This is the Guardian.

This article contains strong language.

Hi, my name is Sam Edwards. I'm a freelance journalist and I wrote the Guardian Longread

Spain's Watergate inside the corruption scandal that changed the nation.

I first became interested in this case as a way to understand some other changes that were

happening in Spanish politics at the time. I'd been covering politics for a number of years and

I'd seen in several elections how the traditional two-party system was giving away to a new form of

politics where we've seen lots of smaller parties and a roading trust in the traditional parties.

One of the reasons that this had happened, one of the main drivers was the financial crisis,

but also a particular anger at a perception of widespread corruption in the political class.

In 2018, a verdict came down in the corruption case I wrote about, which led to the toppling

of the Conservative government at the time. That obviously showed the impact this case had,

but it was also possible to go back and look at how it had begun 10 years earlier and what had

led up to that point. What drew me to the article in particular was some of the people involved and

some of the stakes that they ran. The main whistleblower at the centre of the article, Jose Luis

Plenios, secretly recorded other political figures in the party over several years to try and

gather evidence of this corruption scandal, a considerable risk to himself. He did that in Spain

where there is no law protecting whistleblowers and he took on a significant risk for himself.

This shows that it's important that we need to have a certain level of protection for whistleblowers

since there's been a little bit of progress in Spain, but not that much. It's very interesting to look

at public's response to political corruption. Political corruption is obviously

very harmful in many ways. It's a misuse of public money, most obviously, but it also erodes

...