Swing Low, Sweet Health Service

"I looked over Jordan, and what did I see? Coming for to carry me home? A band of angels coming after me." Rugby has yet to become a dominant sport in Mallorca, which is probably just as well. How would the health service A&E departments cope with the additional broken limbs and, more significantly, all those needing their stomachs pumped after a night of swinging low, bar diving and extreme drinking? Someone who might know the answer is Jordan Thomas. And he is? The latest recruit to the regional government's department of Gómez-Fuster, formerly known as the health ministry but renamed after the married couple running it.

Youth unemployment and all that, lack of what is regularly termed "quality" employment, especially for the youth, and all that, but we hadn't realised that PSOE would be employing bands of angels coming after 20-year-olds and handing them out contracts for over forty grand to take on some advisory job in the health service as part of a grand youth training, job creation scheme. Normally, such aspiring young bureaucrats are given gigs as interns and told to learn on the job for a pittance, if that. It is far less normal to learn on the job backed up by 46,283 euros a year pre-tax. Jordan, so we understand, has little or no qualification for his advisory job, so why has he got it?

The answer would seem to lie along the corridors of power in the Ministry of Gómez-Fuster, the one where the minister, (Patricia) Gómez, handed the task of director-general of the IB-Salut health service to Mr. Gómez, aka (Juli) Fuster. Interestingly enough, and no doubt purely coincidentally, Jordan was number three on the PSOE list of candidates for councillor posts in Santanyi at the recent election. At number one on the list was Juli. 

When Juli landed his job, the Partido Popular's Marga Prohens levelled the nepotism charge at Juli's missus. She was, as were others, perhaps willing to accept that, although the appointment looked a tad iffy, Juli was indeed eminently qualified for the post (which he was). Now, however, Marga points out that the Ministry of Gómez-Fuster doesn't even have that excuse. And she is not the only one who finds Jordan and the assistance he has been given by the angels of the health ministry more than a tad iffy.

Alberto Jarabo, leader of the Balearic wing of the anti-nepotism political conglomerate Wecan, i.e. Podemos, has wondered if Jordan is possessed of "precocious genius" in the mould of, say, Orson Welles. Alberto would allude to Welles because of his own film-making abilities, though he might also have had in mind the Hearst dynasty of "Citizen Kane" being reinvented as the Gómez-Fuster dynasty. A word on every politicians' lips at present - the politicians of the PSOE-led pact that is - is "citizen". Everything is being done in the name of the citizen. Just listen to Armengol and government spokesperson, Marc Pons, drone on and you will realise this.

So how does youthful Jordan with his substantial salary fit with the needs of the citizenry? The answer, according to Patricia, lies with social media, which I'm sure you will all have realised to be the case. "We know that the great gurus of social networks are around twenty years old," she said. What is she on? Well, it isn't the flakka drug, but this and the dangers of other drugs appear to be the motivation for appointing a youth to a position of relatively high command in the health service: in order that he can communicate with other youth. When she puts it like that, it all makes sense of course, but then if there are that many great gurus of social networks out there in Twitterland, couldn't she have found someone a little further from the Gómez-Fuster home? And to make matters slightly worse, Jordan has blocked access to his Twitter account to anyone who wasn't previously a follower. His gurudom has thus been rendered non-dialogue, which in the new political climate is most certainly not de rigueur. From sweet chariot to chariots of political controversy fire.

* Jordan Thomas has now resigned.