Triumph of English

Trevor @ Saturday April 21st 2007 10:04

Fabio Montermini’s excellent granny, who says in dialect (no army or navy in sight), “I can’t speak dialect and never have,” reminded me of a hilarious moment the other night during a meet-the-people TV show featuring the not so excellent Mariano Rajoy, struggling leader of the allegedly non-nationalist Partido Popular. Why, asked some poor mum from the Balearics, is it impossible for my children to use Spanish at school when the regional government is run by your party? “Ah,” cried Rajoy with the air of a salmonella butcher, “let’s not worry too much about that but rather concentrate on the future, when everyone will speak English.” I might take him seriously if I believed he could repeat that in English, and then with rather more sophistication than demonstrated by his predecessor, the much parodied JosĂ© Maria Aznar.

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