Whatever the shortcomings of Spanish corporate culture-and there are many not least in the oil giant Repsol which seems to have made a dog’s dinner out of its investments in Argentina and is now suffering for it-the same cannot be said for Carles Casajuana, Spain’s ambassador to London for the last four years as he has struggled to counter the inevitable pessimism that his country economic crisis has generated without resorting to crude propaganda.
Last night the Spanish embassy residence in Belgrave Square was packed as the friends and contacts that Casajuana has built up during his four year posting came to bid a find farewell to a man who has endured one of the trickiest of postings with dignity, humour, intelligence and generosity of spirit, together with his similarly charming wife Margarita.
Casajuana is being pulled back to Madrid earlier than would otherwise have been the case had the centre-right Partido Popular not won last December’s elections. Casajuana was judged too close to the outgoing socialist party for no other reason it seems than he has spent much of his adult life representing post-Franco Spain loyally as a senior official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs whoever happened to be governing.
His successor, one-time defence minister with the previous PP government Federico Trillo is a straightforward political appointment of a man who owed his rise through the party to the late Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the Franco minister who went on to form a new right-wing political party after the dictator’s death in 1975.
Despite such political baggage, those who know Trillo describe him as socially engaging and intelligent enough not to undo the good work done by Casajuana in building local ties, and he is expected to settle well in London, not least become his love of Shakespeare and all his works.
More worrying to the Foreign Office is another recent arrival to the court of St James, the new Argentine ambassador Alicia Castro. Close friend of Chavez from her time as ambassador in Caracas, this former trade unionist and air hostess, mirrors her president Cristina Fernandez Kirchner in her potential to opt for radical rhetoric and action in defence of populist causes like the nationalisation of Spanish companies and Argentina’s claim to the British owned Falklands.
