 |
| Larmes > cadeau. Argument non sequitur ? Cette gravure semble le démentir. |
More fun ahead
Please question us!
Libel diary – Thursday morning
Libel Diary
Oh Dear
They just don't get it
Sitting pretty
Still sitting comfortably?
Not beginning to fidget yet?
Then I'll begin
...and conclude
Meanwhile
Still living in the past
Now we're talking...
Agony-Aunt Bureau – your question answered
Forgiveness is all
More on Munchin' Mitchell
The vulnerabilities of Mr Mitchell
Sports News
Trauma Time – Again? Part I
More fun ahead –
08.01.2013
Well now. By the last
week in April 2013 Scotland Yard will need to have in place a
complete news package in response to the annual media explosion
surrounding the anniversary of Madeleine McCann's abduction –
sorry, couldn't resist the prospect of making certain people foam –
disappearance in 2007.
The Yard is going to be
very busy, isn't it? The first confidential briefing notes, which
will be landing on desks around now, will be highlighting certain
areas which must be secured in PR terms for the period April 20 –
May 5. These will include:
Heading off a tabloid-led
and potentially horrific "After two years and 3.5 million quid
NOTHING" campaign.
Keeping the government
both happy and in the picture.
Answering the follow up
questions to Hogan-Howe's comments about resources, the future of the
investigation and "results by Christmas".
Dealing with Kate and
Gerry McCann.
Refraining from any
comments that could jeopardise Portuguese co-operation.
Preventing any attempts
to wind-up Operation Grange via the media.
Quite a list for
starters, don't you think? Those of us who have returned to the case
at intervals for almost six years – you know, we
fantasists/obsessive haters etc. – are familiar with its truly
hair-raising propensity to besmirch or destroy the careers or even
lives of those who've come into contact with it, from the parents
downwards. Some – the nimble ones like Rebelo, Monteiro, Blair and
Cameron – have ridden the wave untouched but the list of the others
wouldn't even fit on this page and the damage has by no means ended.
Grime the dog handler, to pluck a name from a cast of dozens, might
have opted for a steady and un-dramatic increase in wealth and
reputation rather than what the case has brought him. Even a monster
like Hewitt might have wept as any possibility of repentance or
coming to terms with fate disappeared in the black comedy invasion of
his death-bed by private detectives and hacks.
We've become accustomed
to watching the latest unsuspecting victim step onto the stage,
brashly confident like a new England football manager, and watched
again, enraptured, as the truth of the McCann Affair's power to
destroy begins to dawn on them, usually just that bit too late.
Watching Andy Redwood disintegrate last spring was a particular, if
unfair, pleasure: gritty determination in the scripted and protective
realms of Panorama was followed by a savaging at the hands of the
media pack and his dread recognition – you could actually see it in
the get-me-out-of here-cartoonish widening of those doleful eyes –
that, Jesus Christ, he was in the middle of a minefield without a
map. And there'll be plenty more yet. So make no mistake, the careers
of every senior Yard officer involved, including Hogan-Howe himself,
are potentially at risk unless the minefield is safely negotiated.
Common to most of the
bullet point problems is the need to throw the media enough
information-meat to distract them while they make their escape. But
how do they do that without opening their flank to the McCanns and
without breaching their remit? Every attempt to do so will give the
normal enmities and rivalries of any organization a chance to surface
with the smooth operators, no doubt, coming out on top. Hogan-Howe,
with the well-tuned political instincts of all UK chief constables,
began positioning himself for April 2013 last autumn by putting blue
water between himself and Grange in such a way that he is covered
whether the operation produces anything or not. If the answer is
"not" then Cider Jack Redwood is dead in the scrumpy vat
and he knows it so he's got to play the anniversary in a way that
protects himself against his boss without giving the latter the
chance to get him for disloyalty. Aren't organizations fun! While
people talk oh-so-knowingly about whitewashes etc. in their Mission
Impossible view of the case the real life dramas are taking place
right now in these obscure internal battles.
Last year, of course,
there were the cries of despair that the review was apparently in the
pocket of the McCanns, whatever that may mean. The fulsome and no
doubt well deserved tributes to the parents from the police, the
stress from the latter that they were investigating a criminal
abduction and a general sense that too much was going on behind the
scenes lowered the spirits of those hoping for an independent (of
everyone, including the parents and their influential contacts)
review.
