When commenting on his massive CIA novel, ‘Harlot’s Ghost’, Norman Mailer once remarked: “It is a fictional CIA and its only real existence is in my mind…If I have an argument to make then, on grounds of verisimilitude I will claim that my imaginative CIA is as real or more real than nearly all the lived-in ones.”

This typically confident Mailerian claim came to mind recently when I read ‘Patria’, Fernando Aramburu’s novel about two families affected by Eta’s terrorist violence in the Basque Country. There are so many different experiences of Euskadi’s decades of violence, how do you go about writing a novel based on them?

Aramburu’s approach was to write a 600-page, multi-viewpoint story which leaps around chronologically and seeks to represent those on both ‘sides’ of the Basque conflict. The narrative centrepiece is Eta’s murder of el Txato, a businessman whom the terrorist group has harassed for months, above all with threatening graffiti, as punishment for not paying them extortion fees. His death is revealed early on in the novel and its details gradually emerge as the incident is revisited again and again.

But it is the emotional and social fallout from this death that interest Aramburu, with the members of el Txato’s family all dealing with the loss in different ways. After a while, his widow, Bittori, starts spending more time back in the village where the crime took place, unsettling her former neighbours who are in thrall to Eta’s silent tyranny. Their son, Xabier, is overwhelmed by the death which compromises his life and happiness for years afterwards. Xabier’s sister, Nerea, meanwhile, does everything she can to avoid facing up to the fact her father has been murdered.

Yet ‘Patria’ also tells the story of a family from the other side of the divide. Miren and Joxian are a couple who were once close friends of the murdered man and his wife, but as soon as Eta starts to threaten el Txato, the relationship starts to cool until it is utterly broken by the murder. Miren becomes a convert to Eta’s cause, her conviction hardened by the fact that her son, Joxe Mari, has joined “the armed struggle” (and may have even played a part in el Txato’s death). Gorka, her bookish other son, tries to break free of the gravitational pull of Eta and its ideology, while her daughter, Arantxa, is disgusted by her brother’s involvement in the organisation.

Aramburu tells this story in a defiantly artless prose. Early on, a bus which has been set on fire by pro-Eta activists is described as “burning stoically” in the middle of the street. The phrase stands out partly because it works so well, but also because the author rarely employs such ambitiously precise imagery again over the following 550 pages. In fact, in one of several curious literary tics, he often seems so caught between two or more possible adjectives, nouns or verbs that he uses both or all, separating them with a slash and allowing the reader to decide which is the more appropriate. (“She listened and understood everything, and she remembered everything and wanted to speak/answer/protest/ask for something and she couldn’t.”) Often, a character’s voice fleetingly inhabits the third-person narration, sometimes convincingly but other times less so, before relinquishing it again.

While Aramburu’s use of language rarely captivates, his burning preoccupation is thematic: the absurdity of the years of violence, how they divided families, destroyed friendships and cowed many Basques into a labyrinth of hypocrisy. The dilemma el Txato faces once he becomes a target of Eta’s harassment, for no other reason than that he has a successful business, is terrifying. Not only is his life in danger but his friends and neighbours prefer to ostracise him rather than stand by him. It should be hard to believe that Bittori, the wife of a victim of terrorism, is virtually driven out of the town after her husband’s death, with the oleaginous local priest encouraging her to leave. But, sadly, that particular plot development passes Mailer’s verisimilitude test.

Similarly, Joxe Mari’s experiences as a young etarra are often evoked with cinematic clarity. On joining the group as a 19-year-old, he enters a world of safe houses, boredom, restlessness and rigid hierarchy. One of the novel’s most successful moments is when, after days of exhausting worry about being arrested, the police finally break into his flat.

