The King has flown...

The King has flown the coop! Literally.

Well, literally as far as flying is concerned. I understand he took a plane. He didn’t really live in a coop, but in a significantly more desirable residence, the Zarzuela palace on the outskirts of Madrid.

He wasn’t a real King any more. He abdicated in 2014 and became ‘emeritus King’. Some nasty scandals, involving an elephant shoot, a mistress, and a lot of unexplained millions, made it advisable for him to stand down.

The elephant hunt was in Botswana in 2012, when Spain was struggling with soaring unemployment. Junkets at 40,000 euros a head weren’t viewed favourably. Especially when the King’s expenses were being covered by a Saudi businessman.

Besides, the King wasn’t accompanied by his Queen, Sofia, but by Corinna Larsen. Let’s just call her a ‘close friend’.

Emeritus King and close friend

The business of the millions emerged later, and many of them came from Saudi too. For what hasn’t ever been made clear, but he built up 100 million US dollars in a Geneva bank account. He transferred 65 million euros to Corinna. So you can see how close a friend she was.

There were also delightful moment, including the transfer of banknotes to Switzerland in a briefcase. Straight out of the kind of clichéd international thriller series that you might only watch on a wet Sunday, if you don’t feel up to anything more demanding.

I ought to clarify that when I say he wasn’t a ‘real King’, I was using the word ‘real’ in the English sense. In Spanish, ‘real’ doesn’t really mean real, it means royal, which he really was once, but isn’t really any more. Following a royal cockup.

I hope that’s clear.

It amuses me that if you live long enough, you get to see practically everything. I never expected to witness the restoration of a monarchy. To me, restoring monarchies was something Europe gave up on a couple of centuries ago. But, in 1975, Spain put the royal family back on the throne. That meant crowning the King we’re talking about, Juan Carlos I.

Now that I live in Spain, I keep being surprised by how many things are ‘real’. You know, you don’t have a yacht club, you have a royal yacht club. You don’t have a Music Academy, you have a Royal Academy of Music. It’s like England, rather than most Latin nations, which are Republics.

Still, if the restoration of the Spanish monarchy struck me as an anachronism, at least the events that accompanied it were pretty impressive. The dictator Franco had made Juan Carlos heir to his power. That was the Franco who had seized power in a military uprising forty years earlier and consolidated it through bloody civil war and brutal repression.

Juan Carlos used Franco’s legal framework to take Franco’s system apart. Within three years, the Spanish people had voted by referendum to move to a parliamentary monarchy as democratic as any in Europe. The subsequent elections included parties that had been banned and hunted for decades, including the Communists.

The King had been under no obligation to take this road. Most historians agree that, though the popular pressure for democratisation might have been hard to resist, he did far more to ease the transition than one might have expected. He built himself an enviable reputation, so that even among Republicans, many would say, “I’m not a royalist, I’m a Juan-Carlist”.

There aren’t so many Juan-Carlists these days. No one has put it better than the ex-King himself: “anyone under the age of 40 will only remember me as the one with Corinna, with the elephant and with the briefcase”.

How the mighty are fallen.

Still, it’s exciting to witness not just the restoration of a monarchy, but now the flight into exile of a monarch. One more throwback to a distant past.

Juan Carlos is keen to stress that his isn’t a flight from justice. It’s true that, sadly, all those dodgy financial transactions have led to police investigations. Even Corinna, now ex-friend just as he’s the ex-King, may be facing up to four years in gaol for money laundering. Juan Carlos says he will make himself available to any enquiries into his affairs. His departure from Spain was just to cause no further embarrassment to his homeland, and to allow his son, now King Philip VI, to play his role more easily.

It’s not clear where Juan Carlos will end up. It seems that for now he’s gone to the Dominican Republic. A lovely irony for Republicans: a King abandons his monarchy to take refuge in a Republic. You couldn’t’ make it up.

Who knows where he’ll head next. He obviously has friends in Saudi, but it’s hard to imagine him going there. But, hey, who knows.

In any case, and this may not come as a surprise, it doesn’t seem that Queen Sofia will be joining him.

In England, for decades after the Stuarts were kicked off the throne, their fans, when drinking the King’s health, would pass their wine over a glass of water, to indicate they were drinking to the “King over the water”.

Perhaps some in Spain may do the same for Juan Carlos. Or, if he does go to Saudi, they could pass their glass over a dish of sand. Unless they feel a piece of elephant hide is more appropriate.

Interesting times…