Breakfast With Francina

The breakfast meeting is, one is inclined to suspect, a device to convey to the citizens that politicians are ultra-hard-working. We never stop. That's the sort of message. Never stop to have a hearty breakfast, that's for sure. And so the full English wasn't on the menu when Francina met Pedro in Madrid for their breakfasting chat, followed swiftly by their breakfasting news conference (one much to the annoyance, one imagines, of the gathered and hungover members of the media). Instead, Francina could have taken the opportunity to promote Mallorcan products. Off she would have gone on the low-cost hop with her ensaimada in its box: Mallorcan pastry, as endorsed by the president.

Of course it was a Balearic promotional drive insofar as Francina was there to promote the desperate need for her and her political chums to manage the airports and also to inform the assembled and bored media how marvellously well her government of change in the Balearics is working. So marvellously well that two components thereof - the Més-ites and the Podemistas - have melded to create Podemés and squeeze PSOE even more on 26-J. However, such minor detail should not and did not get in the way of the Balearics being championed as the model for the whole of Spain to follow in government: unworkable, in other words.

Pedro held the Balearics aloft as the template for "progressive politics" but having observed, only a couple of weeks previously, that Podemos represents the extreme left, it is as clear as a fine spring morning in Mallorca that such progressiveness excludes Podemos; at least where Pedro's concerned. Francina appears to look out and see only cloud: that created by the hodge-podge, fudge government that isn't entirely a government over which she presides. But Francina has not been cast as sweet and friendly for nothing. She does not categorise anyone as "extremist" or "radical". See no evil. They all have their own points of view and see how well these have been combining in the Balearics.

If only one could believe her, and it is evident that Pedro doesn't. His progressiveness still involves the other half of his Ant and Dec act, Al Rivera of the C's, who for some mysterious reason was in Venezuela. Had he gone there in search of money in a Podemos sort of a way? Quite the contrary. He was seemingly there to highlight the Venezuela-Podemos link.