Going out with a bang

PENSIONED-OFF police commissioner Jose Villarejo who apparently had a finger in every unsavoury Spanish pie, is remanded in prison awaiting trial for money laundering and criminal activities.
He secretly eavesdropped conversations that have embarrassed everyone from the former King to Cabinet ministers and he has made it known that three copies of the tapes are safely beyond reach outside Spain.
He has boasted in prison that he is preparing a traca final – the ground-moving sequence of big bangs that ends a fireworks display.
So if Villarejo is planning to go out with a bang, how many more public figures are already whimpering in private?
Whirlwind on the horizon
WHO would be Quim Torra?
Nominally regional president of Cataluña, he is a ventriloquist’s dummy for Carles Puigdemont, his predecessor who fled to Belgium following an inconclusive unilateral declaration of independence.
But remote-controlled Torra still has to maintain law and order for the 50 per cent of Catalans opposed to independence.
As expected, there was trouble on the first anniversary of the unauthorised October 1 independence referendum when the Committees for the Defence of the Republic (CDR), urged by Torra to “keep up the pressure”, responded by blocking roads, motorways and the AVE railway lines.
There’s only so much pressure that can be applied without breaking the law and even a committed separatist leader must draw the line when things get out of hand.
So the regional government had to call out the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra.
Not known for wearing kid gloves, they cooled down the protesters and charged energetically when hooded protesters tried to storm the regional parliament.
“They’re not October 1 people,” Puigdemont insisted afterwards.  Perhaps so, but a year ago Catalan separatists sowed the wind and the radicals will reap a whirlwind.
“Toto I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas,” Dorothy, herself a whirlwind victim, said in the Wizard of Oz.
How long before we hear Torra say, “Carles, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Cataluña”?
Getting priorities right
PARTIDO POPULAR politician Celia Villalobos was twice fined for not supporting Alberto Ruiz -allardon’s misogynist attempt at reforming Jose Luis Rodriguez’s Abortion Law.
In 2013 she failed to turn up to vote against a PSOE motion calling for Ruiz- Gallardon’s Bill to be withdrawn and in 2014 voted with the socialists in another attempt to halt it.
Other PP women privately agreed that unless they had the cash to go to France or the UK, women who needed a termination could once again be left to the mercies of backstreet butchers.
They kept quiet but Villalobos, put her money where her mouth was and had to shell out €1,300 in all, which was cheap at the price.
Not long afterwards she was in disgrace for playing Candy Crush on her iPad in the parliament chamber during a Mariano Rajoy speech.
And just recently she was seen in the parliament chamber, looking at clothes on internet websites while her co-MPs were tearing into Justice minister Dolores Delgado.
Respect, Celia.  You get your priorities right every time.
Gamekeeper-turned-poacher
EDUARDO ZAPLANA, ex-former mayor of Benidorm, ex-president of the Valencian Community, ex-government minister and ex-government spokesman, is currently imprisoned on remand, accused of money laundering, misappropriation of public funds and misconduct in public office.
To defend him he has engaged lawyer Daniel Campos, who belonged to the Public Prosecution department and specialised in corruption cases.
We’ve heard of a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, but what better defence in a court of law than a gamekeeper-turned-poacher?