'My name is Alberto'

In June 2023, when asked about his English, Feijóo said he had a teacher to start classes on a Monday but that Sánchez called early elections by surprise and he had to drop it. Later on, he acknowledged that he had given it up forever but that English was not a problem, because nowadays there are little gadgets that you carry with you and they translate everything while you talk to the other person. And yesterday he said: “I don’t know English, but I know how to govern”.

Not everyone finds it equally difficult to learn a language, especially as an adult, but everyone can achieve it if there is a powerful incentive. That is what is most surprising, that it has already been four and a half years since Feijóo aspired to represent his country internationally and that has not been enough time or enough reason to have the desire to make the effort.

I heard Feijóo's phrase on the same day that a taxi driver greeted me with the BBC application in his car. He plays it for a few hours: “And every day I go home having learned a couple or three new words”, he told me. The last ones had been shelter (they were talking about how the civilian population of Ukraine was protecting themselves from the bombs) and kidnapping, on a day they were talking about kidnappings. And at night he puts on Downton Abbey. From the application he moved on to the Official Language School and, currently, the command of basic English has allowed him to take tourists to Montserrat and the Priorat, with the consequent benefits. But more than anything, he looked happy to have managed it. Nothing that Feijóo could not have done, a fact that abounds in the perception that the popular candidate lives in that rajoynian comfort disguised as the simplicity of a small-town man. And furthermore, as Lola Flores said on the day she met Winston Churchill: “I was surprised that such an important gentleman did not know how to speak Spanish”.