We have treated the McCanns as if they were Big Brother contestants
Rod Liddle says that the appalling sadness of Madeleine's disappearance has spawned a grotesque reality TV show, in which the nation is polarised and opinion divided angrily over who is the true villain of the piece Did Kate McCann inadvertently kill her daughter Madeleine and then confect a four-month long parade of grief and concern for the benefit of the media, in order to avoid being done for the crime? This seems to be what the Portuguese police have come to either believe or hazard. The McCanns are back in England but they are now — exotically — `arguidos', which means that the Portuguese cops suspect they may have a case to answer. One or both of them may yet be charged, so far as we understand the machinations of the Portuguese legal system. It is said that traces of DNA found in a hire car used by the McCanns some 25 days after Madeleine's disappearance provide up to an 80 per cent match with little Madeleine's DNA.
I'm no expert, but I would have thought that my own DNA would also provide at least an 80 per cent match with Madeleine's, along with Vladimir Putin's, Ruth Kelly's, Graham Norton's and indeed that of a polecat, honey badger or a fruitfly. In fact, so far as I'm aware, there is almost nothing on this planet which doesn't share 80 per cent of its DNA with Madeleine McCann; maybe some rocks, certain lichen, KFC chicken nuggets and David Milib and.
Or perhaps I have got hold of the wrong end of the stick and the new Portuguese evidence is rather more conclusive than this. Perhaps the DNA match is nearer 98 per cent, meaning that one might confuse it only with a member of Madeleine's own family — her siblings or her parents, for example. We may never know: the Portuguese police have their own way of dealing with intense media speculation. Police forces the world over have come to understand that in certain cases the usual rules fly out of the window, that there is a higher authority than the simple requirement to investigate and impartially judge the available evidence. You must keep your local media happy — and your bosses too. When there is intense media and public speculation you need, as a copper, to do things you wouldn't usually do.
In high profile cases such as that of Madeleine McCann's, that almost always means arresting the nearest available nutter, regardless of the evidence, as soon as you can get your hands on him Anyone nearby whom the public might think to be a bit bloody odd, frankly. This is called the Cohn Stagg solution to crime-solving; it might also be called the Barry George approach to crime-solving (we shall have to wait and see). Within days of Madeleine's disappearance back in May, the Portuguese police did exactly this and fingered the local oddball, Robert Murat. And when that scheme fails it means arresting anybody, just to show that you haven't been beaten, that you're still hot on the trail.
It is hard to escape the notion that internal public pressure in Portugal led to the naming of Kate McCann as an `arguido', rather more than anything in the way of hard evidence. The Portuguese tabloid newspapers and electronic media had been pointing the finger for the best part of 12 weeks; there was never quite the same level of sympathy (or empathy) in Portugal that was manifestly evident — in the media at least — over here.
There is a certain ambivalence, down in the Algarve, towards the affluent Brits who swing by every summer, buying up apartments and contributing to the local economy while coating the entire region in concrete and breezeblock and thus changing every neighbourhood beyond recognition. Local feeling is not quite so overtly antagonistic as it is down Malaga way and on the Costa de Sol; but it is getting there.
Nor do the Portuguese habitually think of themselves as genetically more stupid or useless than English people. Hence the Portuguese media were less impressed by the McCanns as a couple and even less inclined to cast the country's police force as the principal villain of the piece: the notion that the police were typically incompetent, ineffectual, flailing quasiThird World dagos never really played too well in the living-rooms of Oporto and Lisbon.
In England, meanwhile, the way in which the case was reported reflected our profoundly strange obsessions with class. I have not the slightest doubt that had the McCanns been lager-swilling dole-queue chavs dressed in Kappa and Burberry and with a pitbull in kennels back home, the papers would have had it in for them on day one and would not have relented. Remember, they left their three children alone in an apartment while they drank the local wine more than 100 yards away. A babysitter was available, but not used. Had the McCanns been working class, this would have been the clearest case of gross negligence; they would have been vilified and the English social services would immediately have been called in to investigate. But they were not lager-swilling dolequeue chavs; they were respectable professionals — hell, they were doctors. And therefore, initially at least, their motives and their behaviour were not remotely questioned over here.
Or, at least, not by the press. Elsewhere, though, things were very different. Among the public at large there was enormous sympathy for Madeleine, obviously — but also a dark current of thought which held the parents directly responsible and which became progressively more sickened and estranged by the media circus which, perhaps for the best of motives, they built around themselves. There has been a website petition running for the best part of four months calling for Leicestershire Social Services to investigate the apparent gross negligence with which the McCanns conducted themselves while in Portugal. Away from the media and away from the middle class, I knew of nobody who in those early days felt anything but repugnance for the McCanns; most of my friends expressed a fierce and unrelenting hostility to their every appearance on television — and behind this was the usually unspoken allegation that they were quite likely more directly culpable than through mere negligence.
Eventually — very late in the day — this view began to percolate through to our national newspapers and especially the right-wing tabloids, who yield to no one in their defence of responsible parenting. This opprobrium was later reinforced by the more highbrow commentators who objected to the usual yellow ribbons, commemorative armbands, the thick-as-mince footballers calling for Madeleine to be returned, the blanket coverage and the hyperbole and the cant. This grotesque charade was, they averred, all Diana's fault. This ghastly heart-on-the-sleeve emoting. Or, as Dominic Lawson put it, `the monstrous tyranny of synchronised sentimentality'.
And as ever happens, the views have now polarised. It is impossible to convince those who have bought their yellow ribbons and put posters up in their cars that the McCanns might have been criminally remiss in their treatment of their children on the night of 3 May. Equally, those who clung to the view that the McCann's should have been banged up on day one for negligence find it very easy to now believe that they committed a graver crime. The McCanns — well, if they'd leave the kiddies alone for that long, what wouldn't they do? They might do anything. We knew they were wrong 'uns. And what's happening to all that money they raised to search for Madeleine? Bet it goes on lawyers' fees to fight a charge of manslaughter, etc., etc.
In a sense, the script was written well before 3 May, well before Kate raced back to her convivial restaurant table and raised the alarm: 'They've taken her!' A remark now regarded as a bit suspicious by both the police and the media. The McCanns, having discovered that Madeleine was missing, did what they were meant to do these days and flung themselves bodily upon the massed media; they performed, they posed with that cuddly toy of Madeleine's, they embraced the brouhaha: they did what was expected of them. If Madeleine had been found within 72 hours all would have been fine; but the media, especially the English media, always end up loathing what they have created — an essential part of the self-disgust intrinsic to any tabloid journalist.
They grow bored, they look for the new angle. They treated the McCanns — and especially foxy, photogenic, middle-class GP Kate — much as they might a slightly exotic contestant on Big Brother. Her class and apparent composure demanded immediate respect — and then later suspicion and derision. It's the usual thing: one moment she's up, the next moment she's down. And so on.
Right now, she is on the cusp of being thrown out of the house altogether — and into the clutches of the Portuguese police, who seem to be no less afflicted by the ephemera of this case and thus prone to following a pre-ordained script than anyone else.
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