His contacts with Saddam Hussein which earned him the nickname as "the honourable member for Baghdad Central" and his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to every issue he pursues were a constant source of embarrassment and vexation for the Labour Party.
Ultimately, the Party, after years of infighting, feuding and backbiting, could take no more.
After publicly accusing Tony Blair and US President George W Bush of acting "like wolves" in invading Iraq, Galloway was expelled from the party.
Typically, he responded robustly to his expulsion by saying it was done "by a kangaroo court whose verdict had been written in advance in the best tradition
of political show trials".
Galloway, who has a penchant for Cuban cigars and who describes himself as being on the anti-imperialist left, wasted no time after his expulsion in announcing that he would be working with the Socialist Alliance and others under the name RESPECT Unity Coalition.
His volatile political career has been nothing if not chequered and occasionally explosive. And his mastery of the language of invective has no equal in the present House of Commons.
Galloway was born on August 16, 1954 in, to use his own words "an attic in a slum tenement in the Irish quarter of Dundee which is known as Tipperary".
After leaving the Harris Academy, Dundee, he worked for a garden centre and then for Michelin tyres. In 1977 he was appointed a Labour Party organiser and soon became known for his firebrand speeches.
At the age of 26 he became chairman of the Scottish Labour Party, one of the youngest in history.
He acquired a reputation - whether justified or not – for vanity and a liking for expensive clothes. He subsequently became general secretary of War on Want, which ultimately became insolvent.
Galloway won Glasgow Hillhead - ousting the hated Roy Jenkins - in 1987 but faced an almost immediate scandal.
He was asked about a conference in Mykonos in Greece and replied: "I travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women, some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece."
That put him on all the front pages and the executive committee of his local party, which was hugely unimpressed by this, passed a vote of no confidence in
him in February, 1988. He only narrowly survived to win reselection the following year.
He opposed independence for Scotland, supported the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, opposed abortion, but supported the equalisation of the age of consent for homosexuals.
Overseas, he has taken a special interest in Libya, Pakistan, Iraq and Palestine. And he once said "the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life - if there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East and the US would not be rampaging around the globe".
Nothing is ever serene with George Galloway. In 1998 he founded the Mariam Appeal to campaign against sanctions on Iraq. It was named after a child, Mariam
Hamza, flown to Britain to be treated for leukaemia. The fund was subject to scrutiny in 2003, but the Charities Commission rejected allegations that funds
had been misused.
In a Commons Westminster Hall debate on Iraq in 2002, he called Foreign Office Minister Ben Bradshaw a liar after Bradshaw had accused him of being a mouthpiece for the Iraqi regime. The sitting was suspended but Bradshaw later withdrew his accusation and Galloway apologised.
Earlier, in 1994, Galloway caused outrage when he was filmed telling Saddam: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability." He claimed that the praise was intended for the Iraqi people collectively.
Galloway remained typically fiery after his expulsion, amid fears that he would resign and create a by-election in the seat, now known as Glasgow Kelvin.
What he said sent a shiver down the spine of Labour: "If I were to resign the constituency and there was a by-election, I can't guarantee that I would win, but I would guarantee that Tony Blair's candidate would surely lose."
To the party's intense relief, he did not carry out this threat. But he served notice that at the next election he would fight Bethnal Green and Bow, whose sitting Labour MP, Oona King, supported the Iraq war.
He was married from 1979 to 1999 to Elaine Fyffe, with whom he has a daughter. In 2000 he married Dr Amireh Abu-Zayyad, a Palestinian academic.
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