No really, stay as long as you like. Really!
A spokesperson from Ecuador’s embassy in London revealed the ambassador’s “great relief” that two years of diplomatic hinting had finally achieved the desired effect of getting Julian Assange to end his extended stay in their spare room.
Assange has for many many months been insisting he is perfectly comfortable living in refuge in the embassy, while the official Ecuadorian welcome has gradually become more and more muted.
At first, Assange was welcomed as a modern-day martyr for freedom, but as the months wore on and on, and the piles of unwashed clothes grew ever greater, the embassy’s initial enthusiasm began gradually to wane.
The former Wikileaks chief’s announcement in June that he “would stay in the embassy for ten years if necessary” brought only the faintest of tight-lipped smiles and a wistful look into the middle distance from the ambassador.
“It’s been very awkard,” the spokeperson admitted this morning. “We’ve been dropping hints about needing more space for bookshelves and pointing out that our mother was talking about coming to stay, but he never seemed to get the bloody message.”
The embassy admitted that the eventual motivation for Assange’s leaving might have been partly down to a slight subterfuge on their part.
“In the end we had to tell him we were knocking the embassy down and opening a new one in a closed-down library round the corner, and he said he’d just pop round there and wait for us, if that was all right with us. Now he’s out, we’re not going bloody anywhere.
We feel a bit bad about tricking him, but for God’s sake – wikileaks? Wikipaininthearse, more like!”
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