The week that was

Oh my good Lord. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.” Where’s the Lord when you need Him? Nowhere, it would appear, when the National Police come a-knocking. “We’re coming to get you, Seraphim.” Not even the fact that Seraphim is the archangel who looks over the police could prevent this. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. And there was worse still. This was the angel of Spanish. Serafín Castellano. Banged up. Corruption. Allegedly. What else would it be?
How terribly ironic that the national government delegate to Valencia (a Partido Popular one) who bears the name of one of the two official languages of Spain - the one that the PP typically has a preference for - should, firstly, be the government delegate in Catalan-variant-speaking Valencia and, secondly, that he should find plod banging on the door waving around a corruption charge only a few days after the regional elections. The ones in which corruption didn’t play a part. Or did, depending on which PP apologist was speaking. Rajoy must be spitting feathers. Those of an angel’s wings with the name of Castellano-Spanish, to boot. Spanish was under arrest.
Well, did corruption play a part? According to the Balearics PP government spokesperson Nuria Riera, it didn’t. It was all the fault of errors in communication. Which was something of an admission for the PP spokesperson to make. It was all her fault then. But Nuria was holding her hands up - not as the police were waving guns in her direction - but in confessing that there would now be a need for “self-criticism”: the same self-criticism that was going to be applied after the stuffing at the Euro elections last year but which wasn’t.
What a wretched week it was for Nuria. She was the one with the awkward task of publicly announcing election results on the telly. She could be seen visibly shrinking as the awful truth was being revealed. Much as she might have preferred for there to have been one final burst of communication error, it was impossible: her party was going down the pan. But while she insisted that the corruption hovering over the PP with its now angelic, non-Catalan symbolism was not a factor, others fessed up and said it was. Like, for instance, the president of the PP in Palma, José María Rodríguez. Well he should know, having only avoided a rap thanks to the statute of limitations.
Nuria was left to struggle with the communication breakdown between PP Balearics and PP Central. There is going to be a party congress at the end of the summer, she insisted. Oh no there isn’t, said central office. You’ll have to wait until after the general election. Why this apparent difference of opinion or communication error? Nothing to do with José Ramón Bauzá wishing to clear the PP leadership decks in the Balearics and prepare his campaign to be elected as a PP Balearics delegate to the national parliament? Or was it one final - and vain - attempt to demonstrate that PP Balearics was more regionalist than its critics would suggest and wasn’t a mere puppet of central office?

Not an hour, not a second

Bauza's on his way. This much we know. But he’s going to spin things out so that he can put up a fighting show against the extremists about to take over. Score some Brownie points ahead of the campaign for national parliament. Or something like that. He might not the get the chance though. Rebel mayors gathered on Friday and demanded that they be brought the head of José Ramón. They insisted that Bauzá clarifies all this business with the regional congress by Monday or resigns. Some sources reckon that Bauzá might resign this week anyway. If he had run out of mates before the election, he is now Billy Bauzá No Mates, save for the odd loyal mayor, such as the bloke in Llucmajor. (What was all this stuff about a vehicle from a company that specialises in document shredding being parked outside Llucmajor town hall on Thursday? Normal procedure as part of a contract since 2010, said the town hall.)
The rebel mayors outnumbered the loyal mayors at a lunch in Felanitx. The star turn was the outgoing mayor of Palma, the darling of the alternative PP, Mateo Isern. “This man cannot spend another hour in the party,” he said, referring to his grand foe, Bauzá. The normally jovial Biel Serra from Sa Pobla gave Bauzá even less time. “Not a second more. He is one of the main culprits for what has happened.” Now we know why Biel decided not to stand again as mayor.
Not of course that everyone makes Isern their darling. The Canal 4 television channel, for example. The journalists’ union has reproached the channel for having described Isern as petty, a coward and an egoist. Really, journalists should learn some discretion and not go around saying, for example, that Bauzá is like Count Dracula.

The suits of government

While the PP was engaged in its highly public post-election wailing and gnashing of teeth, the new boys were setting about carving up the next government. There was one particularly instructive moment last week which threw up a question about the presidential and governmental qualities of Biel Barceló of Més and Alberto Jarabo of Podemos. Palma was brought to a standstill because the Chinese had taken over, and as part of this invasion from the east was an encounter between Bauzá and the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang. Bauzá in a fetching suit. He has his dressdown jeans days, but Bauzá has generally always scrubbed up well. What will happen with Biel and Alberto? Will Biel be sporting his green-tide, anti-trilingualism t-shirt for all time? Does Alberto actually have a suit? And if, as has been said, Podemos government sorts will only be paid 1,900 pre-tax, would he be able to afford a suit of a suitably Armani nature?  Strangely enough, the more one contemplates Alberto, the more one realises that if he grew his curly locks longer, coloured them green and sported a pair of whacky, whirling glasses, he’d be a dead ringer for one of those kiddies’ entertainer types who pitch up with monotonous regularity at village fiestas.
If we’d thought that the past few years of the PP had been hugely entertaining and amusing, the four years to come promise comedy gold.