Assange is on the brink of extradition to the United States. He faces an unprecedented prosecution under the Espionage Act that could have him sentenced to 175 years – and open the way for Washington to pursue investigative journalists around the world who are deemed to have revealed US secrets.

Even at this 11th hour, the media is muted in condemnation of this obviously political case, in spite of the dire implications for freedom of information. And even though Assange has been held without charge for four years at Belmarsh high-security prison in London, at a cost to the UK taxpayer of hundreds of thousands of pounds, public sympathy for him is diluted because he has been cast as a reprobate.

Assange describes himself as “an editor who loves what journalists can do” but he was never accepted by the media class as one of their own. Indeed, he has been seen as a threat due to the challenge WikiLeaks poses to the established media’s role as arbiter of the news.

Yet the original WikiLeaks data drop of 2010 produced what Vanity Fair described as “by any standard one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”.