Where is the politician brave and decisive enough to bring the Julian Assange farce to an end? It is costing the British taxpayer £10 000 a day - more than £3.5 million a year.
These charges are being racked up by police keeping a round-the-clock guard on the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge, where Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks - the website which illegally published thousands of top-secret US government emails - has been holed up for more than three years.
Assange took refuge in the embassy, in which he inhabits a 15ft by 13ft ground-floor room, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He is wanted in that country for questioning over four alleged sex crimes.
Actually three of the claims against him will lapse next week under Sweden’s statute of limitation, though a fourth, which concerns alleged rape, will not expire until 2020.
If Assange remains in the embassy for a further five years, the cost of leaving him there will have reached about £30 million.
What idiocy! The villain of the piece is of course Assange himself, a cowardly and devious sleazeball who refuses to submit himself to justice.
His justification is that if he goes to Sweden to face the music he may be extradited to America.
Many feel his actions compromised Western security, and may have put the lives of US servicemen at risk. America takes such matters extremely seriously, as evidenced by the fate of Private Bradley Manning, the source of many WikiLeaks files, who is now serving 35 years for leaking classified documents.
But when it comes to the farce that is played out daily in Knightsbridge, Assange is not the only culprit.
Others in the dock should be the Ecuadorian Government, the British Foreign Office, the Swedish judicial authorities, the Metropolitan Police, and, last but not least, his former friends on the Left who once succoured and encouraged this egotistical monster.
Ecuador, whose economy is about the size of Greater Manchester’s, has been run by a Jeremy Corbyn-like character called Rafael Correa for the past eight years. His greatest joy is poking a stick in the eye of the United States and its ally Britain. Hence the offer to Assange of a billet in the London embassy.
Our own dear Foreign Office does not appear to have been notably robust in standing up to Ecuador to which, by the by, Britain has given £3.3 million in aid in the past 15 years, and still maintains a modest trickle. No good deed goes unpunished in this world.
The languid nature of the FO is epitomised by Hugo Swire, one of its middle-ranking ministers.
He has just said in an infuriatingly nonchalant way: “As ever, we look to Ecuador to help bring this difficult and costly situation to an end.”
How they must be quaking in Quito, the capital of Ecuador! I realise that the language of diplomacy generally avoids calling a spade a spade, but a little huffing and puffing, or at any rate an anguished expression of frustration and anger, would be a welcome relief. If being polite to the Ecuadorian government has got us nowhere, it is time to show some toughness.
The Swedish authorities also deserve a rap on the knuckles. Assange had been in his bolt-hole for nearly three years before they finally floated the idea of sending prosecutors to interview him. Why so long?
Some observers suspect the Swedish government is not particularly keen for Assange to come to Stockholm to stand trial because it fears an extradition warrant from the Americans, who may want to put him on trial for stealing their secrets. If it acquiesced to such a request, it would doubtless be accused of bad faith.
At all events, the interview still has not taken place. According to the Swedes, the Ecuadorians are being tricky about allowing unfettered access to their London embassy on the grounds that it is sovereign territory.
And then there is the Metropolitan Police. Not long ago its most senior officer, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, complained that watching the embassy night and day is “sucking” police resources which could and should be engaged in solving crimes. I’m sure he’s right.
But is it really necessary to deploy so many officers (sometimes as many as 20) staking out a small embassy? It looks like typical police overkill. A couple of officers and an alert dog should be enough to keep an eye on Assange who, despite the use of a treadmill donated by Left-wing film-maker Ken Loach, is probably pretty unfit, and hardly likely to make a gymnastic escape over the rooftops.
Spending £10 000 a day in ensuring that this sedentary and physically unthreatening man doesn’t do a runner is obviously lunatic. If he is going to stay in the embassy for much longer, will someone with a functioning brain please slash the costs of watching over him.
That brings me to Assange’s erstwhile cheerleaders on the Left, particularly at The Guardian, with nearly all of whom he has fallen out in the most acrimonious way.
Do they ever reflect on their role in aiding and abetting this terrible man?
If only they had seen earlier what most of us saw immediately - that Assange is an amoral chancer who was oblivious to the damaging consequences of spewing out top-secret information.
I fear they partly embraced him at first in the belief that the leaked emails would harm America, so hated by many on the British Left.
The joke is that he turned against them, accusing The Guardian of “institutional narcissism”, just as they recoiled from him.
The newspaper’s star reporter and Leftist warrior, Nick Davies, concluded that Assange was an “extraordinary, dishonest man”.
At the New York Times, which also published many of the emails, distaste was even more extreme. Journalists judged that he could be “elusive, manipulative and volatile” and reckoned he smelled “as if he hadn’t bathed for days”. Perhaps we should feel sorry for diplomats at the Ecuadorian embassy.
My point is that virtually no one comes well out of this saga, and, equally, that no one benefits by prolonging it. Even Assange, who makes occasional appearances on the embassy’s small balcony, from which he has delivered rambling diatribes, said almost exactly a year ago that he expected to leave the embassy soon.
It must be literally maddening to be closeted permanently in so tiny a room, away from sunlight - certainly far worse than a Swedish prison, where he might be briefly held pending possible trial were he to hand himself in. If he did so, he would show himself better than the worm most people believe him to be.
But I fear he is not a man to show courage or principle, and that only far greater efforts on the part of the Government will prise him out of the embassy before 2020, when the rape claim will legally lapse.
Tempting though the idea is of severing diplomatic ties with the Ecuadorians unless they hand him over, such strong-arm tactics would probably backfire. If police seized Assange in the embassy after relations had been cut, that would give a green light to any tin-pot dictatorship to set aside convention, and enter British embassies abroad.
No, that would be a step too far. But the Home Office and the Foreign Office must get their act together. This farce can’t go on. Julian Assange is a rogue, not a prisoner of conscience, and leaving him to rot for years in Knightsbridge is simply an outrageous waste of public money.
Daily Mail