Galloway: the smears start here

Galloway is on the BBC. Paxman is attacking him for defeating a black woman (Oona King). Nick Raynsford has called him a demagogue. But Galloway says he's never heard of his ex-colleague Raynsford (they're a 'spineless bunch' who blend into one, he says).

Then Paxman goes on to accuse Galloway of exploiting racism. Now New Labour's David Lammy's in on the act, accusing him of stirring up racial tensions. Whatever your views on Galloway, this is pretty disgraceful stuff.

Oh, and 'objective' opinion pollster (and former SDP stallwart) Tony King is talking Galloway down too. Andrew Marr is rather more balanced though, to be fair.

The mood in the Galloway camp, though, is understandably ecstatic. We should be getting comment directly from there a little later. OR

Comments

[carlton]

That interview really pissed me off, and almost took the shine off a marvellous result. If anybody has a transcript of it I'd like to see it.

From memory Paxman's first question ("You have just ejected one of the only two black women in parliament, are you proud of that?"), as George Galloway was right to point out, was completely preposterous - both seriously disgraceful and just a very crap question. He then played his usual and very tired trick of trying to ask the same unanswerable question over & over again. Galloway then rightly said he would terminate the interview if he asked him it again, to which Paxman's reply (How dare YOU try to threaten ME!") revealed the classic hubris of a man whose power has gone unchallenged too long.

Paxman seems to me a key individual in our political system who has untramelled and unaccountable power, and puts his own personal vendettas ahead of the interests of his viewers. He has seemed a parody of himself, almost personally out of control, for the majority of the election campaign, and he just isn't any good at his job any more.

So who wants to start a campaign to get the BBC to take him off the air for a few months to think long and hard about how he should be doing his job?

[Christiaan Briggs]

Try http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68000c040/bb/09012da68000c156_bb_16x9.asx

[mark]

I like the way Paxman agrees ("absolutely") when Galloway says there is no doubt that Oona King and the other Labour MPs who supported the war have the blood of over 100,000 people on their hands.

Paxman is shocking in this interview: unneccessarily aggro, and visibily out of control. He tried to trick Galloway by opening with a question about King's skin-colour which he intended to follow up with a quote from Galloway about Oona's skin colour. It would have been a cheap interview trick, if it had worked. When it failed he didn't seem to have a plan B. I thought BBC interviewers were trained to be able to deal with all possible answers to a question: "yes", "no", "don't know", "won't say". Paxman doesn't seem to be able to cope with the "won't say" very well.

Another recent example was his interview of Martin McGuiness on Newsnight. Paxman is a good interviewer but he seems to be underpreparing for his interviews. His trick questions and aggro simply don't work on politicians as "sophisticated" as Galloway and McGuiness. He is doing BBC licence holders a disservice by not being able to engage figures like them in sensible arguement.