are “not accustomed to serious challenge.” Not one of them could possibly survive the onslaught of crude insults and sneering contempt that our prime minister faces each week during “Question Time.” Galloway may be a far-left demagogue, unloved at home. But he certainly gave us all an entertaining glimpse at “the mother of all culture gaps.”