Pedro Sánchez has built a reputation as a successful political gambler, but suspending public duties and threatening to resign, as he did last week, was a political bombshell. It was so extraordinary it led to five days of national puzzlement and the wildest speculation over his motives: from mental health to true love and all kinds of shenanigans associated with the dark arts of politics in between. His announcement that he would not, after all, be resigning, came as another surprise, even to some of his political allies.

The timing of this apparently self-inflicted political turmoil adds to its oddity. The centre-left socialist prime minister spent months putting together a fragile parliamentary majority after a close election in July 2023. His coalition government is now on the verge of passing a contentious amnesty law for Catalan officials involved in the unauthorised vote on Catalonia’s independence in 2017, and his Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) is leading the polls ahead of a momentous regional election in Catalonia on 12 May.

In announcing that he needed time to consider his future, Sánchez cited a “harassment and bullying operation” being waged by his opponents against his wife, Begoña Gómez. This came hours after a judge opened a preliminary investigation into allegations of a conflict of interest relating to university programmes Gómez led and a company that received pandemic recovery funds.

The court case was initiated by the pressure group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), which has links to the far right. Sánchez rejected the allegations against his wife as untrue and blamed right wing political opponents, but also reporting by “overtly rightwing and far right” media, without specifying which outlets he meant.

On Monday, after his period of reflection, Sanchez issued another statement, vowing to stay on and fight even harder against those who........

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