The New Age Has Been Delayed

So, as I was saying before I was chopped off in The Week That Was column on Sunday, all manner of nepotistic doubts have been raised about Thomases (and others) associated with PSOE. Firstly, there was Jordan Thomas. He was the 20-year-old social media guru saviour of the drug-inclined youth of the Balearics, appointed by the wife of the head of the IB-Salut health service, she being the health minister, and he - the husband - having stood on behalf of PSOE for Santanyi town hall election along with the boy Jordan. Having now resigned, there is a different Thomas on the scene, one Pau Thomas, the son of PSOE's parliamentary vice-president, Vicenç Thomas. Pau has got himself an advisory gig in the ministry of employment, at which PSOE's Iago Negueruela is the minister.

Vicenç, as he well knows, once tweeted an unfavourable tweet referring to the appointment of the girlfriend of the Partido Popular's Carlos Delgado, who was then the tourism minister, as an advisor to the tourism ministry. Carlos appeared totally unmoved by suggestions that there was something a touch iffy about signing on the live-in at a salary of some 46 grand (a similar amount to that which the boy Jordan will no longer be getting). Think what you like about former president Bauzá, but he pretty much stuck to his ethical code guns: hints of iffiness and the root cause of it required being shown the door. Which is what Carlos had to do, if only from the door of the tourism ministry.

We were supposedly going to be enjoying a new era of politics in which there would be no sleaze, no favouritism and lots of transparency. Bauzá, the way things have been going, was rather better at all this than the new-age fellow travellers of the trinity that comprises the Armengol regime. 

Biel Barceló, the vice-president but not a member of Armengol's PSOE, has admitted that there have been some "errors" with appointments of advisors and senior officials, and he specifically referred to the husband affair at IB-Salut. He had thought the appointment slightly odd. Seemingly, according to Biel, it wasn't the missus who got Juli Fuster the job at the health service, but Armengol. As has been said consistently, Fuster is eminently qualified for the post, but this matters less than perception. She must surely have known that the Fuster fuss would kick off. In which case, if she was intent on him becoming the health service's director, then it might have been wise to have appointed someone else as health minister: Vicenç Thomas, for example, who, in addition to being a qualified doctor, was health minister from 2007 to 2011. But then, as we now know, Vicenç has his own slight embarrassment.

Apart from allegations of nepotism and favouritism, why are all the various officials and advisors needed? In the case of Fuster, it's clear. The health service does need someone to run it, and there are various other organisations which likewise require head honchos. For the most part, however, the appointments are political: new government, new directors. There are exceptions to the rule, Pedro Homar at the Palma 365 Foundation is one, but it is understandable that there should be this turnover. New government means new and different policies and those who are sympathetic to them.

But what about all the advisors? What actually do they do? Patricia Gómez, the health minister, had to explain why the unqualified Jordan Thomas was given the post he has now resigned from. The fact that he knows how social media work was a pretty lame justification. At least we were privy though to what his post entailed, which is more than can be said for the advisors knocking around at the Council of Mallorca, an institution bedevilled in the past by all sorts of insinuation but which, under the new president, Miquel Ensenyat, appeared destined to become a beacon of transparency. So what's gone wrong?

Manel Carmona, the leader of the Esquerra Unida (United Left), has had a right old go at the 26 advisors taken on by political parties at the Council, seven of them by Podemos, a party which had previously made a virtue of highlighting advisory excess. Carmona might be accused of sour grapes, given that he, through the tie-up with Guanyem, was squeezed to such an extent by Podemos and the rest of the left that he ended up with nothing after the elections, but he surely has a point when he says that nothing is known about the qualifications or roles of these advisors. Ensenyat needs to address the issue urgently, while Podemos, which has been vociferously sounding off about other appointments and demanding its say in them, might well take a look at itself. This is meant to be a new political age. Or has this already been forgotten?