But we're coming round to
the view that the Yard weren't quite as stupid as they appeared and
the McCanns are by no means as in the loop as they've implied. After
all:
"High profile
reviews, such as this one, are highly emotive and the manner in which
they are conducted are usually kept in strict secrecy so that the
tactics and lines of enquiry that are followed do not become public
knowledge thereby rendering them useless."(Scotland Yard
commenting on the review in an FOI response, October 2011)
There is not a whit of
evidence that the Yard has breached this, its own, rule. If you go
back to the Panorama 2012 programme – not the confused follow up
press conference – you will find that Redwood gave no clue as to
the direction the review was going. 98% of it was an artful
re-presentation of the publicly known remit document, including the
"abduction" comment which caused so much controversy in
some quarters: "as if the abduction occurred in the UK" are
the remit's words. The "two hundred leads" gave nothing
away. All that was new and definite was the Oporto liaison which, as
Cider Jack very well knew, had already been made public by Goncalo
Amaral and confirmed by the Portuguese authorities.
Since the McCanns have
themselves made it clear that they accepted the right of the
Portuguese investigation to include them in their inquiries, they can
hardly object to the Yard doing the same, if it will help solve the
mystery of their daughter's disappearance. But that is territory the
couple avoid like a leper colony. Rightly or wrongly, they have given
the impression that their own conduct has not been under examination
in the inquiry and a small number of ill-judged PR statements have
implied that they have been kept fully up-to-date on the progress of
the review.
Here one pauses. Is that
really possible? After all the remit, in early 2011, was quite clear:
"The focus of the
review will be of the material held by three main stakeholders (and
in the following order of primacy);
The Portuguese Law
Enforcement agencies.
UK Law Enforcement
agencies.
Other private
investigative agencies/staff and organisations."
We know all about the
focus of the Portuguese agencies and we know from the British
Ambassador to Portugal that the second on the list, UK agencies,
helped develop evidence against the parents. So two out of the three
"stakeholders" feature documentary evidence under review in
which the McCanns appear as suspects or potential suspects, while the
third is of vanishingly small significance. In other words you can't
move without bumping into material examining and questioning the role
of the parents and it strikes us as unbelievable that all such
material has been discounted rather than re-examined. As we said,
though, that's not the impression one gains from the comments of the
parents since spring 2011.
In the annual Xmas
message to the troops Kate McCann writes.
"The Metropolitan
Police Review of all the material in the inquiry has been underway
for over eighteen months. We have been really impressed and greatly
encouraged by the work which has been done and its findings to date
which are revealing there are definitely many stones yet to turn. We
continue to wait and hope that the Portuguese authorities will agree
to reopen the case so that the many lines of enquiry can be
investigated. As Madeleine’s parents, we won’t be able to rest
until we know that all that can be feasibly done to find her, and the
person who took her, has been done."
We bet that paragraph
took some time to write. Of course it doesn't say that they have been
apprised of any of the Yard's lines of inquiry, even in their role as
parents of the missing child. But we can all see what is being
implied, just like the other statements they've been releasing for
eighteen months – that the review is working for and with them,
that they know its progress and that they are briefed.
But what's the point of
such stuff? Whose interests does it serve? The Yard have said they
don't want to say anything to anybody – why not go along with that
in the most natural and obvious manner and say nothing yourself? Yes,
there'll be lunatics who believe that "sorry, no comment"
actually means "I'm hiding something", as in the
persecution of Robert Murat. But so what? Isn't that better than
putting out statements that simply stink of spin and make the
non-loonies among us ask yet again, why are they saying these things?
What possible gain is there for them in claiming a closer
relationship with the review than actually exists? But after nearly
six years they just can't seem to help it.
And they add this:
"Since March 2012
independent 'physical' investigation of lines of enquiry by our team
has been put on hold whilst the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS)
Review progresses. This has been to avoid duplication (and thereby
unnecessary expenditure) and to prevent the risk of compromising any
work, albeit unintentionally, carried out by the MPS. The private
investigation team employed by the Fund continue to cooperate and
work with the Metropolitan Police as and when necessary."
Well a bit of silence
might be sensible there too, mightn't it? Rather than putting out
something so obviously obfuscatory? Not only does it remind us of the
existence of as big a bunch of nincompoop hustlers as ever walked the
earth, Metodo ("she'll be home by Xmas"), Halligen
("results soon but it'll cost") and that huge and shadowy
international security organization "I'm Edgar, I am" but
it also prompts us to ask, why March 2012, for God's sake, a year or
so after the review was set up? Why were their activities not halted
when the review was established so that the files could be neither
hidden, amended nor disposed of but passed on to the Yard? We don't
know because Kate McCann doesn't want to tell us. But she can hardly
think we're all so stupid as not to remember that March 2012 was the
month the parents were in trouble due to their panicky and thoroughly
dishonest attempts to spin the review's activities in the UK Mirror
via their untruthful Portuguese lawyer. The Yard hadn't acted in 2011
when they'd tried the same thing, this time with Metodo, about the
Barcelona visits, but in March 2012 they acted. Hence, no more
investigators.
