Fury as Abbott plays down Assange rape claims
Shadow home secretary under fire for ‘terribly ill-judged’ remarks after Wikileaks founder is held
DIANE ABBOTT has caused a rift in Labour’s shadow cabinet after she appeared to defend Julian Assange against rape allegations and called for the UK to oppose his extradition to the US.
The shadow home secretary was last night facing a widespread backlash after she claimed the Wikileaks founder was being targeted for leaking “embarrassing information” about the US military and security services.
When confronted about sexual offence claims levelled at Assange by two women in Sweden, Ms Abbott said only that “the charges were never brought”.
A senior shadow cabinet minister last night told The Daily Telegraph that Ms Abbott’s comments had been “terribly ill-judged”, “wrong-headed” and would leave people “mortified”.
They added: “The man has been accused of the most heinous crimes and I don’t think it’s good enough. It’s so damaging [for Labour] and she doesn’t really weigh her words carefully enough before she speaks.”
It came as Hillary Clinton, whose 2016 US election campaign was rocked by stolen internal communications circulated by Wikileaks, demanded Assange “answer for what he has done”.
Police dragged Assange, 47, from the Ecuadorean embassy in London on Thursday – seven years after he claimed asylum there having lost a battle to avoid extradition to Sweden. He now faces 12 months in prison after being found guilty of breaching his bail conditions, as well as extradition to the US over allegations he conspired to hack into a Pentagon computer.
While a long-running investigation into a rape claim against Assange was dropped in Sweden in 2017, prosecutors in the country yesterday said they were now considering reopening it.
When asked about Assange’s arrest yesterday, Ms Abbott told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We all know what this is about. It’s not the rape charges, serious as they are, it’s about Wikileaks and all of that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military and security services. If the Swedish government wants to come forward with those charges, I believe that Assange should face the criminal justice system. But if you’re talking about the American extradition attempt … we should block the extradition of Assange.”
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, also said the party was opposed to his extradition to the US, writing on Twitter that Assange had exposed “evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Stephen Kinnock MP said: “Julian Assange stands accused of rape, in Sweden. It is critically important that we all remember this. It would be deeply troubling if the possibility that Mr Assange may be guilty of sexual violence were to be airbrushed out.”
Strong-armed from the embassy he had been holed up in for more than half a decade, resembling the kind of faux guru-cum-cult leader that Netflix true-crime series are made of, is presumably not how Julian Assange imagined his re-entry into the real world.
Yet so it was on Thursday morning when Ecuador closed its diplomatic doors on the Wikileaks founder, who had been living there (and, according to one embassy source, smearing mess on the walls) since June 2012. Images of his exit showed, starkly, the transformation of a man once labelled an “albino cyberpunk libertarian sex symbol” into little more than a dishevelled poo-botherer, all because of a refusal to let go.
So much is made of “just hanging in there”; of sinking your nails in and clinging on until blood runs down your fingertips. But there is an art to knowing when to call it quits – one few of us are able to deploy well. See this week’s two most talked-about women, Theresa May and Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-bridge.
The agreement of a Brexit deadline extension was announced at 2:45am in Brussels on Thursday morning presumably because, having decided that stepping down is as far-fetched a thought as exiting the European Union with even the vaguest semblance of purpose, the Prime Minister wants to illustrate as vividly as possible how miserable her position has now become.
Even if that means being forced from the doors of No10 by guards (or members of the European Research Group). What the walls will look like when – if – she goes is anyone’s guess.
This is not a concern for Ms Waller-bridge, however, whose description this week as being a “probable genius” in these pages was the most muted I could find.
Fleabag was excellent, of that there is no doubt. Wasn’t its market value raised infinitely, though, by our knowledge that this second series would be its last?
It made each episode all the more worth savouring; those sub-30 minute bursts being the perfect vehicle for displaying the craftsmanship of its lead writer and actor, and allowing for the bittersweetness of its coming to an end to really set in.
Such a feeling does not extend to Mr Assange and Mrs May, obviously, whose good work has been all but overshadowed by the subterranean level at which they decided to dig in their heels.
Presumably, they see this as proof of their resolve – but to the rest of the world, it is little more than pigheadedness.
It is tricky, of course, to recognise the golden window of opportunity in which going out on a high is still an option; like any good thing, it is hard to give up. But surely it is better to do that, rather than cling on until nobody remembers you did any good in the first place.