The caped crusader Julian Assange turns to the dark side

As he sweats out the hours in the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange, fashionable society's favourite fugitive, may be in more trouble than he realises. His big hope is to find a bolthole in South America, but the sinister forces he believes are pursuing him could turn out to be a lot more forgiving than the people who put up his bail money.

The Assange Supporters Club, a motley collection of socialites, movie-makers and human rights bores, offers a poignant illustration of the collective liberal conscience battling the establishment by coshing itself over the head. It all looked so different late last year when 40-year-old Julian, the white-haired whizz-kid of the secrets-busting WikiLeaks website, was in a London courtroom trying to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.

To his side rushed Jemima Khan, the cause-hungry heiress, saying: "I am here because I believe in the principle of the human right to freedom of information and our right to be told the truth." Tripping daintily behind her was Bianca Jagger, the ex-wife of the Stones' frontman, now a "goodwill ambassador" for the Council of Europe, who fumed that the charges against Assange must be part of a plot to have him handed over to America, where he could rot for the rest of his days in a dungeon.

But what about the claims that Assange had sexually abused two women during a week's visit to Stockholm? Clarification was provided by John Pilger, the Left-wing journalist, who, showing unsuspected jurisprudential skills, declared: "I have read almost every scrap of evidence in this case and it is clear, in terms of natural justice, that no crime was committed." Marxist filmmaker Ken Loach suggested that the Americans might think jail too good for Assange: "Clearly the Yanks want to get him back and either imprison him for a long time or worse," fretted Ken. "We need a bit of solidarity with someone who has just told us things we were entitled to know."

Together, the Supporters Club raised pounds 240,000 to have the Australian released pending further legal manoeuvres. Last week, after a Supreme Court ruled extradition was legal and proper, Assange slipped into the embassy in London and claimed asylum.

You have to hope he knows what he is doing. Ecuador exports five million tons of bananas a year, and gave the world the Panama hat, but a darkness dwells at its moist and spicy heart in the form of tinpot president Rafael Correa. Irony doesn't quite capture the mordant weirdness of Assange seeking sanctuary in a country where the suppression of information is a flagship government policy.

Here's a recent bulletin from the Organisation of American States: "Correa regularly uses an emergency provision in the country's broadcast law to commandeer the country's airwaves and denounce journalists as 'ignorant' and 'liars'." But his tactics go beyond theatrics. Correa has filed multiple defamation suits against journalists and is creating a legal framework to restrict press freedom. Three executives and the former op-ed editor of the leading newspaper, El Universo, have been hit with a $40 million libel judgment and could soon be jailed.

Now, what was Julian saying before this unpleasantness began? "We [WikiLeaks] are free press activists. It's about giving people the information they need. That is the raw ingredient that is needed to make a just and civil society. Without that you are just sailing in the dark. I have tried to invent a system that solves the problem of censorship across the whole world."

Should he ever make it to the jungly bosom of Ecuador, Assange can reflect at leisure on such vagaries of fate. For the Supporters Club, facing that potential bill for pounds 240,000 and a more painful loss of face, there is deeper reflection to be done. It isn't as though Assange was ever the brave moral warrior the liberal establishment made him out to be.

In their book WikiLeaks, David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian, the newspaper that first championed Assange, describe the staff's revulsion at his behaviour. Over lunch at a London restaurant, one reporter asked if he wasn't worried that Afghan civilians who had co-operated with the coalition forces could be exposed to danger by WikiLeaks' revelations, Assange replied: "So, if they get killed they've got it coming to them. They deserve it." A silence fell over the table.

The New York Times, another early WikiLeaks glorifier, suffered a similar disillusionment, reporting that several of Assange's closest associates had abandoned him, exhausted by his "erratic and imperious behaviour, and nearly delusional grandeur". The public mood has shifted, too, with a growing sense that a world in which nothing is secret would be even madder than the one we live in now.

The Supporters Club looks to be in need of a little support itself. Jemima, confessing to being "on the hook" for a pounds 20,000 bail bond, says she "expected" Assange to face the charges in Sweden. Miss Jagger and Pilger appear keen to point out that they didn't actually put up any money, while fellow member Tariq Ali, the imperishable Left-wing activist and protester, defended the asylum bid as "a good move unless the vassal state that is Britain sends in the Paras".

It might be easier to let him go to Ecuador, concealed in a diplomatic banana crate and on the understanding that he doesn't come back. "Let us stop promoting this image of poor, courageous journalists, a saintly media trying to tell the truth, and tyrants and autocrats trying to stop them," said President Correa in an interview last month. Assange, who was asking the questions, nodded obligingly. "I completely agree with your view on the media," he beamed. How well they will get along together.