Misc. Comment 2008 (1)

Who do we blame?, 14 March 2008

Beatrix Campbell Who do we blame? Guardian   Compare and contrast the stories of Shannon Matthews and Madeleine McCann - and what we see is a narrative of nasty class prejudice   March 14, 2008 6:00PM Beatrix Campbell     The story of Shannon Matthews' disappearance - and dramatic reappearance, apparently alive and well, today - has confirmed the degree to which class is still the cultural register in our purportedly classless society.   The comparison between Madeleine McCann and Shannon Matthews is saturated by class. It isn't just a matter of resources, and which children attract our attention. The comparison registers class as a courier of moral tales. Both stories dramatise the distribution of virtue and blame that fixes the working class and the middle class in moral hierarchies.   Shannon Matthews' neighbourhood, community and family are poor, lacking in resources, and yet they have spontaneously displayed remarkable resourcefulness - children organised a vigil, adults went out searching for the missing child, community intelligence led the police to her. And once she was found, a party was promised.   Karen Matthews has acted appropriately throughout: she was waiting for Shannon at home; she contacted the police as soon as she had exhausted all the obvious locations. And yet, our eye is drawn to her poverty, numbers of partners, cans of lager going into her household. Everything about Ms Matthews' life has been up for scrutiny.   There has been talk of domestic violence. I can think of several high-profile "human interest" tragedies in which the domestic violence endured by a middle-class woman has been successfully screened from public knowledge.   Karen Matthews has been subjected to a Today programme interrogation that appeared to position the mother as the perpetrator: Sarah Montague asked her seven times about her lifestyle. Her patronising preoccupation was how many men there have been in her life, not her judgment about them. Has any other, apparently blameless mother been so sweetly assailed?   The McCanns attracted a torrent of money and celebrity solidarity. The McCann campaign was focused on them as young, professional, personable victims. Her silence, his flat verbosity, contributed only to a sympathetic sense that they were traumatised. Their reputation as good parents was redeemed by their apparently sleepless quest to find their child. They needed to be redeemed, of course, because they had left their children sleeping alone in their holiday apartment. They said their daughter had been abducted. Every parents' nightmare - and the campaign invited every parent's sympathy. "There but for the grace of God," people said.   It was the McCann campaign, not the police, that guided the world's thinking about the child's fate: that their daughter had been taken from them. She was not dead, they kept saying; their religious faith bathed them in piety and in merit. The campaign's determined hypothesis got people, from airports to football grounds, posting their child's image to keep her in the collective consciousness as a child who was alive somewhere.   Their parenting was simultaneously aired and withdrawn from scrutiny in this crest of sympathy. Yes, they were drinkers. But wine, not cider or lager. Yes, they were arguably neglectful; they'd left their children alone, but hey, who hasn't. Yes, they'd taken their children away for a week and didn't seem to spend much time with them. That didn't make them bad people; it just made them tired parents. The father apparently preferred golfing to child care. Well, men!   Their resources - money, looks, religion, organisation, focus (all a function of class) - were all mobilised to protect them and to obscure the question of culpability. It was the McCann's photo-opportunity with the Pope that eventually exposed the campaign to criticism as inappropriate, not to say unseemly. And yet, even when they ultimately emerged as suspects, they still attracted personal, hyper-identification in the press and a sense of outrage that a foreign reporter had dared ask them about their own culpability and that social workers - the stormtroopers of the Daily Mail's gallery of hate figures - dared assess their competence as carers.   No one thought Karen Matthews had abducted or killed her daughter - and yet she has been judged. Some commentators think they can say anything they like about this woman and even to her. She has spoken with reticent dignity, yet her class makes her available for blame. The McCanns are official suspects. And yet - unlike Karen Matthews - they are presumed innocent.

