This megalomaniac sleazeball embodies the nightmares we face in the anarchic age of the internet

Julian  Assange earned a place in the record books yesterday, by becoming the first alleged sexual predator in history to ­secure a 25-minute slot to explain himself on the BBC’s Today programme. It was a remarkable and revealing performance.‘Women have been extremely helpful and generous to me,’ he said. ‘That’s what I am used to.’ He is resisting extradition to Sweden to face questioning about two alleged sexual assaults because there is ‘no natural justice’ there; rather than being a ­civilised country as John Humphrys suggested, it is ‘more of a banana republic’.

The Swedish prosecutors have not followed ‘proper process’ and: ‘I don’t have to run off to random states; I have an organisation to run.’He laid bare the perceived megalomania of this 39-year-old Australian with the white hair, narrowed eyes and mean little mouth who is conducting a war on two fronts which divides opinion around the world.

To his defenders, he is a hero of free speech, and now also the victim of a Swedish sexual frame-up, probably instigated by the CIA.

To his critics and enemies, he is a major threat to the processes of ­government; an anarchist with almost demented delusions of grandeur.

His radio interview yesterday, at the Suffolk country house where one of his rich sympathisers is entertaining him as a condition of his bail, revealed a man serenely confident of his own rightness: ‘I’m perfectly happy with myself… I feel at

peace… The world needs to be reformed.’

The sexual allegations, he said, are ‘quite helpful to my organisation’ because ‘people will start to realise what is really going on…a tremendous abuse of power’.

Humphrys noted the marvellous hypocrisy, that the master leaker denounced the Swedish authorities who, Assange claimed, had ‘illegally leaked material to newspapers’ about the allegations against him.

He admitted what he describes as consensual sex with the two women who have given evidence against him, but declined to discuss on the air their claims that he was ­violent and refused to use a condom: ‘A gentleman doesn’t like to talk about his private life.’What do we conclude from it all?

It is impossible to take a view about whether the sexual allegations against him are true.What we do know is that if they were made against any ordinary citizen, public and media opinion would insist that the accused must answer the charges. It seems wildly implausible that liberal Sweden should have colluded with the Americans to frame Assange.At the very least, by his own account of his personal life and the facts known about his childhood and youth in

Australia, where he fathered a child at 18, he is a turbulent character with a notably arrogant attitude to women, prompted by his many successes with them.

His conceit has been supercharged by the fame or notoriety achieved by WikiLeaks, which appears to have ­convinced him that he may be above normal standards of conduct, responsibility or accountability.

He is encouraged in this belief by a gaggle of celebrity ­groupies around the world, including the Left-wing Australian ­

journalist John Pilger and ­Jemima Khan. Nonetheless, it behoves Western governments not to make too much of Whether or not this particular global nuisance is crushed or discredited, there will be plenty more like him, unless or until governments and institutions discover how to protect their computer systems from his kind.It is impossible to judge the merits or likely outcome of the legal proceedings against him in Sweden, but we should have sufficient faith in Swedish institutions to believe that Assange will receive justice.

Most of us have heard enough to believe that he is a ­sleazeball, however the legal proceedings turn out; it is a mere accident that he is a ­sleazeball who is also causing grief to the governments of the West.Even those who support WikiLeaks should abandon the pernicious delusion that he should be excused from answering charges of sexual misconduct which are wholly unrelated to his self-­proclaimed crusade for transparency.