There are some things in life you never want to know. I was going to write a list of them, but most of them are sordid and unpleasant and since by their nature you don't want to know about them, I thought I'd leave it. But very, very high on such a list would be George Galloway's views on sex. Unfortunately, the MP for Bradford West has been holding forth on precisely such matters.

If it were merely a matter of him telling us his peccadilloes, that would be one thing. But no: Gorgeous George has gone further, and decided to tell us what is, and what is not, rape.

In a podcast released today, Galloway claimed that the allegations against Julian Assange, even if they were "100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them", "don't constitute rape". At least "not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it". Here's the bit that matters (hat-tip The New Statesman):
Woman A met Julian Assange, invited him back to her flat, gave him dinner, went to bed with him, had consensual sex with him. Claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know.

I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion. Some people believe that when you go to bed with somebody, take off your clothes, and have sex with them and then fall asleep, you're already in the sex game with them.

It might be really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and said, "do you mind if I do it again?". It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning.
Galloway had previously asserted that Assange's behaviour is "sordid, disgusting, and I condemn it". But it's not rape, according to him.

Let's be clear. The alleged facts of Assange's case notwithstanding, the situation Galloway has just described is absolutely, 100 per cent, no-ifs-or-buts definitely rape. A woman wakes up to find a man having sex with her. She was unconscious at the time. It was literally impossible for her to consent. Having sex with someone once does not give them carte blanche to have sex with you again; the woman is entitled to change her mind between "insertions" (yuck, George. Yuck), and what is more she is entitled to expect the man to wait until she is sufficiently conscious to state whether or not she has changed her mind. That is what "consent" involves. Giving it once is not a waiver of one's right to refuse it in future.

Then he took to Twitter to expound further on his views, claiming that those who thought Assange had a case to answer were "useful idiots" for the "Empire", that it was "about WIKILEAKS stupid" and that the "'liberal' chorus of Pavlovian reaction must delight the Pentagon". Listen, George: it is possible to think that Wikileaks have done some good things without believing that Assange can do no wrong, or that all attempts to make him face trial are some sort of grand conspiracy.

You would think, by now, that politicians would have learned to shut up about what constitutes "real" rape, "rape-rape", or "honest rape". But no: at the same time, over in America, a Republican congressman called Todd Akin has decided to claim that "legitimate rape" doesn't get women pregnant, with the subtext being: if a woman gets pregnant, she was actually only "crying rape". (For the record: rape does, in fact, get women pregnant, possibly more often than consensual sex.)

Is this finally the straw that breaks Gorgeous George's political back? After all, this is a man who was elected to political office after dressing up in a catsuit and licking milk from a saucer on national television. But surely the rape thing is an outrage too far.