George Galloway will say he is the real Labour candidate for Manchester Gorton, but not even Corbyn supports him

Twitter users and the people of Manchester Gorton will hear incessantly in the foreseeable future that George Galloway is the “real Labour” candidate for the upcoming by-election to replace the late Sir Gerald Kaufman. It’s a tried and tested line, and one that has brought mixed results for Galloway over the years. In the 2005 General Election, he used it to great effect to unseat Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow at the height of dissatisfaction with the Iraq War and again in the Bradford West by-election in 2012.

But in the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections, he got 3.3 per cent of the list vote in Glasgow and a mere 1.4 per cent in last year’s London Mayoral election. He has toyed with but thought better of standing in by-elections in Tooting and Stoke and it seemed as though his career as an active politician was coming to an end, with his broadcasts on talkRADIO and RT taking centre stage.

Galloway has offered nothing but vociferous support for Jeremy Corbyn since he was elected Labour leader in 2015. Blairites (by which I mean everyone between Tony Blair himself and those now occupying the ground on which Michael Foot once stood) are denounced with fury, with David Miliband, Sadiq Khan and Keith Vaz in particular on the receiving end of a hailstorm of Tweets that only he can provide.

It was Vaz who initiated his latest by-election bid. Having taken over the selection process for Gorton from Corbyn loyalist and pretender to the hard-left crown Rebecca Long-Bailey, Vaz instituted an all-Asian shortlist for the seat, excluding Momentum-backed Sam Wheeler and pro-Corbyn local councillor Julie Reid, who managed to have a spat over who plagiarised whose candidacy statement.

It is clear that Galloway had been mulling over the idea of standing since Kaufman’s death was announced. Bizarrely for a man who venerates Tony Benn, he paid a warm tribute to the man who christened Labour’s most left wing manifesto “the longest suicide note in history” and played a crucial role in the policy reviews of the 1980s which ditched unilateral nuclear disarmament and Euroscepticism.

He has tweeted pleasantries about the Curry Mile and Manchester United and, finally, on Tuesday, announced his candidacy for Gorton, peculiarly comparing himself to Sir Matt Busby, Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola, with the promise of putting Tony Blair on trial for war crimes.

Can Galloway truly claim to represent Corbyn’s Labour, though? When it looked as though the veteran left winger would win his first leadership election, Galloway claimed that he would re-join the party “pretty damn quick” but in the intervening two years, there has been no movement on the subject, despite Galloway’s deregistration of the Respect Party, his electoral vehicle since 2003, last summer.

That Corbyn was publicly critical of Galloway’s tactics in Bradford West in 2015, when he called Naz Shah’s teenage forced marriage into question, is telling. Even among the desperately unpopular far-left Labour leadership, Galloway is persona non grata, despite his wealth of experience, charisma and public profile.

This is simply because Galloway has drifted further and further away from a dependable political position. After a long career of shouting down Eurosceptics on the airwaves, he advocated a Leave vote last year, happily campaigning alongside Nigel Farage. He announced his candidacy via Westmonster, the Breitbart-esque website run by Arron Banks, the former Ukip donor now committed to unseating his old party’s one MP.

It is impossible to see Labour members, other than the most isolated factions, will stomach his steadfast support for Vladimir Putin, his flirtations with Trumpism and his previous comments on rape even caused controversy in the Respect Party.

As a Leaver, not least one without party machinery being him, his chances of winning in heavily-Remain Manchester, where Labour have a 24,000-majority, are incredibly narrow. This latest bid for parliament seems more like a speculative punt.