But such action plays a relatively small part in ‘Patria’, which is dominated instead by family and small-town intrigue, and this tends to lack any such tension. Despite all the detail and baggage provided by Aramburu, there seems to be a vacuum at the heart of the novel where characters’ motivation ought to be. This is a major problem, for example, when it comes to Miren. Such an unremittingly caustic and dogmatic character needs some substance so that she can exist as a human rather than a mere hateful caricature. But we never see what lies beyond her awful façade nor what drives her hypocrisy and political extremism, beyond the fact her son is an etarra.

“Between that tea in the café on the Avenida and the next one in the churrería in the old town, my friend Miren changed,” Bittori explains, early on. “Suddenly she was another person. In a word, she had taken the side of her son….Until then, Miren had shown absolutely no interest in politics.”

Miren’s ideological transformation gets no more explanation or illustration than that. Nor do we get any understanding of how Joxe Mari became radicalised. When he or any of the other abertzale characters discuss their political ideas, they tend to sound like brainwashed half-wits, giving the novel a lop-sided feel, despite Aramburu’s apparent intention of providing a more rounded perspective.

I am fully aware that such reservations put me in a minority. ‘Patria’ has scooped a number of Spanish literary prizes and critics have heaped praise on it, with Mario Vargas Llosa comparing Aramburu to Joseph Conrad and André Malraux. A television series is now on the way (perhaps fittingly, given that the novel’s multi-perspective structure and bite-sized chapters seem almost custom-made for small-screen treatment). Yet I can’t help feeling that its success is due more to its politics – which is tilted firmly in favour of Eta’s victims and against Basque nationalism – and those of its cheerleaders than to literary merit. The story of both sides of the Basque conflict could make an extraordinary novel. One day, perhaps, someone will write it.

‘Patria’ by Fernando Aramburu is published in Spanish by Tusquets and in English as ‘Homeland’ by Picador.

I have known Mateo since he was born. Now a bass-playing, Beatles-loving, comic-reading, basketball-playing 16-year-old, you could not meet a more charming teen. Recently, he underwent a six-hour operation to help improve his balance and mobility, which have been affected by cerebral palsy, and having come through his op with flying colours and world-class positivity, he has been updating his brilliant blog, which I recommend you visit: http://meandmybatec.blogspot.com/

Mateo is currently missing several weeks of school as he recovers from the operation. But November 27 will be a big date as he will have his heavy plaster replaced with something lighter.

Meanwhile, make sure you check out Mateo’s inspirational Beatles playlist – it seems to be working for him.

Like moths to the light, we journalists tend to get drawn towards the dramatic. In the case of politics that can mean dwelling on the extremes: the colourful, the freaky, the radicals. But there are also, of course, characters and opinions that are less eye-catching yet equally important.

Catalonia’s on-going crisis has been so relentlessly divisive that it’s easy to forget that there are plenty of people caught in the middle. They may or may not favour independence, but either way they do not fall into the Manichean confrontation which has made the “Catalan debate” so poisonous.

A Catalan friend of mine describes himself as one of those “in the middle”. He is not an independentista, but he can sympathise with the independence movement’s grievances. His unionism, meanwhile, is a long way from that on display in the form of the Spanish flags hanging from balconies and car rear-view mirrors in so many parts of the country.

October 1^st, which has become such a significant date in the political calendar, brings back painful memories for him of the events of 2017.

“October 1^st was tough for me,” he says. “I was against the holding of the referendum, [but] when I saw the police charging I went down to the voting station which was next to my home to give a hug to my neighbours who were terrified.”

“I’m totally against the police action and it seems unthinkable that the interior minister didn’t resign that same morning.”

But he is also critical of the referendum itself, because he believes it was based on Catalan politicians taking their voters “for a ride”:

“I distinguish between the pro-independence base, the people who believed in the [vote], and the independence leaders, who were toying with those people, they toyed with their feelings and they have left my country in a shameful situation. Catalonia is going to take years, or even decades, to recover a degree of normality…Catalonia was okay before because there was a degree of consensus: ‘We’re all different but we all accept each other as Catalans’. But now, these people have divided Catalonia into those ‘who are Catalan, who are pro-independence, and the others, who aren’t pro-independence and we don’t really know if they are Catalans.’ We’ve thrown away years of work uniting Catalan society.”

