Julian assange

Haven’t had a chance to follow the day’s political events and interviews? Then don’t worry: here, The Spectator, brings you the best of today’s audio clips in one place for you to listen to. Philip Hammond hit out at the UN after a panel ruled that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was being 'arbitrarily detained' and should get compensation. The Foreign Secretary said Assange is a 'fugitive' and he called the UN verdict 'flawed': Julian Assange hit back at a press conference saying that Hammond's comments were 'ridiculous'. He also warned the UK there would be 'consequences' to ignoring the UN panel verdict: David Cameron has been on a charm offensive in Europe as he attempts to persuade fellow leaders to deliver on his draft deal.

Home Two groups were launched, one in favour of remaining in the European Union and the other in favour of leaving. Vote Leave drew support from Conservatives for Britain, from Labour Leave and from Business for Britain. Lord Rose, chairman of the new group Britain Stronger in Europe, said: ‘To claim that the patriotic course for Britain is to retreat, withdraw and become inward-looking is to misunderstand who we are as a nation.’ The Metropolitan Police withdrew officers stationed outside the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange sought refuge in 2012, a watch that had cost £12.6 million. Marlon James from Jamaica won the Man Booker Prize for A Brief History of Seven Killings, based on an attempt to assassinate Bob Marley in the 1970s.

New York Brooklyn is the hipster heaven of New York, which is perhaps why it was there that a bust of Edward Snowden was unveiled yesterday.  Not that it stayed long.  The bust of the former National Security Agency contractor was put on a pedestal sometime on Monday with the word ‘Snowden’ glued on the base at the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument at Fort Greene Park.  It was taken down a few hours later by parks and recreation employees. I don’t want to read too much into this, but the brief deification and bringing down of Snowden’s image does seem apposite.

This is a good time to write about a nation’s resilience in the face of calamity. I am referring to the stoic discipline with which the Japanese bore hardship and the death of 15,000 people in March 2011 following a nine-magnitude earthquake, the strongest ever known to have hit Japan. I can remember the TV coverage as if it were yesterday. Very young and very old Japanese formed a long orderly line for disaster supplies. There was no looting whatsoever as there had been in Los Angeles or in Mexico City, no weeping on camera so that the world would send more funds, just plucky resolve (gaman in Japanese) and ganbaru (to endure with pride). As anyone who is familiar with Japan knows, tenacity is highly celebrated both as an individual and a collective trait.

Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s become a figure of fun. Perhaps you noticed him holding a press conference last week, to announce that he might soon leave the Ecuadorian embassy but probably wouldn’t, or something.

This is an extract from Hugo Rifkind's column in this week's Spectator, out on Thursday Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made such a mess of his life, hasn’t he? And with such promise. Only a few short years ago he was the world’s most prominent anti-everything activist, with hair like an indie guitarist, feted and worshipped wherever you might find hot Scandinavian revolutionaries, smug old men who work for ‘theguardian’ and Jemima Khan. Now he’s a hermit with hair like Noel Edmonds who lives in a cupboard. It’s a hell of a fall. Most crushingly, he’s become a figure of fun.

I hadn’t seen a Ken Loach film in years because I got sick of his schmaltzy sexism but yesterday decided to give him another try and popped along to see his latest, Jimmy’s Hall. Set in 1930s Ireland, it tells the true-life story of self-educated, community-serving James Gralton, who enraged the Catholic church and the local land owners by setting up a community centre that served as a meeting place for ideas and, God forbid, dancing. Perhaps he's returned to form, I thought on my way to the cinema, and produced something gutsy like Cathy Come Home or Kes. These story lines usually warm my cynical old heart, so I approached Jimmy’s Hall with a hopeful spring in my step.

Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer building on Farringdon Road. I don’t mind telling Spectator readers (‘you people’) that I once kissed the bricks of this building, quite seriously, like Jews kiss the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport. (At least that is the story; but I have never seen anyone do it. Kiss some dirty tarmac. What for?) Moro is distinguished as the restaurant in which Guardian journalists first realised Julian Assange is mad. He stood up near an olive and announced he didn’t care if the leaks led informants to be murdered, which is a bad look for a revolutionary, until you really think about it. Then I imagine he ate an olive.

The Guardian seems to be hurt that larger selling Fleet Street newspapers (ie almost all of them) have not rallied to its side since Andrew Parker, the boss of MI5, stuck the boot in. Parker eviscerated the North London local paper for publishing material stolen by Edward Snowden, which he said had given a ‘gift’ to terrorists lurking within our midst. It amounted to, he said, the ‘greatest damage to western security in history’ and was ‘hugely harmful’. The Grauniad cheerfully published various details relating to our own information gathering centre, GCHQ, without giving a monkey’s as to the possible ramifications. Of course, it did the same with the indiscriminate screeds of data purloined by that other self-serving narcissist, Julian Assange.

I have been puzzling about why the United States authorities ever thought that Bradley Manning, who was jailed last week for 35 years for leaking military secrets on an unprecedented scale, was a suitable person to join the army. His size alone might seem to be an impediment to effective military service, for he is only five feet, two inches tall and weights 105lbs (7.5 stone). But his stature, though tiny, nevertheless comes within the army’s prescribed limits. He would have had to be two inches shorter and a stone lighter to have been rejected on grounds of size or weight. (If he had weighed over ten stone, he would have been rejected as obese.