Felix Millet is now sleeping in prison. It has taken 10 years, 11 months and two days since the Mossos d'Esquadra entered the Palau de la Música, and two years since the trial which sentenced him to 9 years and 8 months in prison, for a member of the Barcelona bourgeoisie, once considered untouchable, to begin serving his sentence in the Can Brians 2 prison. It has been so long since that incursion by the Catalan police into one of the temples of Catalan nationalism one fine morning in July 2009 that even a fact as important as Millet's entry into prison for a fraud involving almost 35 million euros has ended up losing its context. On that warm July 23rd, Juan Carlos I and Corinna were still discreetly enjoying their affair, Zapatero was still Spanish prime minister, Montilla presided over Catalonia's Generalitat, Hereu over the Barcelona city council, Laporta and Guardiola led Barça, Benedict XVI reigned in the Vatican and Obama had just arrived at the White House. And the political party Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) did not even dream of its dissolution, something that would end up occurring seven years later and that would have the emergence of the so-called Palau case as one of its causes, if not the most important.
If the judicial process had not stretched out forever, Millet would not have entered prison at the age of 85 nor would he have done so in an ambulance, a matter which raises a large question mark about his situation as a prisoner in the near future. We will see what sort of prison regime ends up being applied by Can Brians 2, beyond the sentence, given his advanced age and state of health. Today, Millet has become completely ostracised and despite his last name has no points of social anchorage. But before it all began, he had dealings with presidents, monarchs, bankers and prestigious businesspeople, and he was allowed the luxury of showing up without an advance warning in offices where today they would probably be ashamed if they knew he was going there and what he was doing. Because Millet was always asking for something or was the person who managed to fulfill some task and the Barcelona of those days did not want to be in the bad books of such a character.
By sheer mysterious chance, Millet enters prison a few hours before the PDeCAT (Catalan European Democratic Party), the political party which is the successor to Convergència, decides its future as an organization, after a very brief stint as a party but having already made too many mistakes. So many that the party's main players have been distancing themselves from it, some due to political discrepancies, others due to personal enmities and many others due to boredom in the face of a lack of direction and continuous internal fighting. So many that even a politician as important in this political space, and one who is as discreet as former Catalan president Artur Mas has ended up adrift and distant; the man who in other times was the party's own Catalan president Carles Puigdemont is more outside the party than inside it, and its political prisoners Jordi Turull, Josep Rull and Quim Forn scarcely see themselves reflected in many decisions of the current leadership. Under these circumstances, the risk of converting this ideological space into a political smallholding may end up being the solution for a few, but it will never have options of being a reference point for anything.