As I write, the general election results are coming in and it seems that the ruling PP [Conservative] party has been roundly punished by the Spanish public for their premature - and possibly cynical - attempt to lay the blame for Thursday's atrocity at the door of the Basque terrorist group, Eta. In effect, the PP party - which had a 10 point lead only a short while ago - is paying the price for taking the country into a war opposed by over 90 per cent of the population. On the other hand, what does it signify that the result would almost certainly have been different if the bombs had not gone off? Were people only supporting the PP on a contingency basis - with the proviso that the war wasn't brought home to Spain - or is a significant proportion of voters prepared to switch its vote on purely emotional grounds? The latter, I suspect. Such is democracy.

Anyway, I took part in the local manifestation of solidarity on Friday night - having passed through Madrid's Chamartin station only hours before the explosions the day before. So the following article from today's Sunday Telegraph had particular resonance for me. I hope Mr Howse doesn't mind me reproducing it:-

I have seen Spain's unity before By Christopher Howse

What brought tears to the eyes more readily perhaps even than the millions in Madrid were the crowds filling the normally windswept spaces around the bandstand next to Bilbao's Town Hall. For the people of Bilbao have marched against Eta before, and walls are scrawled with Eta Ez! - the Basque for "Eta No". It never stopped Eta.

What did those crowds think they were doing? Not preventing terrorism, but manifesting - in a manifestacion - a united attitude to it. Did those eight million really show the unity of Spain on Friday night? After all there is not one Spain. The monarch is "King of the Spains". Some of the Basques, but also some Catalans, Galicians, Asturians, Aragonese, even Leonese, demand independence.

This country more than twice the area of the United Kingdom, with only two thirds of the population, seems ready to fall apart. Spain invented the word guerrilla. And there are plenty of old people who remember when it tore itself in two in a civil war which killed half a million, or a million - no one was keeping count.

More than that, the Spanish character is often described as solipsistic. "La vida es sueno" - Life's a dream - and the only person to believe in is oneself. In church, the Spanish are undistracted by flapping fans or fidgeting children; it is as if externals disappear. No one can blank a wheedling beggar with so little indication of even seeing him as a Spaniard can.

Something of that haughty resistance to externals could be seen on the set face of the 9th Marquis of Tamaron, the Spanish ambassador in London, as he expressed in clipped English how much he despised the bombers.

The demonstrating crowds too showed disdain, and they showed courage. Another bomb might well have been set off in such a crowd. But they would not care any more than they took notice of the cold puddles through which they shuffled. If the British are surprisingly stoical in war, with the Spanish it is no surprise.

Spanish unity is not primarily political. It comes from the daily traditions of life. The Spanish live in public. They socialise not round the hearth but in the town square. At seven or eight in the evening - the time of those demonstrations - streets are suddenly full of people, as if invited, taking a paseo, a stroll, with husbands, with girlfriends, with little children who are sat up on the stainless steel bar counter while parents take a little glass of yellow beer and move on. This is not only in the warm south; in wintry Toledo they muffle themselves up and throng the Zocodover, as picaresque assemblies filled the same square before Madrid ever became capital.

Such cohesion of neighbours is even more easily seen in villages. The Spanish for a village is 'pueblo' - the people. National laws may be ignored - taxes or compulsory crash-helmets - but the pueblo behaves in unconscious unity, like a school of fish wheeling in unison. This unity applies to morality as much as to daily customs. To act against the mores of the pueblo is to be sin verguenza, shameless - an outcast, worse than a prostitute - like a bomber.

Lope de Vega latched on to this truth in the 17th century with his celebrated play Fuente Ovejuna. It deals with a village (present population, 3,110) that committed a murderous act. When the investigating magistrate tries to find the culprit he gets nothing but the answer: Fuente Ovejuna did it.

What goes for killing goes for suffering. When King Juan Carlos - a black-ribboned flag of all Spain behind him - said on television "Your king suffers with you", he was not providing a touchy-feely soundbite. As a constitutional monarch he stands or falls with the people. He entered into democracy on the death of Franco at the same time that they did. Whatever happens, it happens to all the people.