Madeleine: in Praia da Luz, there's not even a traffic cop, 06 April 2008

Madeleine: in Praia da Luz, there's not even a traffic cop Guardian   Ned Temko, Praia da Luz The Observer, Sunday April 6 2008 This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday April 06 2008 on p8 of the News section. It was last updated at 00:01 on April 06 2008   The 'missing' posters are mostly torn down. The hotels are preparing for the first of the season's tourists. Police are still talking to witnesses, but there is growing acceptance that Madeleine McCann's disappearance will never be explained. The good news for the reception desk at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz is that they have every prospect of a full house for late April and early May. It is particularly welcome this year, as tourist numbers have been down because of the pound weakening against the euro and Easter falling early. The downside is that many of their guests are likely to arrive not with bathing costumes, tennis rackets and sun cream, but with laptops, microphones and television cameras. And their focus will be on the one flat in the Mark Warner holiday complex that has lain empty for 11 months: Apartment 5-A, where Madeleine McCann disappeared on the evening of 3 May, 2007, a few days before her fourth birthday. The media's first-anniversary invasion has not yet begun in earnest. Last week only a trickle of British newspaper reporters, the odd photographer and a team from al-Jazeera television were in evidence. There was no sign of the Polícia Judiciária, Portugal's equivalent of the CID, nor even an ordinary traffic cop, outside the flat where Madeleine was last seen. Only a flimsy silver chain barring entry to the back garden entrance recalls the tragedy, the agonising efforts to find Madeleine that became a worldwide campaign and the deepening mystery surrounding the case after her parents, Kate and Gerry, were interrogated and declared arguidos, or formal suspects, by the Portuguese authorities last August. The posters of Madeleine that filled every shop window in the weeks after her disappearance are gone. Just one faded image of her is still on display - on the bulletin board outside the church, where the local Catholic and Anglican communities hold an ecumenical service every Friday to highlight the case of Madeleine and of other missing children around the world. Poignantly, a poster recently pinned up at the entrance of the Baptista supermarket, a few dozen yards downhill from the flat where Madeleine last hugged her mother goodnight, pleads in Portuguese: 'Não te esqueças de mim.' Don't forget about me. In recent weeks, to the alarm of Madeleine's parents back home in the Leicestershire village of Rothley, that had seemed a real possibility. In Portugal the active search for their missing daughter by the police and hundreds of local residents on the oceanfront, in gardens, olive groves and scrubland has long since ended. The police, and the Spanish-based Metodo 3 detective agency hired by the McCanns, are still responding to 'sightings' or claims of fresh evidence of what has happened to her, but these have become less and less frequent. A recent claim by a taxi driver on the eastern end of the Algarve coast, near the Spanish border, that he had driven Madeleine and four adults to a nearby hotel on the night of her disappearance appears to have come to nothing. So, too, has a freelance search by a Madeira-based lawyer of a lake down a twisting potholed lane outside the Algarve's old Moorish capital, Silves. The police investigation, and the often lurid local newspaper headlines accompanying it, have gone quiet. Last October a new officer was put in charge. The official spokesman for the investigation has been replaced by two Lisbon-based officials who were politely replying last week to all press inquiries by saying: 'Sorry. It is our policy that we cannot comment at all on the case.' In fact, there are now signs of new movement in the investigation - and every prospect that, starting in the next few days and building towards the first anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, her case will again be front-page news in Portugal, Britain and around the world. Early this week a team of Portuguese police is due to travel to Britain to re-interview witnesses from the so-called 'Tapas Nine' - the seven friends who, along with the McCanns, were dining at a poolside tapas restaurant 50 yards from Apartment 5-A on the night Madeleine disappeared. Particularly in the light of a comment by Portugal's Justice Minister, Alberto Costa, two months ago that the investigation was nearing its conclusion, the mission is likely to prove critical in determining in what direction, and at what pace, the next stage of the largest police probe in Portugal's history is now taken. The only other person named as a suspect in the case would already seem to be out of the frame, to the cautious relief of his distraught family, veteran pillars of Praia da Luz's expatriate British community. Robert Murat, 33, was on a week's visit from Britain to his mother Jenny's home, yards from Apartment 5-A, when Madeleine disappeared. But he cancelled his return flight, stayed on in Praia da Luz, and was informally helping the investigators as a translator when a British Sunday newspaper journalist told the police she thought he was acting suspiciously. They brought him in for questioning and - largely, Portuguese polices sources have said, on the strength of British crime profilers - formally made him an arguido in