Plundering And Blundering

Oh my God. To plunder once, as Lady Bracknell didn't say, may be regarded as a bit of cock-up; to plunder twice looks like you mean it. How good is your Spanish? Would you be able to distinguish between the verbs "sacar" and "saquear"? You could be forgiven if you were not able to. But, the national secretary-general of the Partido Popular and the president of Castile-La Mancha? Oh my God. Dear Dolly was at it again: Maria Dolores Cospedal, throwing the PP what might be termed a Cospedal pass. "We have worked hard in plundering our country." Honestly, this is what she said at a meeting in Guadalajara on 17 April; the gaffe only really coming to light and having been given the attention it deserved last week. What she had meant to say was - "we have worked hard in moving our country forward" - but because she got her "sacar" and "saquear" muddled up, she didn't say this.

Unfortunately, this is not the first time that Dolly has stumbled over these verbs. In 2012, she was announcing policies that would plunder (or loot, if you prefer) Castile-La Mancha. Over the course of three years, Dolly's ambitions for looting have increased substantially. Not content with a single region, she's having away with the treasures of an entire nation. What a girl.

At a time when it was emerging that Rajoy's old mate (no longer a mate), Rodrigo Rato, had been not so much a rat who had left a sinking ship but - allegedly - one who had rammed it with his pirates' ship, boarded it, deprived it of all its vast horde of pieces of eight and had then set fire to it, Dolly's mixture of verbs was especially unfortunate. Or perhaps it was entirely appropriate. The Pirate Plunderers of the PP: it has a ring to it. Major-General Matas, The Pirate King Bárcenas, and many a Pirate Apprentice: "They are the very model of the modern political party".

Linguistic balls-ups by PP prominenti are of course not uncommon. A fine example of the genre was that of erstwhile education minister in the Balearics, Joana Camps. She trampled her heavy boots all over the PISA Programme for International Student Assessment by believing that PISA was in fact the Spanish verb to tread, which she then duly translated into Catalan, thus compounding the error and turning herself into a laughing-stock (which admittedly wasn't that difficult).

Joana should have been demanding double geography lessons for her colleagues in the party, as there have been the geographical gaffes as well. Take Mariano Rajoy, for example. Prime minister of Spain. Should have a reasonable grasp on the subject, you would think. Not when it comes to Mallorca, he doesn't. Hence, he referred to the island of Palma. And, blow me, Dolly has the same sort of problem. The day after she was boasting about all the plundering, she was at a meeting in Extremadura. Or was she? According to her, Las Hurdes, which is where she was, is in Andalusia. It isn't.