I have just come back from an evening with friends far more active on the left than I am. There were four other people there: two in Respect, two in the SWP. The conversation turned inevitably to Big Brother and George Galloway. 'I've been depressed for two weeks', one said, 'ever since Galloway went in there. I don't get it, I just don't get what he thought he'd gain from being on the show.' Another is branch secretary of the union where they work. 'No-one has been hostile, but people just tell me how disappointed they feel.' The third said: 'there is a tradition of flaky Labour candidates in working-class areas, Johnny Clarke, Victor Grayson.' Clarke of course was a lion-tamer, and Grayson the great left hope, who simply disappeared. The fourth: 'I always knew Galloway would do something crazy, like run off and join the cabinet in Syria or stand for election in Cairo, but I'd never guessed he'd do anything this silly.' 

Call it bad judgment on my part, but ever since Galloway was announced, I've never felt so bad about the idea. I don't know how it will play in the Muslim East End, but I do know that the politics of Brick Lane are more complex than Labour thinks them. People don't watch TV, or when they do, they watch it differently. Their religion, their humour, their sex-lives are all different from how we think them.

Galloway was vain enough to think that he could win over 'yoof' culture just by showing his true face to the kids. That was stupid: rather than being on the level, he appears on the show as old, arrogant, bullying and cruel. But the culture is so short-lived that I doubt he will lose many voters there either. I can remember how Nick was the villain and Craig the hero of the first series of Big Brother. I can remember also how three months later they were both equally low on the celebrity ladder.

There still is a chance he could turn things around. But even that's not the point: it would just reinforce a destructive pattern of vanity. The point for me really is television. The people who hate Big Brother are the ones who love books. The people who'll make socialism (if it has a chance) are the one who watch telly.

17 January: Galloway on BB

The one thing to have struck me about George Galloway's performance so far wasn't the cat scene, or 'George' bullying 'Jodie', nor the reports of censorship, when Galloway has attempted to stir discussions in the direction of the Iraq War or the Poll Tax, nor even his one moment of collective success, when he persuaded all the housemates to leave their boxes as a group ... what has really struck me has been the texture of Galloway's eyes. You know his look is there when he speaks, but unless you're right in the front row, you wouldn't get to see it, not properly. 

I suspect that the eyes are the key to his charisma as a speaker. On the first night, they seemed milky, like an alcoholic's eyes, or those of a recovering drinker. On subsequent nights, they have lost their ferocity, but retained a luminous character. I don't know anyone else whose eyes look quite like that. They're not the 'demon eyes' of the old anti-Blair posters. Nor Bush's eyes, looking straight forward, and with the pupils slightly dilated, to give the impression of permanent confusion. 

Galloway's eyes are the sort that a writer of adult, romantic fiction would give to her hero: eyes of passion, eyes of regret. 

I'm also struck that the government here has agreed to meet with the Israeli ambassador as a prelude to banning Galloway's nominated charity Interpal. A Charity Commission investigation in 1996 vindicated Interpal following accusation of links to Hamas. Again, last December Interpal is reported as having won a court case against the Jewish Agency, following attacks on it by the latter.

It seems pretty clear to me that another government initiative, to allow the phone-tapping of MPs, is also motivated by contempt for Galloway and the anti-war movement. If not Galloway, then who are they chasing? David Blunkett? David Cameron? Galloway is the only person in parliament with the capacity to cause New Labour alarm. But you would have thought they knew already what he was doing.