So, a lot of people round
the Big Table, come April, and a lot of hands to be played. Should be
fun.
Please question us! -
11.01.2013
Curiously enough an
innocent Kate & Gerry McCann have more to gain from an extremely
sharp and exhaustive Yard review scrutiny of their role and movements
than almost anyone. As we posted here last year these two of the
three arguidos were released from their status before the
investigation into their activities was anything like complete,
while, indeed, there were serious reservations about the veracity of
the evidence provided by them and their friends. That was why Goncalo
Amaral was correct in calling it the "interrupted investigation"
and why we referred to a missing paragraph in the archiving summary,
the one, that is, that would give the reasons behind such an unusual
move.
We promised to look at it
some more in the future. As we're always saying, though, life, if not
the McCann case, is short. It's history now and the
likelihood of a reconstruction providing any resolution after six
years is remote. But that isn't to say that an attempted
reconstruction is the only way of ascertaining the truth, nor even
the best: not when you've got teams from both countries reviewing the
evidence and able to question witnesses without going through the
rigmarole of letters rogatory or finding them all beyond reach in
another country.
Because that was the
problem, wasn't it? The Seven were needed to clarify what had
happened to help find the child but getting them back to Portugal was
like catching greasy piglets on market day. Who'd have believed that
family friends of a child would hire lawyers to avoid returning to
help? Even though the head of the investigation, Rebelo, a man
untainted by any suspicion of anti-Nine bias, personally appealed to
them for their assistance. It really sounds sick to this day. But the
piggies stayed home – and brought the investigation to an end. For Rebelo was stuck. The
prosecutors had made it clear that the investigation couldn't go on
for much longer, if only on natural justice grounds to the three
arguidos; but out of the thousands of sightings and possibilities in
the files the only ones still open, unresolved and offering a clear
and defined line of inquiry were those surrounding the nine British
holidaymakers.
Of course we've had the
endless claims since that "somewhere in the files" were
leads that could have cracked the case if only people like Amaral
hadn't focused on the innocent McCanns, claims originating chiefly
from the people with a direct financial interest in the McCann
family's freedom and well-being such as their "detectives"
and numerous lawyers, civil and criminal. Now even Duarte and the
rest of the gang have to acknowledge that after many years of
well-funded examination by private detectives not a single one of the
"missed opportunities" has led anywhere, even a short
distance, before comprehensively failing. Instead, despite the boxes
of leads donated to the case by Metodo3, despite Duarte's gift of
"overlooked" inquiry lines and despite the efforts of an
anxious-to-help world public, all has descended, literally, into
fantasy – Bundlemen, Spottymen, M/S Millionaire Baby-Buyer, Gypsy
gangs, lurking paedophiles, Moroccan tribes and the rest. These six years seem to
confirm the PJ's belief that there really wasn't anywhere else to
look. So what, exactly, do Abreu and Duarte – we'll leave aside
their ignorant camp-followers – think the PJ should have done in
late 2007? Suddenly announce that they were going to forget the
reconstruction stuff and look instead at a Hewitt before the
prosecutor's bar came down? No, the Nine were all
they had and until Cider Jack earns his knighthood in May by proving
us and six years experience wrong by naming the 196-strong gang who
abducted Madeleine, the Nine is still all that any investigation
possesses. It is likely that Rebelo
knew the game was more or less up once his UK visit to discuss the
forensic results was over. All the problem areas about the Nine and
their evidence had been shovelled into a leads file loosely called
"Reconstruction", waiting for the next step. But there
wasn't a next step. Most of the Seven, as Rebelo could see, were
loudly asserting their desire to return to Portugal to help the
inquiry through their joint spokesman while simultaneously – and
secretly – taking all necessary steps to ensure that they wouldn't
do so. And there was nothing that he could do about it: the Seven
weren't suspects to be forced back via prima facie evidence and a
European Arrest Warrant. They could only be asked to assist
voluntarily.
