West makes the wrong call

IF the West had done the unthinkable and backed El Assad and not the rebels in Syria their tanks would be there now, not Russia’s.

Nor would there be hundreds of thousands of refugees looking for a safe haven and Mariano Rajoy would not have the headache of providing for the homeless and destitute when there are already so many on his own patch.

Give it a try

FELIPE GONZALEZ, Joaquín Almunia, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba and Pedro Sanchez, PSOE leaders past and present, hope to promote the Tercera Via.

This the Third Way of dialogue and negotiation as a solution for the situation created by the Spanish government’s inability to listen to Cataluña and Cataluña’s inability to listen to the government. Churchill allegedly once said at a White House luncheon that “to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

Sixty-one years later Mariano Rajoy and Artur Mas could give that a try.

Charity cannot start at home, Rajoy knows it.

Paying a piper

PODEMOS ideologue Monedero bade farewell to the party’s upper reaches some months ago.

This coincided with proof that he was as creative with his personal accounting as any of the PP and PSOE politicians belonging to the ‘caste’ that he and the Podemos co-founders so despise.

No longer answerable to voters, Monedero evidently felt safe enough to compare Leopoldo Lopez, a critic of Venezuela’s current chaotic government who was recently jailed for 15 years, to an ETA terrorist.

Mondero’s previous closeness to Venezuela’s late president Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro is well known, hence his loyalty to an administration that gave him €425,150 under the old ‘consultancy’ catchall.