Wendy Alexander

Like her Deputy and possible successor, Cathy Jamieson (a frequent Galloway warm-up act back in the day), Wendy Alexander is an old cog in the George Galloway machine. She was his researcher and baby-sitter, and he refers to her as having "a brain the size of Hampden Park, but of common sense or the common touch she has none".

Indeed, so otherworldly is she that Galloway claims to have been present when she was first ever presented with a mobile phone and asked, in complete seriousness, where you put the money in.

Much is made of her having been a protege of Gordon Brown and Donald Dewar. What, at the same time as she was working for George Galloway? And then there is Jamieson, among others. North no less than South of the Border, New Labour's sectarian Left roots are plain for all to see, yet remain oddly unremarked upon. Why?