In theory, as the
supporters of the parents have constantly pointed out, the McCanns
had to return for a clarification of evidence if the Portuguese
demanded they do so: not only did they not refuse to return with the
others, the argument goes, but they couldn't refuse, so there. Pull
the other one, chums. There was no machinery to enforce such a demand
except their own consciences, which at that time were not in
high-visibility mode. You don't engage the best extradition lawyers
in the world if you're anxious for a PJ reunion. The only way they
could be forced back was via an EAW (European Arrest Warrant) and that again legally required
prima facie evidence which, with the death of the forensic results
hopes, didn't exist. That left only the
interviews under the letters rogatory process to probe the gaps in
their evidence and that process itself had two fatal weaknesses.
First, the questioning was tightly confined by the treaty process to
clarification of events surrounding the disappearance; a "no
fishing expedition" requirement, as the lawyers call it, meant
that the police could not build on material as it emerged by
developing new lines of questioning to test veracity. Hence, and most
obviously, the failure to explore the evidence of Jane Tanner and the
surveillance van episode. As the Bureau has repeatedly pointed out,
to a certain amount of scepticism, Tanner neither confirmed nor
denied identifying Robert Murat as the supposed abductor and under
the terms of their remit the Leicester police, though perfectly aware
of the evasion, were not allowed to press her with "Now look, I
want a yes or no answer to this question: did you tell the officers
with you that the person seen by you from the van resembled the
person you saw at 9.13 on May 3?" That was probably the
most important question in the case so far and it could have decided
whether Jane Tanner was a credible and truthful witness or not, since
Bundleman/Eggman and the rest bear no possible resemblance to Robert
Murat and since Leicester police knew very well what her answer had
been in the van through the UK liaison officer Bob Small. So the
Seven only had to say what they wished to say without any fear of
being trapped into logical contradictions.
The second weakness, of
course, was how any revelations from the Seven could be used
regarding Kate and Gerry McCann. Nothing that was said in Leicester,
even if Jane Tanner was exposed, helped in getting the McCanns back.
Tanner could claim in the future (tearfully as usual) that she'd been
intimidated and now denied her answers but even if she didn't the
McCanns, safely within their fortress of lawyers, couldn't be forced
back for years, if ever. How did that square with the prosecutors'
deadlines? Having watched from behind a screen as the questions were
asked Rebelo knew the score and left early, missing the 3,500 or so
"ums" and "ers" of David Payne's performance –
the first record in history of a red-blooded male (we presume)
forgetting what a blonde woman standing by a doorway and wrapped only
in a towel had been wearing when he saw her. Who Dunnit? As usual the Bureau takes
the conservative non-dramatic view of events, believing that, given
these circumstances, Rebelo didn't have to be a clean-up man tasked
with killing the investigation. It didn't need one. Whatever the
speculation about cover-ups etc. the evidence above clearly suggests
that the actual killers were the Tapas Nine, acting alone except for
their lawyers. It only needed Rebelo's
PJ to make the understandable, if slightly dodgy, claim in their
report that the rogatory interviews "revealed nothing new"
(they hadn't even been translated, let alone analysed in depth)
rather than "they don't get us any nearer a charge and it's time
to give up", and for Rebelo and Menezes to agree that further
timescale extensions were not on, for the investigation to end. Unfortunately Menezes
made a poor fist of his role. Naturally the "missing paragraph"
required to explain a shelving despite a key area remaining
unexplored couldn't have been written as frankly as we've given it
above: that's not the way the world goes round and would likely have
cost him and his colleague their jobs. His task, and challenge,
though, was to justify the shelving while maintaining the integrity
of the PJ and its investigation on the one hand, and avoiding leaving
a black cloud of suspicion over two of the arguidos and their friends
on the other. The latter would have caused uproar – claims of a
smear job by the terrifying UK press and loud demands to lay hands on
the McCanns by a dissatisfied Portuguese public, demands that, as
we've seen, couldn't be met.
Menezes attempted to
square this circle by minimizing the significance of the Nine's
behaviour and evidence while stressing how exhaustive the inquiry had
been. The PJ report section on the needs of the reconstruction
couldn't be omitted from the archiving summary since the PJ wouldn't
permit it so Menezes attempted to counter its explosive implications
by smothering them with love. Hence the embarrassing purple-prosed
final paragraphs in which his rhetoric took wing with references to
European literature, the art of the who-dunnit and the analytical
power of the average man. All it lacked was a swooning reference to
the "fragrance" of Kate McCann, such as a dribbling English
judge had once made about a Mrs Archer during her well-known, and
crooked, husband's libel case. So intent was Menezes on
being "fair" to the two arguidos that he skimmed, misread
or minimised the evidence against them. Thus his summary used the
collusive and in places untruthful first batch (May 4) of statements
by the group, not the later ones in which they had been forced to
change their stories under questioning;
Certes "cherry picking", donc panachage, mais plus de recours aux dépositions du 10 mai qu'aux premières, celles du 4 mai, ayant statistiquement plus de chance d'être authentiques.
and he got them wrong too,
the dolt, referring to Russell O'Brien leaving the Tapas restaurant
with Mathew at 9 PM, for example.