The Catalan issue, he says, has had an impact on him socially. There are old friends whom he no longer sees, not because they have fought over the independence issue but because they know that they will disagree if the subject comes up. His own family, including his in-laws, he says, are a mixture of lifelong independentistas, “neo-independentistas” and “totally anti-independentistas”.

 “I’ve been at some family meals where somebody ended up banging the table and saying ‘that’s enough – we’re not talking about this any more, okay?’”

He adds: “The problem is, admitting that [social] division means breaking with the idea that the process is nice and tolerant. It’s also linked to the issue of violence…I would say there is no violence, although actually there’s no explicit violence. But there is an incredible latent tension.”

Ciudadanos, he believes has been gleefully contributing to that tension and he describes Albert Rivera’s party as “the worst thing to happen to this country” for years. He then makes a statement which, while rather obvious to many, will no doubt horrify hardliners on both sides.

“Ciudadanos and the [radical] independentistas are the same, they’re the same thing,” he says. “One on one side, the other on the other side – exactly the same. They both feed off all this, they live off confrontation.”

“The procés proposes something…it says: ‘In Catalonia there are two sides, so you have to decide: either the Francoist, fascist, hyper-Spanish and god-knows-what-else side, or the side of democracy, the smiles and self-determination’. And then there’s a group on the other side – Tabarnia and all that mob, who say: ‘Finally, it was about time, there are two sides in Catalonia – those who speak Catalan, who are nationalist, pro-independence, intolerant fascists and then there are those of us who are democratic Castilians who have always been under the boot of the Catalan bastards’.”

He says: “Both visions are complementary and both are false. In Catalonia there aren’t just two sides, [but] the two extremes are the ones who speak the most. Those of us in the middle are the ones who speak out the least.”

It has been a strange spectacle watching the optimism generated by Pedro Sánchez’s general election victory at the end of April turn sour. The stop-start slow-mo negotiations between the Socialist Party and Unidas Podemos to form a new government never really seemed to get beyond second gear. Instead, they have become a marathon blame-game full of briefing, counter-briefing and poisonous soundbites. Rather than asking whether they will be able to reach an agreement by the September 23^rd deadline, we have more frequently started to wonder: whose fault is it that they can’t?

The answer to that is far from straightforward, despite what partisans on each side claim. Sánchez’s declared refusal to allow Pablo Iglesias in his cabinet was key, lending a baffling note of personal enmity to negotiations, as well as suggesting that the acting prime minister feared being eclipsed by the Podemos leader’s charisma. Iglesias’s counter-proposal ahead of the failed July investiture, of having an array of ministries under his party’s control, looked like overreach yet seemed to bring the possibility of a two-party coalition into play. He is understandably exasperated, therefore, by Sánchez’s decision since the summer investiture vote to insist once again on forming a minority government.

The last year has given us a new incarnation of Sánchez. On his arrival on the political front line he was a felipista moderate, under the yoke of the Socialist party machine, blandly grinning his way through two election defeats. Then his “no means no” stance against Mariano Rajoy in 2016 saw him transformed into a back-to-the-roots leftie, as he was first ousted by his own party before making a Lazarus-like comeback and pledging a closer relationship with Podemos.

Sánchez 3.0, who has been in action since taking office via a daring parliamentary manoeuvre in June 2018, is different again. Inevitably constrained by the dilemmas of the top job he has struggled to deliver on promises and gestures, whether it be trying to calm the Catalan crisis long enough to seek a solution, presenting a coherent immigration policy after taking in the Aquarius migrant boat, or overcoming legal obstacles to the exhumation of Franco.

Despite the pressures of office, Sánchez retains his cool, unruffled demeanour – but surely something more urgent was required over these summer months. At times he has seemed so relaxed about engaging in talks with Podemos and other parties whose support he requires that he might as well have been wearing flip-flops.

