George Galloway: ‘I don’t regret pretending to be a cat on Celebrity Big Brother’

George Galloway wants your vote in the London Mayoral elections in May. Unfortunately, he’s more famous for being in the Big Brother House than for being in politics.

Time flies: it’s ten years since that Celeb Big Brother scene when he crawled around on the floor, purring and pretending to lick a small saucer of milk. Largely, he’s remained quiet about the ‘incident’, though today he insisted in an interview that he didn’t regret it.

He told the Huffington Post:

“I don’t, actually. That was a decade ago so it’s a bit thin gruel as a criticism now. I did it for charity, people do all kinds of things for charity and it’s usually approved of – [like] when Jeremy Vine dressed up in women’s lingerie. It’s generally thought to be a good thing, but some people want to use it against me.”

Other lines including putting down Sadiq Khan and referring to himself as the “spiritual son of Tony Benn” (he is certain the veteran Labour politician would be as Eurosceptic as he is). “There are people on the Labour frontbench now who are more left wing than me,” he said. “I don’t want to name names. I’ve never been communist or a Trotskyist or any other kind of ‘ist’.

“The truth is, that the last man I took a picture with said ‘I’ve been following you since I was a child’ and the first thing he cited was Big Brother, so for a generation of people it’s not a bad thing to have been in it. I wouldn’t do it again.”