The Literary Regent

 

The previous king of Spain, who abdicated in 2014 to give way to Felipe VI, is to publish his memoirs – evidently with the idea of presenting his side of the story. “I get the feeling”, he says, “that they are trying to rob me of my own history”. The book is being ghost-written by a French journalist and will be published early next year with the title: Reconciliación.

“My father always advised me not to write my memoirs. Kings do not confess, and even less so publicly”, says Juanca (his nickname in progressive circles).

It may not be such a good idea. One should always consider the reputation of The Firm.

A second story about Juan Carlos had also hit the news-stands last week: photos in a Dutch magazine of His Royal Highness in a clinch with a companion of the female persuasion called Bárbara Rey. (El Rey kissing La Rey). The relationship had been considered until now as an open secret.

The Bourbons (going back through the ages) have long enjoyed activities which have been quietly swept under the carpet: but Royalty is not as other people, and their peccadillos should be at best, unremembered. President Clinton might have got into hot water in his day for his extra-curricular activities (and we shake our heads, even though many of us have done the same, or worse), but our leaders, our shepherds, chosen as it were by God (or Franco maybe) must be kept to a higher standard.

Why, if it’s OK for His Nibs to cheat on his wife (and his subjects), then what about little me?

For this whole thing to work, the Royals must be revered by their subjects, since they are, and must be, an example to us all. One thinks of Elizabeth II or Spain’s Felipe VI and of course many others.

All said, it must be a strain – living such a virtuous life under the public eye at all times. One mistake or lapse in judgement, especially in these times of intrusive paparazzi, and one’s Royal reputation is in the dust.

Not that Juan Carlos didn’t have other reasons to upset the applecart – other lovers such as Corinne, other enthusiasms such as shooting elephants, and other vices including accepting bribes from foreign leaders. José Antonio Zarzalejos, former director of the ABC, once defined JC's behaviour with three words in the book about his son called ‘Felipe VI. Un rey en la adversidad’: greed, promiscuity and arrogance.

His fortune is estimated by Forbes as running to 2,000 million euros. He is leaving it all to his two daughters Elena and Cristina – Felipe wants nothing to do with it.

El Emerito moved to Abu Dhabi a few years back to keep himself out of the public eye, however he sometimes briefly returns to participate in regattas in Sanxenxo (Pontevedra).

His son ignores him on these occasions.

For the institution of Royalty to survive, it has to be without blemish. Now that may be hard to do; but there are only two answers to that, and Spain has been careful not to ask the public in any of its many official surveys, which they would prefer: a monarchy or a republic. It is strange to think that the obligation for a country to elect a system with a head of state is like throwing a coin to choose between pot luck and naked ambition.   

Feijóo Does Spain No Favours

 For those who yearn for a change in the Spanish government, there’s the problem of the leading opposition champion evidently not being the right person for the job.

The hard-to-pronounce (or spell) Alberto Núñez Feijóo had been the president of Galicia and was chosen to take over the leadership of the Partido Popular following the defenestration of Pablo Casado (for criticising on the television the behaviour of his colleague Isabel Díaz Ayuso during the pandemic). Since he can’t talk about the economy – which is doing surprisingly well (now that everyone has been obliged to pay their taxes), Feijóo must concentrate his relentless opposition to the actions of his rival and his crew, whether actually true or basely dreamed up by the innumerable fábricas de bulos which are endlessly circling the ship of state.

Feijóo (pronounce him fay-who) sort of won the election last year (he has the most seats), only he didn’t since he and his allies – the Vox and a couple of tiddlers – weren’t quite enough to win against the coalition of the PSOE and its partners to the left plus some nationalist parties from the north. I could have been president, he said at one point, if it wasn’t for Vox, producing the jocular rejoinder of Pedro Sánchez in the Cortes with "That’s a very good one! Sr. Feijóo, you are not president because you do not want to be. In fact, you have even proclaimed that you are the first Spaniard to renounce being president of the Government when you could have been".

They’ve been at daggers drawn ever since, with Sánchez only last week complaining of Feijóo’s ‘vinegary’ and senseless opposition. Why, he will even go against the opinion of the PPE in Brussels in doomed attempts to pull down either Spain’s standing internationally, or Sanchez’ britches at home.

The party (and its supporters) is beginning to have second thoughts about the Galician (and his troubles back in his home region), his lack of constructive ideas ("When there is a problem with Morocco, the PP goes against the Government of Spain; if there is a problem with Algeria, the PP goes against the Government of Spain; if there is an issue in Venezuela, the PP goes against the Government of Spain; always against the Government of Spain and never in defence of the Spanish people" says a government minister with candour), and his recent performance over Venezuela, where his claim that Spain had plotted with the Caracas government to allow the disputed winner of their recent elections, Edmundo González, to seek asylum in Spain – was afterwards denied by the arch-conservative candidate González himself.

Feijóo with Ayuso

Feijóo wouldn’t make much of a president anyway – he gabbles and doesn’t speak English – and waiting in the wings is the above-mentioned Isabel Diáz Ayuso, who may be a handful with much baggage, but for some reason – she’s bulletproof. Pretty, too, like Meloni.