mid-May. They secured a routine three-month extension to his suspect status last January, but in recent weeks have returned a computer, his clothing and other property removed from the home that Murat shares with his mother. The McCanns, too, are drawing some hope from the Portuguese police team's visit to Britain. Their spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said yesterday that while the couple had made clear their readiness to speak to the investigators, or even to return to Portugal if required, 'there has been no request to talk to them'. He also revealed that, contrary to media speculation in recent months, the visiting investigators have conveyed no plans to conduct any searches in Britain, to take possession of Kate's personal diary, or of Cuddle Cat - Madeleine's favourite toy - which Kate constantly clasped by her side during the weeks after her disappearance. But an unprecedentedly detailed account of the days and weeks after Madeleine's disappearance from a well-placed Portuguese police source suggests that - after numerous fruitless twists and turns in the investigation, and in the absence of either a 'body or a confession' - the police focus is on the accounts of the McCanns and their friends of precisely what happened to Madeleine on the night she vanished. The source has not suggested there is evidence that Madeleine's parents were involved in the disappearance, or the possible death, of their child - a suggestion that Kate and Gerry have passionately denied, pressing home the point last month in securing a half-million-pound settlement from the Express newspaper group over stories suggesting they were implicated. Indeed, amid the rash of reports last September suggesting there was DNA proof linking Madeleine's parents to her death, the same police source emphasised that the DNA samples had proved to be degraded, incomplete, possibly contaminated and inconclusive. But the source has said that, almost from the outset, particularly amid growing Portuguese police scepticism that Murat had any connection with Madeleine's disappearance, the 'key' to the investigation had been in unravelling what the Polícia Judiciária felt were 'difficulties and contradictions' in the accounts given by the McCanns and their friends in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. Part of the police concern, he said, involved details of Kate and Gerry's initial statements - whether the back window and shutters in the flat had been open or closed, for instance, and whether Gerry had entered from the front door or the back and exactly when the parents or their friends had checked to make sure Madeleine and her then two-year-old twin siblings, Sean and Amelie, were safe and well. Equally crucial to somehow resolving the case, he said, were the accounts of the 'Tapas Nine' - and particularly Jane Tanner, who earlier this year went public in a BBC Panorama documentary with her account of having seen a man carrying a child in pink pyjamas like Madeleine's outside the McCanns' flat at 9.15pm. 'Jane at first made no mention of the pyjamas,' the source insisted. He said that this detail and a number of others about the man apparently carrying a child emerged only later in her statements to the police. He said the initial statements by the McCanns and each of their friends had 'never fit together' and that the police were particularly sceptical when, after the group had had time to talk a few days later, an 'agreed time-line' seemed to emerge. Mitchell said yesterday that, far from opposing the latest move by the Portuguese police to press their concerns over the 'Tapas Nine' testimony, the McCanns, Tanner and their other friends eagerly welcomed the opportunity, in the hope of finally bringing the legal process to an end and focusing 'on what really matters - Madeleine'. Some of the friends, he said, had even considered going back to Portugal to try to speed an end to the investigation. Mitchell said he was not surprised by the inconsistencies in the initial accounts. 'You had nine people in a bar without watches on, without mobile phones, and absolute panic set in when they realised what had happened. They were running around and then several hours later they were forced to sit down and recount their movements in exact detail and they were at sixes and sevens... We would say that, if the police had a perfect time line across nine people, that would be a damn sight more suspicious than the fractured, illogical composite statements they might have got.' And although Mitchell was not in Praia da Luz in the days after Madeleine disappeared, he said his personal contacts since then with Tanner and the other friends had convinced him there was 'nothing furtive or suspicious' about the time-line provided to the police. 'Everything I've seen and heard on a private, human level tells me that this is an innocent group of people who have got caught up in this awful situation and they're doing their best to try and help their friends on a decency level.' Luis Maia, a leading Portuguese television journalist who co-authored the first of what are now five books on Madeleine in Portugal, said yesterday his gut feeling was that - barring an unexpected breakthrough, or a formal police request to re-interview Kate or Gerry - the investigation was finally nearing an inevitable end, with the mystery of the missing girl no closer to resolution. For the parents, the next few days and weeks are likely to be difficult, with the approach of the anniversary of the disappearance of a daughter nearing her fifth birthday - especially in Rothley, in the home Kate had said she could not bear to live in again without having Madeleine back. 