Une des erreurs, effectivement, qui ne cessera d'être répétée par tous les documentaires portugais qui s'essaieront à "reconstituer". Le rapport final de la PJ n'est pas exempt d'erreurs non plus.
A mistake like that in an
official prosecutors' report! And with all the smothering the smoke
was still escaping, as in his famous reference to the McCanns being
"victims". What were they terrible victims of, Menny, a
miscarriage of justice? Why, they were victims, he said, of their
wilful refusal to co-operate with the investigation, thus losing the
chance to "demonstrate their innocence", poor lambs. Such
victimhood. So that was the archiving
summary, their "exoneration". There's no need to waste any
more words on this lamentable work. We repeat we can't see that
Menezes, Rebelo or Monteiro had any choice but to wind up the affair
as best they could, given the forensics, time-scale and their
impotence in the face of the Nine.
But what about the Nine
who had thus got away with refusing to co-operate, what did they
achieve for themselves? The only defence any of them have regarding
the fact of their killing off the police search for the child is that
they believed that the Portuguese police were out to get them, but
once you force your way through the self-pity it isn't much of one,
is it? As so many people have said, your own safety is normally put
to one side, or not even considered, when there is a chance, however
small, of helping to save your child. As for most of the other seven,
just what risks terrified them so much that they wouldn't return?
Portugal isn't Iran or Putin's Russia and they were never at risk of
lengthy custody. Yet they opted for cowardice, by their own account
of events, or something worse if their accounts are untrue,
abandoning a four year old child to her fate. Brrr! Chilly.
The McCanns: failed to
demonstrate their innocence, according to the official summary
report. The Seven: failed to assist for "unknown reasons"
according to the official summary report. It seems incredible that
nine adults should be content to have their reputations sullied for
the rest of their lives by these official conclusions. That is the
legacy of condemnation and suspicion they are going to leave their
children. It follows, naturally,
that a new investigational review offers all of them their only
chance of removing this blemish. It can't happen passively, as it
were – simply waiting while a review/investigation which doesn't
include the close examination of their stories is concluded. Even if
the child's body is discovered that won't lift the cloud over them
since, after many years, the circumstances in which she died may be
no more conclusive than the circumstances of her disappearance. Only
their willing assistance can give them all the chance to demonstrate
their innocence. That is why Kate and
Gerry McCann should have been pleading with the Yard for the last
eighteen months for the opportunity to answer any questions at all,
no holds barred. And so should their cowardly friends.
(...)
Libel diary – Thursday
morning – 17.01.2013
John Blacksmith writes:
I've experienced plenty of shocking events in my time and survived
encounters with a number of monsters but I'm willing to confess that
I read Kate McCann's Madeleine with something approaching horror. The stormy and
unpredictable violence of her personality, her inability to conceive
of anyone's needs beyond her own, her failure ever to write about, or
confront the memory of, her oldest child as a real human being,
confining herself instead to recalling and describing photographs and
images of her daughter in a pattern of clinical aberration, were
troubling enough. Then there was the extraordinary risk she was
taking in setting out a version of events that people close to her,
particularly her Portuguese lawyer and his assistant, knew to be
untrue. What, I wondered, was she thinking as she sat alone at her
desktop, somehow constructing a narrative on several different levels
at once, addressing simultaneously the police who she knew would be
reading her book, her seven friends and her family who had seen a
very different Kate McCann, the journalists who she had used to
subvert the investigation so successfully and, finally, the "public"
itself? Perhaps she'd convinced herself that the latter, whose
support in the UK had carried her through so many dangerous passages,
was the only one that mattered and would continue to keep her
impregnable and wrote accordingly. Even creepier was the sense that
one gets from certain Nabokov books, including Lolita – the feeling
that at times you can hear a ghostly voice hidden somewhere behind
the narrative, laughing at the challenge of deceiving the audience. For the book reveals that
Kate McCann is quite mad. That was why I softened the end of the
review I wrote for the McCann Files: the exposure of her madness was
so raw and discomfiting that it made me pause at the impact my own
writings might have on what passes publicly for her personality if
she read them.
