It’s that man again

Yes, he’s back in the news, that for­mer Span­ish king who ab­di­cated in 2014 (and was im­me­di­ately blessed with the legally un­prece­dented, quickly in­vented title ‘King emer­i­tus’, prob­a­bly to make him sound like he was still regal) and in 2020 went into gilded exile in a ho­mo­pho­bic, misog­y­nis­tic dic­ta­tor­ship called the United Arab Emi­rates.

His Majesty skedad­dled be­cause he was sus­pected of skim­ming off com­mis­sions to the al­leged tune of 88 mil­lion euros from Saudi Ara­bia for hav­ing fa­cil­i­tated the con­struc­tion of a Span­ish-built high speed rail net­work in that coun­try; and of some tax dodg­ing of con­se­quence; and of hav­ing made an ex­trav­a­gantly un­ac­cept­able use of his royal credit cards. There was also the mat­ter of his 65 mil­lion euro ‘gift’ to Corinna Larsen, his lover since 2004, and who has now taken the for­mer di­rec­tor of the Span­ish In­tel­li­gence Ser­vices and Juan Car­los him­self to court (in Eng­land) for hav­ing been threat­ened by them with dire con­se­quences should she spill the beans con­cern­ing her long af­fair with Spain’s sav­iour of democ­racy. And now, de­spite hav­ing been ac­cused of money laun­der­ing, tax avoid­ance, adul­tery, and being an all-round scam artist, Juan Car­los has de­cided he wants to come back to the coun­try of his birth this year (well, more or less: he was born in Rome); a re­turn which would cause un­bear­able em­bar­rass­ment to his son (the cur­rent sov­er­eign) and the Span­ish Prime Min­is­ter and pos­si­bly to the en­tire Span­ish po­lit­i­cal class, as well as alien­at­ing that large por­tion of the Cata­lan pub­lic (as­sum­ing they could be alien­ated any more than they al­ready are) who do not recog­nise the Span­ish monar­chy and would pre­fer to live in an in­de­pen­dent re­pub­lic.

Yet no sooner had the ru­mour mill re­gard­ing Juan Car­los’s home­com­ing started to turn, when an­other skele­ton in his spa­cious cup­board stepped into the light of day. The Cata­lan jour­nal­ist An­dreu Barnils neatly summed up the sit­u­a­tion at the end of last year: be­tween 1976 and 1994, the then crowned head had a lengthy re­la­tion­ship with an ac­tress whose stage name, oddly enough, is Bárbara Rey. In her day Ms Rey was quite a celebrity, star­ring in 43 films and around 20 stage shows. She and her monarch held their trysts in a chalet in a town near Madrid, where Rey se­cretly filmed and recorded him; these tapes not only show the Com­man­der in Chief of the Span­ish Armed Forces mak­ing whoopee, they also con­tain com­ments of his on the pri­vate life of his wife - aka the Queen - and the rev­e­la­tion of var­i­ous state se­crets, in­clud­ing the still pub­licly undis­closed in­side story of the 1981 coup d’état.

So when the King gave Ms Rey the big E in 1994, she threat­ened to re­lease these tapes un­less she re­ceived ample com­pen­sa­tion. She even­tu­ally ob­tained four mil­lion dol­lars and sev­eral con­tracts for pro­grammes on pub­lic tele­vi­sion, in­clud­ing a cook­ery se­ries on Va­len­cian TV (al­though she didn’t know how to speak Va­len­cian - a vari­ant of Cata­lan - or cook). (The ex­cerpts of this pro­gramme on YouTube are worth their weight in tax­payer’s money: a po-faced Ms Rey goes through the mo­tions of prepar­ing a tatty-look­ing piece of fish ac­com­pa­nied by three mys­te­ri­ous yel­low­ish blobs).

She is cur­rently being in­ves­ti­gated in the Span­ish sen­ate for hav­ing il­le­gally re­ceived pub­lic funds to stop her black­mail­ing her liege lord. This month, she was due to be grilled in the Sen­ate to clar­ify just ex­actly where her dol­lars and her TV con­tracts came from and why. The party in power, the PSOE, ve­toed her ap­pear­ance. You can’t help but get the im­pres­sion that Span­ish politi­cians - of what­ever colour they be - fear that the down­fall of even a for­mer King could trig­ger off a na­tional cat­a­stro­phe. After all - to para­phrase the title of Chinua Achebe’s mas­terly novel - sooner or later, king­doms fall apart.