George Galloway says Jeremy Corbyn is too woke to join his party

All is not well on the backbenches, where old pals Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway have become neighbours since the latter got re-elected to parliament after a long break.

Though they have a history as Left-wing allies, Galloway said there was a little froideur in the air of their reunion. “Quite often parliament is boring and you talk to the person next to you, sotto voce,” Galloway told Novara Media. When Corbyn first sat next to him, “he certainly made no effort to say, ‘I know I haven’t been in touch with you for the last 10 years, but how have you been?’ I’ve had three children in the last 10 years and he didn’t ask about them!” Nevertheless, they have had some “meaningful conversations” since.

With all the candour of a frenemy, Galloway suggested that Corbyn was too scruffy and unstatesmanlike to become PM. “There was something of the whiff of the student squat about Jeremy,” he said. Corbyn was apparently a “fish out of water” when he met the late Queen, while Galloway himself who had a “splendid chat” with her.

Though Corbyn has been expelled from Labour, Galloway doubts he’d be welcome in his Workers Party of Britain. “I’m not sure he’d get in, with some of his views,” he said. “Corbyn is a slightly naive, slightly liberal, small-L individual.”

Galloway is often referred to as a “far-Left prodigy” and a “Leftist firebrand” in the press, but he admits that “Jeremy is woker, greener and more trendy”. The MP for Rochdale spoke about how his Catholic faith makes him opposed to abortion, and how being gay is “not normal”. When questioned about this in an LBC interview yesterday, he promptly hung up the phone.