George Galloway, the only other sitting MP to have taken part in a reality game show that took him away from the Commons, when he spent three weeks on Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, also faced criticism that he was neglecting his constituents.

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And this past week, sitting on my couch watching one of the many reality shows featuring celebrities, I was moved to write this.

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Separately and together, he and his sometime lover and regular companion, Giancarlo Giammetti, made sure to greet and double-cheek kiss friends and supporters sitting at all the tables in their area, ranging from the young (the former reality-television star Olivia Palermo, the Brant brothers, the model Jessica Hart and her shipping-heir boyfriend, Stavros Niarchos) to the established (the interior designer Mica Ertegun, Barbara Walters, the Texan philanthropist Lynn Wyatt, the Greek businesswoman Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki).

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