When the election results were announced, Galloway exclaimed, “All praise to Allah!,” to which his supporters responded, “Allah! Allah!” But the biggest cheer went up, at least according to the Guardian’s report, when he exclaimed: “Long live Palestine!”

Four days later, in the same newspaper, the political commentator Seumas Milne wrote that “the central thrust of Galloway’s pitch in Bradford was in fact about cuts, tuition fees, unemployment, poverty and the decline of a city.” This is a little like saying that when some of the people of Bradford marched through the streets calling for Salman Rushdie’s death after the publication of his Satanic Verses, they were protesting against the magic realist school of fiction.