Julian Assange, the Australian self-publicist and self-styled martyr, sought asylum in the London embassy of Ecuador last June, and was granted it today. He faces extradition to Sweden on charges of sexual assault but refuses to go on the grounds that if he does he will be sent to the USA where he might be accused of...what we are not quite sure, related to his Wikileaks website, which in 2010 published a mass of leaked, largely US, diplomatic cables. 

Assange has many supporters among people who don't think very long: anything that exposes secret government doings (especially US ones) must be good; most secret government doings (especially US ones) are surely evil and against the rest of us; the more everyone knows about everything the better. 

This is not the moment to go into the idiocy of that view of the world, though I may at another time. The issue today is that the British Government, in a move of spectacular stupidity, has effectively threatened to go in and get Assange out, brandishing an obscure law of 1987 which would revoke an embassy's diplomatic status.

Never mind that this would instantly undermine the status of British embassies around the world. It just as quickly would make Assange look like the persecuted political martyr he has been trying to convince us he is. Could the British Foreign Office have been more clodhopping if it had actually tried?

Mind you, there's nothing charming about Ecuador's treatment of its own people. But maybe Assange isn't too bothered by that.