As the constitutional clock has ticked down towards the deadline triggering new elections, the Socialists and Podemos have reinforced the age-old cliché about Spain’s left: that it will always find something to disagree over. Compare that to the country’s right, where Ciudadanos, which two years ago was still defining itself as a “social democratic” party, now merrily bins its scruples and teams up with the far right and the corruption-plagued Popular Party if it means getting a slice of power. Sánchez’s strategy may have been all along, as many suspect, to hold out for another election at which his party is expected to improve its share of seats. But Spain’s fragmented politics is so delicately balanced that it remains a gamble, giving the parties of the right a shot at redemption after their April defeat.

And so the prospect of a new, harmonious, leftist government has mirrored the fate of a blow-up holiday unicorn. Once gleaming and buoyant in the late-spring sun, the air has gradually hissed out and now, at summer’s end, it is drifting in the swimming pool, lifeless and floppy.

It could be that a last-minute deal is secured, giving Spain a badly needed government as it heads into an autumn of turmoil that promises Catalan unrest, further Brexit mayhem and, possibly, an economic downturn. But don’t assume that common sense and national interest will overcome petty hostilities, personal rivalries or hubristic strategies.

Last October, I joined a group of foreign journalists for an off-the-record meeting with Ciudadanos party leader Albert Rivera. We’d had plenty of these kinds of events with leading politicians before, and several with him, but on this occasion he seemed different to the man I remembered. He seemed more hurried and less at ease. What’s more, he no longer spoke with evangelical zeal about political regeneration and the battle against corruption. Instead, he spent much of the time talking, in highly derogatory terms, about Pedro Sánchez who had become prime minister a few months earlier. The Socialist leader, he told us again and again, had sold out to Catalan separatism.

In 2016, Rivera and Sánchez had been photographed shaking hands as they closed an agreement on a raft of proposals which they presented as the platform for a governing partnership. In the end, their accord, whose proposals broadly occupied the centre ground, didn’t receive the necessary parliamentary support, so it became just another footnote in Spanish political history. But the ferocity with which Rivera attacked his erstwhile partner two years later was striking – as if he was annoyed with himself for having once engaged with Sánchez. Sitting next to him at that press meeting I felt the full blast of his peevishness.

Early last year I wrote about Rivera and his exploitation of the Catalan crisis for electoral benefit and how it was time for him and Ciudadanos to confirm that, having shed their original social democrat values, they were now a party of the right. But even now, getting them to admit where they are on the political spectrum remains about as easy as nailing gazpacho to the wall.

Ciudadanos continue to insist they are “liberal” and “centrist”. That’s despite a refusal to support the centre-left Socialists in the national parliament and the fact that they see the conservative Popular Party (PP) as a “priority ally”. The claims of occupying the centre ground are also contradicted by a willingness to form local administrations with the far-right Vox party in Andalusia and Madrid.

For some former Rivera allies all of this has been too much. The former French prime minister Manuel Valls, who seemed such a coup when he agreed to run for mayor of Barcelona with the backing of Ciudadanos several months ago, has condemned the party’s dealings with Vox. Rivera then decided to split with Valls altogether after he supported the leftist Ada Colau as mayor. “There’s nothing worse than Ada Colau,” tweeted Ciudadanos spokesman Juan Carlos Girauta.

Such a hard line is clearly bothering at least some in the party. Francesc de Carreras, a co-founder of Ciudadanos, wrote a strongly worded letter to Rivera in El País recently, accusing him of betraying the party’s principles and of behaving like “a petulant teenager” due to his refusal to consider supporting a new Sánchez government.