Talking of the Italian torpedo, Feijóo was over in Rome this weekend, to discuss immigration from the point of an ultra – however it panned out, Georgia Meloni wouldn’t say – and apart from a stolen snapshot, there’s no record of the summit anywhere in the Italian media.

Now we have the pre-budgets for 2025. The Conservative regions want more money from Central Government, but their colleagues in Parliament will likely be voting against the proposals this Thursday, which include any increase for the autonomies (mostly under PP control).

Pedro Sánchez certainly has problems to keep his majority, but the loosest of his allies – Junts per Catalunya (the exiled Puigdemont’s rabble) – know full well that they would get short shrift if the PP and its friends at Vox were to somehow take over the government.

So, maybe Sánchez and his claim of three more years is not such a fantasy, and with Feijóo for his rival, he may be right.

As someone says: better a Frankenstein government than a Neanderthal one.  

 

 

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The Spanish are generally an easy-going people, happy to be a little early, or more likely, a fraction late for an appointment. They will – and this is part of their charm – round things upwards: an extra dollop on your ice-cream or a shrimp on your tapa.

Only the statisticians will be prone to the sin of exactness, of putting a number down to several decimal points. They would probably get fired if they said something like ‘half of the customers were satisfied’ rather than ‘49.27% admitted to being pleased’.

Well, they use a comma where we use a point, so it would be: ‘49,27 per cent’.

That’s out of a hundred (although only 99 people were there, plus a small dachshund).

Our bean-counter, working for the INE – the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas – is paid to be exact, but his numbers will not make sense to anyone except another accountant. He might claim that ‘85,056,528 foreign visitors visited Spain in 2023’, where a mathematician would probably say ‘85,060,000 foreign visitors’ and a journalist would lead with ‘something over eighty-five million visitors’. 

Who is going to remember, or even read properly, that first number from the INE?

Secondly, of course, despite being exact, it is hopelessly misleading and wrong. Did they count the people in transit through the airport to another foreign destination? How about the cruise ship passengers, or the people who drove across the border from Portugal? What about the ones who stayed… or live here as foreign residents?

It’s a useful figure to draw political conclusions maybe, or to contrast with the year before or after, but not much beyond concluding what we already knew: a whole lot of tourists.  

Our favourite example of this anal delight in myopically clicking away at the abacus next to a flickering candle comes from a Canary Islands newspaper: ‘In July this year Lanzarote recorded just over 275,363 tourists according to the Lanzarote Data Centre’.  

A confusingly exact figure, although the article suggests maybe they missed one somewhere…

But hey, at least they couldn’t drive there.

The problem then, is not the exactitude of the numbers fielded by the statisticians, but the error that they can easily make, which in turn breeds false results. Otherwise, why bother to add them up anyway?

A town’s population is based on its padrón: its official census. That doesn’t mean that it’s right, what with long-term visitors, people who are registered in one town but living in another (for a variety of reasons), sundry vote-stuffing activities, foreigners who either aren’t on the padrón, or maybe have moved away without taking their names off the list. 

Let’s be fair though – the information is provided painstakingly and to the last level of accuracy, as is to be expected. On the other hand, there’s the concept of ‘garbage in, garbage out’, where the numbers are just plain wrong, due to false information, or corners cut. Take the Spanish fiscal information, the Gross Domestic Product – used, says Wiki, ‘to measure the economic health of a country or region’, and thus very important for comparison, European funding, reputation and so on.

From elDiario.es we read ‘The main official indicator of the Spanish economy, the GDP figure, is wrong. The National Institute of Statistics (INE) has been measuring it incorrectly for at least three years. At best, we are talking about a huge negligence, the most serious in the history of Spanish statistics, the one that will cost us the most…’

The title to this story is ‘The most expensive statistical error in history’. Not good. The methodology which may have worked in the past is now obsolete – there are simply more useful figures available.

Another headline says: ‘Official statistics admit a deviation of 32,480 million euros in the Spanish GDP. The INE carries out the largest revision in its history and corrects upwards, for the third time, the growth data of the Spanish economy in 2021’. Naturally, the lower figures for 2021 (following on from the Pandemic) paved the way at the time for opposition attacks on the Government: “These are your green shoots? This is where we came out stronger?”…and so on.

A sober report from The Corner says ‘The main change that has caused this increase in the volume of GDP is mainly due to the incorporation of the information derived from the new Population and Housing Census 2021, which has led to an increase in the number of inhabitants and, therefore, this has an impact on GDP…’

Sometimes, a journalist may need to go to the INE page. It’s hard to find the information one is looking for on this complicated site when one visits there and also, at least with the Firefox web-browser, when we do, we get a sinister ‘Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead’ which is a bit off-putting.

They need to not only buck up their ideas, but also their Internet presence.

Thus many news-sites will make up their own numbers, based perhaps on their experience, their politics, or perhaps on other more-or-less reliable sources.  

…

Note: The Europeans use a different mathematical nomenclature from the Americans and British. The Google translation of ‘32.480 millones de euros’ correctly reads – for Anglo readers – as ‘32.48 billion’. This is to do with ‘the long and short scale’, a confusion one doesn’t want to make.

Just to be clear, a Spanish billón (a ‘thousand million’ or 10⁹) is the same as an American million million (that’s to say, a trillion).

Silly? Hey, they still use Fahrenheit.