'Some days, for both Kate and Gerry, are better than others,' Mitchell said. 'But they still believe she is quite possibly alive. There has been no evidence to the contrary. 'And every day that goes by without her being found makes them think that she must be somewhere, very well hidden, and that someone must have her.' How life changed for those caught in the public glare of a heart-rending case   The parents As the first anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance draws closer, her parents are back home in the Leicestershire village of Rothley. Gerry has returned to full-time work as a cardiologist, on call, with regular NHS hours. Kate, a GP, has decided not to go back to work at a local surgery until the fate of her daughter is resolved. She takes Sean and Amelie to nursery school every day and is in frequent phone or email contact with 'Find Madeleine' campaign organisers, charities, the family's lawyers and police. 'There are good days and bad days,' says the McCanns' spokesman Clarence Mitchell, but they take hope from the belief that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, their daughter is still alive. Meanwhile, they have thrown themselves into urging Britain and the rest of Europe to improve co-ordination in dealing with missing children and to adopt an American-style 'amber light' alert system to speed up attempts to find them. That will be the core message of a British television documentary in which they plan to take part on the first anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance. 'They feel that if, God forbid, Madeleine is not found, that will be a fitting legacy for her,' says Mitchell. The McCanns' first spokesman Within hours of the news of Madeleine's disappearance, Alex Woolfall of the London-based PR agency Bell Pottinger was asked by Mark Warner to fly to Praia da Luz as part of a 'crisis' team to help her traumatised parents deal with the media. 'People forget there was quite a lot of hope at the time and we figured that if we got photos out someone would call up and say: "Yes, I've just spotted her."' Woolfall says he feels the way the media behaved was 'unique and extraordinary - and I put that down to the fact that so many of the journalists out there were doing the story as parents first, and journalists second. It was: there, but for the grace of God, go we.' With the approach of the anniversary of Madeleine's disappearance, he says, he has inevitably found himself reflecting on her parents' agony. 'This year a very good friend of mine has had a baby, and I've watched him grow over the last 12 months. And he's become an individual rather than a baby now. 'And I just cannot imagine what it would be like to have a child and bring up a child and then to have that child taken from you. I just feel deeply, deeply sad for Kate and Gerry. I don't think anyone can really imagine what is like to go out on holiday with three children and to come back with two.' Robert Murat 'A year in hell' is how friends of Murat describe the experience of the Briton, raised in Portugal, who had been helping the police with translations for the case and suddenly found himself declared a formal suspect barely a week after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. In the intervening months, he, his mother and other relatives in Praia da Luz and the nearby beach village of Brugão have had to come to terms with police questioning. Murat's mother Jenny, 72, says that she, her son and others in the family have tried to stay positive and have kept a daily diary of their ordeal in an effort to help them to cope. Now, with the police having returned Robert's possessions and agreed to his going to England, she says they are holding out hope that he may soon be released from arguido status. 'When all is said and done,' she said, 'that is still what matters - the fate of this poor little girl.' The private investigators Metodo 3 is a Barcelona-based agency that built its reputation on corporate fraud investigations before the McCanns engaged it on a six-month contract last year to follow up reported sightings of the missing girl throughout Europe and in Morocco. But with its managing director, Francisco Marco Fernández, making increasingly upbeat remarks about the prospects for a breakthrough on finding Madeleine - most controversially, a statement late last year that 'God willing, we hope she will be home by Christmas' - the agency has now agreed that all comments should go through the McCanns' spokesman, Clarence Mitchell. Metodo 3 remains on a monthly retainer of £8,000, Mitchell says. 'The agency are very good on the ground. They're very passionate and committed to the search for Madeleine.' In fact, he told The Observer, the family's hope is that the Portuguese police will ultimately close their investigation and pass on all the relevant papers to Metodo 3 to reinvigorate the search. The family friend Jane Tanner has been haunted by the thought that she could have prevented Madeleine's disappearance. Tanner, 38, was among the seven friends with the McCann parents at the restaurant on the night in question. She had gone back to check on her own children and is certain she saw a man carrying a pyjama-clad child nearby. Generally, Tanner has avoided making public remarks but, in a recent BBC Panorama, she said: It's important that people know what I saw, because I believe Madeleine was abducted.'

