Long life | 6 September 2012

While cocking a snook at the United States to help him win next year’s presidential election, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador has shown callous indifference to the welfare of his diplomats in London whom he has effectively drafted into the service of a very tricky and unpredictable master in the person of Julian Assange. The founder of WikiLeaks thinks that his sojourn in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge will last only six months to a year, because he expects Sweden to have dropped its sex allegations against him by then; but even that may be more than enough time to reduce his hosts to a state of quivering rage and resentment. For the embassy is small, it has no bedrooms and no garden, and Assange is by all accounts not only strange in his habits but also extremely self-confident and bossy.

The Guardian recently published a series of interviews under the headline ‘Who is Julian Assange? By the people who know him best’, and it was notable that even his greatest fans found him somewhat odd and bristly. Vaughan Smith, the former army officer and journalist who championed his cause and housed him for more than a year in his Norfolk country house while he was on bail, said ‘it wasn’t always easy’ having him there, mainly because of his constant stream of visitors, and that ‘he usually falls out’ with any other strong character.

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Jérémie Zimmermann, a fellow campaigner for freedom of information, paid tribute to his cleverness, his courage and his wit, all qualities widely mentioned by others; but he also said he had ‘certain characteristics you find only in very technical people and some people with Asperger’s syndrome’ and that ‘unless the people around him force him into the shower, he might not change his clothes for days’ (which, together with the stream of visitors, does not bode well for Ecuadorian embassy staff).