The dalliance with Vox, meanwhile, has been a gift to the independence movement, which has long cast Rivera and his party as neo-Francoists merrily jack-booting their way into Spain’s institutions while being cheered on by angry unionist hordes. Yet, as De Carreras suggested, the party’s rightward lurch seems to be driven not so much by sinister ideology as by what Gerardo Tecé calls “National-Opportunism”. Tecé points out that the party that pledged to clean up Spanish politics made its début in a regional government in 2015 by propping up the Socialist administration in Andalusia, widely regarded as one of the most corruption-riddled of the modern era; it then continued its regenerative crusade by returning Mariano Rajoy to power in 2016 – before his government was ousted due to a torrent of corruption scandals.

Now that the territorial issue is apparently Ciudadanos’s single main concern, similar qualms arise. If the party is so keen for Sánchez not to rely on separatists to form a new national government, why doesn’t it offer him its votes, or at least an abstention? Because Sánchez is already in cahoots with them, Rivera will reply – a conspiracy theory which has no basis in fact. And if Ciudadanos is so determined for Barcelona not to fall into the hands of separatists why did it punish Valls, who ensured it did not?

This kind of anger-charged politics reminds me of Rosa Díez and her now all but defunct UPyD party. A disgruntled Socialist with strident unionist views, Díez once seemed poised to challenge the existing party duopoly. Yet her politics increasingly seemed to be driven by what she hated in others rather than a positive vision for Spain. Now marginalised from mainstream politics, she is just another ranty presence on Twitter.

Rivera, of course, has made a bigger impact than Díez, with 57 seats in parliament. But, as he fiddles with his Spanish-flag wristband and launches yet another tirade at the Catalan government while ruling out pacts with Podemos, the Socialists or nationalists, he looks like a bridge-burner rather than the bridge-builder he once promised to be.

It’s tempting to wonder if Rivera’s fury might stem from the fact that, deep down, he feels that he, not Sánchez, should be the one currently trying to form a new government. In the general election Ciudadanos performed well, yet still could not beat the PP, even when it had suffered a disastrous defeat. With those disappointing results from the 2015 and 2016 general elections under his belt, Rivera must be wondering what he has to do to break into the top two. His post-election insistence that he, not Pablo Casado, is leader of the opposition betrayed his frustration at coming so near to pulling off a major upset.

Alexei Sayle once said: “Anyone who uses the word ‘workshop’ in anything other than a light-industrial capacity is a wanker.” It’s a harsh maxim, but he was making a good point. Words matter and being honest with the words you use matters, especially in the political sphere. Yet amid the breathlessness of Spain’s recent crises and election campaigns, respect for language has been gleefully buried. Spanish nationalists are not nationalists, they’re “patriots”; Catalan nationalists are not nationalists, they’re “democrats”; parties don’t do pacts with the far-right, they form governments “a la andaluza”. And Ciudadanos, following this linguistic mendacity, are moderate, centrist liberals.

One of the top headlines on El País’s website earlier this week read: “The Spanish black legend spread by Hollywood”. The article beneath reported how the Defence Ministry has given an award to historian Esteban Vicente Boisseau for a book he has published on how Spain’s presence in the Americas between the 16^th and 19^th centuries has been distorted by British and US cinema over the decades.

I have not read the book, although El País went into some detail regarding its content, explaining how Boisseau sees a deliberate, long-standing attempt by British and American filmmakers to smear Spain’s past. Given that the article quite clearly takes the historian’s side on the matter, offering a strident synopsis of the book, reading Boisseau’s work itself now feels rather redundant.

“Without a doubt, the African-American population would find it unacceptable if in Disney theme parks there were an attraction, to the sound of happy music, that showed Africans being captured by pirates,” Boisseau notes, in a passage quoted in the article that lambasts the depiction of Spaniards in such places.

Then, apparently with a straight face, the author draws on a famous film franchise that he believes is laced with anti-Spanish slander: “The message conveyed in Pirates of the Caribbean is that robbing, torturing and killing Spaniards, selling, buying and abusing Hispanic women and looting are not only justified but rather that they are happy events, a true bit of fun.”

