Come on out, Julian! This farce must end

One night this week, I went to a Venetianthemed party in a London restaurant. Harry’s Dolce Vita in Knightsbridge was a riot of confetti and delicious cicchetti.

Pretty Italian waitresses tied coloured streamers in their hair and delivered trays of foaming bellinis as a promenading opera singer made the rafters rattle.

Customers and staff alike wore glitter masks and all entered into the uproarious carnival spirit. Bellissima!

Sipping my drink amid all this revelry, it seemed strange to think that, less than 200 yards away, Julian Assange was closeted in the ecuadorian embassy, where he has been mouldering away like a cheese for fiveand-a-half years. The WikiLeaks fugitive has locked himself away from life, from the joyous bustle of living, from his loved ones and his family.

When I met his actress friend Pamela Anderson recently, she told me: ‘Julian has small children and he desperately wants to be part of their lives.’

Yet his incarceration is entirely self-inflicted — and not likely to end any time soon.

This week, a British judge upheld the warrant for his arrest, and he will continue to face detention if he leaves the embassy.

Judge emma Arbuthnot said she was not persuaded by the argument from Assange’s legal team that it was not in the public interest to pursue him for skipping bail.

She said he should have the ‘courage’ to come to court like everyone else — and she did not agree, then or now, that he would necessarily be extradited to America.

So, there he stays, locked away in storage like an unloved piece of furniture — the unwanted guest sleeping on the couch who won’t take the hint and move on.

The Conservative MP nicholas Soames has no sympathy for his plight, rudely tweeting that Assange must ‘smell like a badger’.

But Miss Anderson says this is not true. He has his own shower cubicle, says the former Baywatch star. And no, she has never noticed a bad odour.

She brings him vegan snacks and encourages him to take exercise and eat well, but he gets little in the way of fresh air. ‘He can’t stand by an open window,’ she said, ‘because he might be assassinated.’

One can see how such endless claustrophobia must foster paranoia — in his own mind and those of his friends — even though it seems risible to outsiders.

Pamela sees Assange’s predicament as ‘a romantic struggle’. But sitting in the glamorous London restaurant nearest to his grimy digs, it seems like the exact opposite.

Laughter, music, the wet pavements, the warming glow of a candle on a table on a cold winter’s night: the life of this great city roars on all around Julian Assange, but for him, time stands still.

This awful farce should end — but Julian is the only one who can do that.