All good stuff from McGrath, starting with the one on 4 Dec (7.25pm) and not excluding the last sentence there.

If Les really thinks the world (or even Russia) is a better place since the collapse of the Soviet republics, he is not living on the same planet as me. Certainly conditions in the former GDR are actually a whole lot worse for many of the population there. As McG has indicated, the communist experiment was carried out in the face of hostility driven by vested capitalist instincts, and any efforts to give socialism the human face its founding fathers had intended were particular feared, on the basis that they just might work.

Greg, I have said many things I would cringe to recall now, never mind having them thrown back at me endlessly via tv screens and newspapers. That New Labour stalwart David Blunkett is no doubt regretting even now some incautious remarks he made about his cabinet colleagues. From 1924 until WW1, and most particularly up to 1932, senior British politicians including Winston Churchill when Chancellor of the Exchequer, paid obeisance to Mussolini in much the same lnaguage as as Galloway used with Saddam.

Sometimes individual judgment may be unsettled by the grandeur of the moment. Remember Kinnock at Sheffield Arena, or that concession-speech scream by Howard Dean? Churchill admitted that no matter how much he resolved not to do so, he always found himself standing up when Stalin came into the room at Potsdam.

Galloway is on record as deeply regretting his huge blunder. Like Ake said, he has an Iraqi wife. And he has spent many years trying to alleviate Iraqi suffering, not least when Iraq was an unfashionable cause, on the receiving end of a vicious and undiscriminating sanctions regime.

The Telegraph behaviour was reprehensible and rightly they are going to pay heavily - about £1,500,000 ($15,000,000,000).