It’s hard to know which is more troubling: Boisseau’s argument, El País’s willingness to recycle it without critical comment, or a government ministry’s decision to reward the product of such a provincial mindset.

To return to the author’s point: no, I’m sure African-Americans might find it unacceptable to see themselves depicted being merrily enslaved in Disney World. But that’s because they suffered hundreds of years of slavery. Spaniards didn’t. Meanwhile, to cite Pirates of the Caribbean as evidence of a plot against Spain is surely either part of a very elaborate, book-length joke, or something more worrying.

A catalogue of further dastardly Anglo-Saxon celluloid-shaped attacks on Spain’s proud history follows in the article, including the bloated Gérard Depardieu vehicle 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Disney’s animated Pocahontas, or, going much further back, Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (which, rather thoughtlessly, was made in the year 1898).

What do we make of such historical paranoia? I have written at some length about how sensitive Spain, or at least many Spaniards, have become about their international image over the last couple years, mainly as a response to the Catalan crisis. But this silliness over history – attempting to present a prosperous, developed member of the EU as the victim of a weird conspiracy – raises the bar. The petty comparisons with the sins of other countries made by Boisseau/El País – Henry VIII killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition, they protest – make it worse. It’s the Y tú más mentality used by discredited politicians in the hope that their opponents’ scandals will eclipse their own and now it is seeping into prize-winning academia.

When Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed recently that Spain should apologise for abuses committed during its conquest of Latin America, the vitriolic backlash that followed seemed to be fuelled by this recent trend of national defensiveness.

In its current mood, Spain is not going to consider López Obrador’s request and, from a country where it’s hard to look up without seeing a national flag, perhaps that is asking too much. But a more informed, less emotionally charged understanding of the conquest of the Americas can only be a good thing. How many people, for instance, are aware that disease, rather than military might, was the most deadly factor in overwhelming the Aztecs, Incas and Native Americans?

Boisseau’s Jack Sparrow-fixation is only one of many ways in which history can be misread or crowbarred into a particular worldview. Last weekend, members of the Spanish and Catalan governments were among those who gathered at Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where several thousand Spaniards died at the hands of the Nazis. In a speech paying tribute to the victims, Gemma Domènech, head of the Catalan government’s historical memory department, cited the “political prisoners” being held in Spain, in reference to the nine independence leaders who are in jail facing charges of rebellion. Spanish justice minister Dolores Delgado walked out in protest.

This is not the first time the Catalan independence movement has tried to frame its cause alongside some of the 20^th century’s most horrendous atrocities and noble campaigns. Apartheid-era South Africa, segregation in the United States and Gandhi’s anti-colonial movement have all been invoked by Catalan leaders in recent years, as their insistence on “internationalising” their cause has spilled over into misjudgement. Domènech’s insistence on mentioning the Catalan cause in the same breath as the victims of Mauthausen is surely a misstep even the most fervent independentista should blanch at. Not only does it show a poor grasp of history and a crass lack of taste, but her own cause (which, whatever injustices it may have suffered in recent years, has a death toll of zero) is belittled when placed next to the Holocaust.

It reminded me of a similar case from 2013 when Eva Durán, of the conservative unionist Popular Party (PP), made the mistake of comparing the trend of escraches – gatherings of demonstrators outside the homes of politicians – with Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. For some, history revolves entirely around their own needs.

• 

The desperation of migrants attempting to reach their dreamed-of destination has become a familiar sight on our TV and computer screens, its impact inevitably diluted by the 24-hours cycle. But on a recent trip to Spain’s North African city of Ceuta, I was reminded of the lengths to which many migrants will go in order to cross borders.

