There are pictures that tell you a lot more than the thousand words they are proverbially said to be worth. Such a picture was widely reproduced this summer in Spain: of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, doing his best to shake hands with Mariano Rajoy, leader of the opposition Popular party at the entrance to the government’s Moncloa palace. Mr Rajoy looks as though he cannot quite bring himself to greet the prime minister; he looks at Mr Zapatero’s outstretched hand and clasps the watch on his own left hand – or perhaps he is just counting his fingers. Of course, as the newsreel reveals, they did shake hands.

But the hesitation about performing an act of common civility – think Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat on the White House lawn – is a lamentably accurate snapshot of the descent into incivility of Spanish public life: marked by factional self-indulgence that makes impossible any common view of the national interest.