Why did Pete Townshend play the finale to the Olympics?

I returned from holiday to discover that the silly season has turned into something much more serious. The daily list of horrors from Syria, the Eurozone crisis and the terrifying state of the UK economy: they had all been there when I left (for Greece by the way, where people are genuinely scared about the future — stockpiling food and preparing for civil conflict in some cases). But the Olympic fiesta atmosphere seems to have been replaced by something darker following George Galloway’s moronic comments about the Assange case. There are plenty of men of the Left whose sexual politics don’t bear much scrutiny, but Galloway really is the prize poseur of radical chic.

The Assange case is a deeply troubling one for the Left. I have written approvingly of the work of Wikileaks and have worked with Assange in the past. He is a free-speech fundamentalist with a degree of personal courage, but he is not a progressive figure, or a socialist.