The resort that was rocked one night in May, 11 April 2008

The resort that was rocked one night in May Guardian     When Madeleine McCann went missing on May 3 2007, a Portuguese village became the focus of worldwide attention   Angela Balakrishnan Friday April 11 2008   Praia da Luz – originally a tiny fishing village – has attracted British tourists for the past few decades but, before Madeleine McCann went missing, the destination was one of the best-kept secrets on the Algarve.   The Ocean Club was one of several collections of tourist accommodation in the holiday town, which is located just a couple of kilometres west of the larger town of Lagos, about an hour's drive from Faro airport. Owned by the holiday company, Mark Warner, the club comprises villa-style apartments, set around a series of private areas that include a swimming pool, tennis courts and restaurant.   Kate and Gerry McCann, and their three children, stayed in an apartment that overlooked a private complex. The terms of their holiday were simple – half-board, breakfast and evening meal, all for about £1,500.   They had been given a reduction when the Leicester-based couple discovered that, unlike most Mark Warner resorts, the Ocean Club did not offer a baby-listening service.   The McCanns and their friends – now dubbed by the press as the "tapas seven" – asked for apartments close together so they were all assigned to block five.   The Paynes were on the floor above the McCanns in the only apartment with a functioning baby monitor.   Russell O'Brien and Jane Tanner had brought a monitor with them, but it didn't get a good signal at the tapas restaurant 50 yards away where the group gathered on May 3.   In the usual style of Mark Warner, the Ocean Club is not a gated, enclosed resort, but a sprawling complex open to the village of Luz and scattered over such a wide distance that minibuses are used to ferry holidaymakers around.   Many holidaymakers felt that, although the resort was open to the village, it was still safe and secure.   In early May, it was still very quiet, more than a month before the holiday season gets into full swing. Gerry McCann has said he never saw a soul, except once, on the last night, on his evening checks going back and forth between the restaurant and the apartment – a walk of about a minute.   As the McCanns endlessly repeated afterwards, if they had thought it was wrong or even risky, they would never have left their children.   *   This article is a virtual word-for-word 'steal' from the article by David James Smith, entitled 'Kate and Gerry McCann: Beyond the smears', published by Timesonline on 16 December 2007.   Smith's article reads:   'The terms of the holiday were half-board, breakfast and evening meal, and the McCanns paid about £1,500. There had been some reduction when they had discovered that, unlike most Mark Warner resorts, the Ocean Club did not offer a baby-listening service. Instead, the group had asked for apartments close together, so they were all assigned to Block 5. The Paynes were on the floor above, the only couple with a functioning baby monitor. Russell O’Brien and Jane Tanner had brought a monitor too, but theirs wasn’t getting much of a signal from the Tapas restaurant 50 yards away. The Ocean Club was not a gated, enclosed resort in the usual style of Mark Warner, but a sprawling complex open to the village of Luz and scattered over such a wide distance that shuttle buses were used. Even though the resort was open to the village, it felt safe and secure, and in early May it was still very quiet. Gerry never saw a soul, except once, on the last night, on his evening checks, going back and forth between Tapas and the apartment, an even-paced walk of just under a minute. As the McCanns endlessly repeated afterwards, if they had thought it was wrong or even risky, they would never have left their children.'

'Be very careful, Kate...', 11 April 2008

Be very careful, Kate... Daily Mail     Amanda Platell 11th April 2008   "Mummy, why didn't you come when we were crying last night?" Those were Madeleine McCann's haunting words on the day she vanished, as revealed in a newly leaked Portuguese police report. Their friends believe it is part of a smear campaign to discredit the couple, who have been campaigning for an "abduction alert system" to be implemented in Europe. Their media spokesman talks menacingly of a furious counter-attack, saying 'the gloves are off' in the PR war. My hearts go out to them, but I urge Kate and Gerry to be very, very careful. The leaked statement may have been insensitive. But it has served to remind us all that at the core of Maddie's disappearance is the cruel truth that the McCanns left their three young children alone in an apartment in a foreign country while they went out to dinner with their friends. It is hardly the kind of parenting you might expect from a couple who now set themselves up as children's ambassadors. I have always defended the McCanns' right to fight to the ends of the earth to find Maddie. Their campaign on behalf of all abducted children is proof only of their determination that some good should come from their terrble suffering. But laying claim to the moral high ground while they are still official suspects in Portugal was always going to make them vulnerable to attack. The only comfort for the couple is that Maddie's words have placed their own lost child exactly where they want her to be - back in the media spotlight.

