Campaigning for Spain’s general election opens on Friday amid accusations of political espionage described as the country’s ‘Watergate’.

Last month Spain’s judiciary launched a probe into an alleged conspiracy by secret police and the former conservative government led by Mariano Rajoy to smear the reputation of the left-wing Podemos party founded in 2014.

On April 1 Spain’s Socialist administration claimed to have deactivated the so-called “patriotic brigade” of senior police officers.

“The sewers no longer exist,” said Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska.

But Podemos’s leader Pablo Iglesias has since claimed the dirty tricks campaign against his party did not end when the more ideologically-aligned Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez came to power last June.

Last weekend Mr Sánchez’s deputy press officer, Alberto Pozas, was summoned by a judge in connection with the theft of data from a mobile phone belonging to Mr Iglesias’s former aide.

The phone was stolen in November 2015, weeks before the first general election in which Podemos took part, when Mr Pozas was editor of a now-defunct sensationalist news weekly called Interviú.

Investigators found data from the mobile phone among the files of former police officer José Manuel Villarejo, jailed since 2017 while a court probes his role as alleged leading member of the “patriotic brigade”.