Spanish royals, politicians and company bosses, ever eager to catch up with more developed nations, have realised that it is not enough for Spain to be good at tennis and tourism: it is now vying with the White House and Buckingham Palace for world leadership in the art of the gaffe.

Queen Sofía – Britons will not be surprised to learn she is second cousin to their own Prince Philip – shocked Spain, infuriated her husband the king and abandoned political neutrality when she attacked abortion, gay marriage and President George W. Bush’s “wars of vengeance and destruction” in Iraq and Afghanistan in a series of interviews. The dust had hardly settled before Manuel Fraga, the 86-year-old rightwing senator who served the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, opined that the best way to weigh the importance of Catalan, Basque and other nationalists would be “to hang them from somewhere” because such nationalism was against the interests of Spain.