McCanns must not return to Portugal, 12 April 2008

McCanns must not return to Portugal Daily Express (No online link)    Richard Madeley 12th April 2008   Sources cose to Kate and Gerry McCann have indicated they are most unlikely to comply with a request that they return to Praia de Luz. Police there want them to take part in a large-scale re-enactment of the minutes and hours following Madeleine's disappearance. The couple are quite right to turn down this invitation. The whole thing has the authentic smell of a trap. What can such a re-enactment possibly achieve nearly a year on from that dreadful night? Nothing. The trail went cold months ago thanks to the idiotic blundering of Praia de Luz's finest. No. The Poruguese police want Kate and Gerry back in their jurisdiction for their own private reasons. The couple remain official suspects but could never to extradited back to Portugal: there isn't a scintilla of evidence against them. This new proposal is, to my suspicious and cynical eye, an attempt to lure the couple back there, along with the friends who were with them the night Madeleine vanished, so they can be re-arrested. The police could pounce on the tiniest discrepancy in what anyone said and blow it up out of all proportion. And now as I write this, come reports of a new smear on the couple from Portuguese police. I rest my case.

'Crying Shame' - Carole Malone, 13 April 2008

Crying Shame News of the World     Carole Malone 13 April 2008   I DON'T want to make Kate and Gerry McCann's pain worse than it already is. But they chose to make public their fury about leaked documents in which they told police Madeleine had said the day before she was snatched: "Mummy, why didn't you come to us when we were crying?" So I feel entitled to say, just as publicly, what right do they have to be upset if it's the TRUTH? Friends reckon the leaking of the documents was a move by Portuguese police to smear the McCanns and sabotage their visit to the European parliament, where they made an appeal for a Europe-wide alert system for abducted children. I'm sorry but however much sympathy I have for the McCanns, the fact remains that they repeatedly left their three kids alone in an unlocked apartment on that holiday, while they went out to dinner with friends. And they did that even after Madeleine had told them she'd woken up alone and crying— AND after they'd promised to keep a closer eye on her. No alert system in the world could have prevented what happened to Madeleine. Only Kate and Gerry could.

Brits love to torture a 'bad mother' - Melanie Reid, 14 April 2008

Brits love to torture a 'bad mother' Timesonline     In a long media career, the persecution of Kate McCann is the cruellest thing I have seen   Melanie Reid April 14, 2008   How many centuries of accumulated spite and misogyny, I wonder, went into the latest twist in the Madeleine McCann saga. Did the British television presenters feel the remotest twinge of conscience as they sensationally reported - second-hand via a Spanish television station - the leaks from the Portuguese police portraying Kate McCann in the worst possible light, as a mother who had left her children to cry?   And did Britain's tabloid editors, themselves presumably sons of mothers and husbands to the mothers of their own children, flinch even a jot as they ordered the devastating headlines "Mummy, why didn't you come when we cried?" to be unfurled on their front pages alongside the face of the missing little girl?   I have seen, lived with and been party to many different kinds of sadism in a long media career, but I honestly think that this latest outbreak of malice towards Kate McCann is just about the cruellest thing I have witnessed.   Many serious writers have deliberately avoided discussing the case of Madeleine. Not because it is not serious, but because there was no enlightenment we could bring; nothing remotely we could add to the frenzy of distress, loss and bewilderment.   I have avoided reading or watching most of the coverage. It was too harrowing; the couple's grief too visceral to bear; and I could not stand the treatment they received from the macho, out-of-their-depth Portuguese police. For many of us, it was enough, briefly, to contemplate the horror of losing our own child. Anything more was prurience and soap opera.   But somehow we have passed a watershed. With this latest betrayal, picking deep at Kate McCann's emotional scars, we have regressed to the level of the medieval peasants reaching for the ducking stool. Although women suspected of being witches, I sometimes grimly think, received a fairer fate in their slow drowning than do modern women accused of being bad mothers, who are tortured to the point of mental disintegration.   And so it is time to speak out in defence of Kate McCann, a woman whom I have never met, but someone who is being