The Lunatics Take Over The Asylum

Carlos Delgado. Now, you must remember him. Ex-mayor of Calvia. Small bloke, copped some flak for having been photoed with two deer's balls on his head. Where had Carlos been for the past eighteen months since resigning as tourism minister? Not a peep out of him. Then suddenly he does reappear. Lunatics, fanatics, he calls the Partido Popular rebels. Pot, kettle, black. The lunatics were taking over from the lunatics. Shut it, Carlos, the lunatics responded (or words to that effect). The only ally Carlos seemed to have was the fading PP political boss of Palma, José María Rodríguez. With friends like him ... .

Mateo Isern and Biel Company, chiefs among the lunatics, arrived on a high-powered motorbike. "I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride. Wanted, dead or alive." There was to have been a lynching. Not high noon but high seven in the evening. Algaida. José Ramón was to have been marched to the top of the Randa and strung up. In the end, the lynch mob was stood down. Get out of town, JR. And so he will. One day he will be here, the next he will not be. Like a character in "Neighbours" who suddenly disappears with a cursory explanation that he or she has gone to Brisbane, JR will have gone to Madrid, never to be seen again.

The thing is that it was all so predictable. I'm not going to say that I told you so, but I did. Even before JR became president of the government. Division, division, division, with Delgado pulling the strings. And Madrid. Joan Riera in "Ultima Hora", who has been providing a post-electoral daily chronicle of, among other things, the PP implosion, has highlighted the ideological differences. Bauzá's fall has been predicated on ideology - one of anti-regionalism, driven by the PP in Madrid - rather than on anything personal. True. That's how it started, how it had started before the 2011 election, then it got personal though. Rafael Bosch, Toni Pastor, Mateo Isern, how many more do you need?

The lynch mob should have gathered a long time ago, and they know they should have. They could see where it was all heading. And if they hadn't, they could once trilingual teaching became the cause célèbre of the Bauzá administration: JR's own death warrant. Wanted. Dead or alive. Don't be fooled. It wasn't just because Podemos and others emerged from the political woodwork. Had there not been all the personal stuff, PP mayors might now still be mayors or at least part of pacts. Ah yes, pacts. There could never have been any. Not with, say, El Pi. Personal. Pastor, Jaume Font. Someone said that if Bauzá had just picked up the phone and spoken to Font, patched things up, the results would have been different. But Bauzá was not the one who could have made that call. It had to have been someone else. The lunatics know it. And they knew it then.