Several hundred Moroccan teenage boys are in Ceuta and its sister city, Melilla, hoping to cross the Mediterranean and reach the Spanish mainland. Many of them are living in shelters run by local authorities, but there are dozens who prefer to sleep rough near the port areas of the cities, scrounging food where they can. In Ceuta, they sleep in abandoned cars or under wooden pallets and most days they scale the wall surrounding the port car park and attempt to stow away on vehicles waiting to board the ferries. Sometimes they hide in the back of lorries or trucks carrying goods, other times they cling to the underside of these vehicles. The success rate appears to be low. I spoke to boys who had tried to stow away almost every single day for the last couple of months, only to be caught by the civil guard each time.

But the occasional success story keeps their hopes up. The week before I was there, a 13-year-old boy had managed to get across to the Spanish mainland, having hidden away in a ferry.

Ceuta may be part of Spain, but it’s not part of the Schengen space, so reaching it does not mean a migrant is automatically able to travel anywhere in the EU. Also, it’s a relatively small city, where professional and study opportunities for migrants, particularly of Moroccan origin, are limited. As one boy told me, he only feels “twenty percent” in Spain when in Ceuta.

With elections looming, the presence of these boys in both Ceuta and Melilla has become a political issue. Being under the age of 18 protects them from being repatriated, a norm which has been debated recently as some parties pressure for them to be treated as adults. They even have their own acronym – MENA, or menores extranjeros no acompañados.

None of which is to suggest that this is an easy phenomenon to resolve. These teenagers almost always leave home with the blessing of their families, despite the obvious risks they run. Recently, a man was found guilty of sexually abusing Moroccan migrant children in Melilla, something which is reportedly commonplace. And in February, a 15-year-old boy paid the ultimate price for pursuing his dreams: he was crushed to death by the lorry he was trying to hide under in Ceuta’s port.

• 

In the spring of 2015, El Mundo’s Asia correspondent David Jiménez was unveiled as the newspaper’s new editor. A year and 366 editions of the paper later, he was sacked.

Jiménez recounts his eventful tenure in a newly published book, El Director (“The Editor”). Having gone on sale this week it has already sparked a storm, not just among Jiménez’s former colleagues, but in the Spanish media world in general, with several journalists accusing him of taking revenge on his former employer or peddling gossip. In the Spanish media, one journalist told me, “firemen don’t stand on each other’s hoses.” There’s a feeling that, in being so explicit about his experience, he has broken a longstanding omertá.

One of the problems for Jiménez’s critics is that El Director is such a good read, with a lightness of touch and a tone that ranges from bemusement to barely concealed fury. From the start, he is a fish out of water. A journalist who had spent most of the previous two decades living abroad, having little direct contact with the workings of El Mundo or the world of the Spanish elite, is suddenly chosen for the Big Job. He follows in the footsteps of long-time editor and media legend Pedro J. Ramírez and his successor, Casimiro García-Abadillo, who held the post for just over a year.

The brief seems to be clear: to stop the paper’s disastrous decline in sales, make it a competitive online presence and restore its journalistic reputation. Jiménez envisages a major overhaul, led, understandably by an emphasis on developing the paper’s digital performance. But from the very start he faces resistance. Some of it is from luddite or jealous colleagues, but a more formidable foe is upstairs from him, where El Mundo’s executives pace the corridors and fret over whether the paper is doing enough to grease the wheels of power.

Despite employing many dedicated professionals, El Mundo, Jiménez tells us, is a hotbed of hypocrisy, cowardice and back-stabbing. All these attributes come together in the sinister figure of El Cardenal (one of many characters in the book whose real name is replaced by a nickname), an executive who constantly pressures Jiménez to bury news that will hurt the Partido Popular (PP) or the country’s corporate giants. “Power had stopped fearing the media and now it was the media who feared power,” he writes early on, setting the melancholic tone for a story which we know isn’t going to end well.

However, there are lighter moments. Former Madrid mayor Ana Botella confuses Jiménez with a prize-winning bullfighter at one point, and his account of desperately trying to get his children to shut up in the back of the car when prime minister Mariano Rajoy is calling him on the phone is priceless. And Spain’s élite don’t always come off badly. On a train journey back from Huesca, he receives an unexpected phone call from King Felipe and Queen Letizia, who both apologise after some compromising leaked texts had shown her calling one of El Mundo’s supplements “shit”.

