Julian Assange's UK exit is excellent news for one big reason
On Tueaday the country woke up to a rare moment of unabashedly good news: Julian Assange has left the UK. Excellent. Good riddance. Very few people have come out of this unedifying story with any credit: the campaigners for free speech who didn’t seem to care that he’d endangered the lives of serving military or the women stupid enough to see him as a victimised lothario. Then there are the idiotic Ecuadorian embassy officials, who inflicted him and his allegedly revolting personal habits on their poor staff –and everyone else involved in this farce.
He’s a ghastly man, so solidly in the centre of his own universe that he can’t see the effect of his actions on other people. In some cases this involved putting men and women serving in the field at risk – and having recently worked with a military man I know quite what risks they have to undertake – while on a personal level it involved treating two Swedish women so badly they called the police. This is how this whole saga kicked off, remember? – with allegations of rape.
And no doubt any number of players thought they were being ever so clever in their involvement with this horrible man. Ecuador must have thought they’d got one over of both big, bad Britain and the wicked old US of A by granting him asylum: instead they landed themselves with a guest with – allegedly – spectacularly poor hygiene habits who ended up abusing the hospitality of embassy staff.
Various journalists who really should have known better allied themselves to him, possibly to thumb a nose at the establishment and ended up just as disillusioned as everyone else. Just about everyone who has had anything to do with Assange has fallen out with him: even the unlikely figure of socialite Jemima Goldsmith was at first a supporter and then cut free.
But as various people have pointed out, this saga has gone on far too long. Assange has been punished in some ways in that for nearly a decade and a half he has essentially been a prisoner. And given that he’s clearly an attention-seeker who loves being in the limelight, anonymity will now be the worst punishment of all.
My total sympathy goes out to Australia, which will now have to put up with the nauseating narcissist; on the morning of the announcement a British-based Australian statesman said that Assange will not be greeted with a hero’s welcome.
I should jolly well think not.
