Let's see. George Galloway is a "sadist", "beneath contempt" and a "man whose search for a tyrannical fatherland never ends". Christopher Hitchens, on the other hand, is a "hypocrite", an "idiot", a "slug leaving behind a trail of slime" and a "jester at the court of the Bourbon Bushes".

So this was it. Gorgeous George against The Hitch. Their skirmish outside the US Congress in May - during which Galloway memorably called Hitchens a "drink-sodden, ex-Trotskyist popinjay" - was being renewed as open combat in New York, billed as a Debate on the War in Iraq. For those with a taste for the more ad hominem style of discussion, it will not have disappointed.