Do Spaniards have the right to eat in restaurants at midnight?

Yolanda Díaz, one of Spain’s deputy prime ministers, raised eyebrows during last summer’s election campaign when she arranged to be filmed doing the ironing. ‘I love ironing’, she announced virtuously. ‘I spend hours, almost every day ironing’, she went on, warming to her theme. ‘When I get home from work’, she concluded with evident self-satisfaction, ‘I iron my clothes and everyone else’s.’

Now the 52-year-old Labour Minister in Spain’s minority left-wing government has irritated even more people by suggesting that the nation’s restaurants should close earlier: ‘It’s madness to carry on extending opening times; a restaurant still open at 1 o’clock in the morning is not reasonable’, she declared. ‘After 10 o’clock at night the working hours are nocturnal and, therefore, have certain risks. They have mental health risks’, she added earnestly.

The hours Spanish restaurants keep are certainly remarkable. Half a century ago when I was doing A-level Spanish I was astonished (and delighted) to learn that they didn’t even open until nine in the evening; the nightlife sounded wonderfully exotic and romantic – a world away from Birmingham in the 1970s.