And yet, the overall impression El Director gives is not just that of a media industry that is in economic decline, but one which has utterly lost its ethical bearings. While Jiménez sees more and more evidence of corporate pressures compromising the media’s performance, he also discovers that media organisations are blackmailing companies into buying advertising.

“The wall separating propaganda from information, the press release from news and advertising from journalism had collapsed,” he writes. “Buying a journalist was not possible in Spain, but, as the Afghan saying about corruption goes: you could talk about hiring one.”

Jiménez sees journalists-for-hire all around him. Many are on tertulias – radio and TV panel discussions – where participants are often chosen for their outlandish personalities and because they fill an ideological quota, even receiving instructions from political parties before appearing. (Jiménez has a particular axe to grind against the tertulias – on election night in 2015 he spots one of his star reporters holding forth on a television panel when she is supposed to be in the newsroom covering the result.)

Any insider account of El Mundo has to at least touch on how the paper handled the events and fallout of March 11, 2004, when a terrorist attack killed 191 people in Madrid, and Jiménez obliges. The paper’s coverage remains a huge blemish on its reputation: Ramírez, who as editor would frequently play paddle with then-prime minister José María Aznar, accepted the government’s erroneous line that ETA, rather than jihadists, had carried out the bombing. When it became apparent that ETA had played no role in the attack, El Mundo continued to insist on the Aznar theory, for years casting doubt on the official investigation, thus convincing many Spaniards that there had been a cover-up.

I had always wondered what the journalists under Ramírez had thought of all this and whether it was simply a bubble mentality. But Jiménez, who at the time was in another country, suggests that few agreed with the ETA theory. “It was difficult to find anyone in the newsroom who thought that what we were doing made any sense,” he writes, “but it was even more difficult to find someone who had the guts to tell the editor that.” Those who did dissent, he reveals, were “purged”.  Meanwhile, “Those who bought into the editor’s fantasies with the most enthusiasm were promoted.”

Ramírez, who was El Mundo editor for most of Jiménez’s time at the paper, is portrayed as a flawed, egomaniacal autocrat. Utterly driven by the search for the big headline and exclusive, he is blessed with boldness and a rare journalistic instinct, yet appears to have few scruples, whether selling the March 11 lie, plagiarising a scoop from El País without attribution, or simply reducing journalists to tears with an angry tirade.

But while Jiménez’s book casts light on the Spanish media and one newspaper in particular, it also has plenty to say about the state of modern Spain in general, a country whose political and economic institutions have taken a pasting in recent years, as the cosiness between media, business and politics has reached a peak. He writes:

“[Rajoy] had as much intention of overhauling politics as El Cardenal had of overhauling journalism or [Telefónica CEO] César Alierta had of overhauling business. The three of them were part of the chain of national mediocrity which began at school, where critical thinking was viewed with mistrust and popularity was earned by pushing people around in the playground; it continued in the office, where promotions were reserved for those who were submissive and too much initiative is seen as a threat; it continued in the media newsrooms, where a privileged caste had become powerful by stepping on the enthusiasm of journalists with more talent than themselves; it turned gangrenous in public institutions, where thousands of jobs were doled out according to which side you were on, regardless of merit; and it continued up to the final rung of the ladder, where a prime minister who was plagued by corruption could aspire to re-election, confident of the fact that several million Spaniards would vote for him with the blind loyalty of the fans of a football team.”

Jiménez is frustrated at every turn by those who want to keep this rotten media-business-politics triumvirate in place. The experience was clearly a painful one for him and his account of it is drawing a fierce backlash from some quarters. “We journalists like to tell a good story,” he writes, “but not our own.” This is one story that needed to be told.

El Director, by David Jiménez, is published by Libros K.O.