Sympathy for a sick
person might be in order then. Except for her
ruthlessness in her own interests illustrated by the psychotic
pursuit of Goncalo Amaral in which she used everything she had, the
wealth her public fans had provided, the support and sympathy of
people who believed in her, the dirty newspapers like the Mirror
willing to collude in the plot and the unrelenting viciousness at her
core, to destroy him. "Destroy", for once, means what it
says. As does "Kafkaesque". The assault that she and her
tight-mouthed accomplice sprang on Amaral, the nightmare in which
they trapped him and the relentless way they upped the pursuit month
by month could easily have driven a lesser man to suicide.
While Kate McCann was
whining to the UK media at the unfair fate she had suffered, I was
hearing how her campaign had claimed its first victim – Amaral's
wife having a complete breakdown and telling her beleaguered husband
that even if he was right she simply couldn't stand the terror of it
any more: both the pain and the odds against them were too great, he
had to seek out the McCanns and settle. She was an innocent victim in
the way the whiner never was but that cut no ice with Kate McCann:
she was just an object to be trodden on and squashed in her pursuit
of her enemy. That pursuit has failed.
The McCanns are going to settle on Amaral's terms and that means it's
the beginning of the end of six years of lies and deception. No, I
can't evoke even a touch of sympathy for them: they have acted
wickedly and now they are going to pay.
Libel Diary – 17.01.2013
(...) The only information I
ever get hold of is connected with the use of the term "we"
in the Blacksmith Bureau. Everyone who is interested knows who I am
since I posted my full name and location on the old 3As forum in
2008. Bureau contributions, however, don't derive from me or belong
to me alone: the Bureau exists as a centre for messages and opinions
about the case from a number of what we might call the "sane
critics" of the parents, people who have done a great deal more
investigation than I have and have dedicated much of their lives to
the case in a way which puts me to shame. We know about the
negotiations which, we repeat, are known to all UK national editors.
Anyone who knows the McCanns' modus operandi, either through watching
the Leveson hearings or studying Duarte's briefing note for the
Portuguese media after the Wikileaks episode, should know how they
prepare the way for their media spin initiatives by confidential
contact with editors so that there will be a spurious unanimity of
view. That is what is taking place now.
The purpose of
pre-empting their spin plan is not to build ourselves up but to
remind all our readers of the secret, and disgraceful, way in which
the media have supped with a very short spoon with the McCanns for
six years, a subject which we have taken up with them on occasion,
most recently with the editor of the Daily Mail, although we got
little change from him. One of the reasons that the story is dragging
on and leaking is that it is not just the McCanns who stand to lose
but all the newspapers and a number of individuals that defamed
Amaral so grossly while helping the McCanns keep Amaral's claims away
from the British public. In helping the McCanns now they are
attempting to help themselves as well.
And we want them all to
fail, the lying, dishonest, greedy bastards. That's the axe we have
to grind. Listening Kier? Listening Clarence?
Goncalo Amaral statement
on May 18 2009
I can say that we are going to sue the McCanns and others that, for the moment, I am not saying who they are, because we have a team of lawyers who are studying the case because we feel defamed and slandered, and we will move forward.
Goncalo Amaral interview
with Algarve 123 December 8 2011
I have my anger well-guarded. No feelings for revenge. Like I say, they will pay for what they have done to me and my family – but through the courts. Even after everything that has happened, I still have faith in the Portuguese justice system.
(...)
Libel Diary –
19.01.2013
So there we are: readers
will no doubt have seen the Portuguese announcement that the trial is
suspended (for a maximum of six months) for the negotiations to take
place. The Bureau sits here
placidly waiting for the first comments from Kate & Gerry McCann
or people speaking on their behalf. Listen to them carefully and
you'll be able to judge for yourselves who is asking whom for a
settlement. Of course if they don't say anything over the next week
or so – we'll just have to nag them again. Come on Clarence –
you're up to the task, aren't you?
Oh Dear – 21.01.2013
(...) Turning now to the libel
case itself. The simply crazed suggestion that GA has asked for
terms, and the even crazier idea that Kate McCann would take her
fingernails out of GA's eyeballs unless she was dragged off by male
nurses, implies that he sees no possible hope of winning the case.
Dear oh dear, oh dear. No hope? The libel writ has only
been released to the two papers with most to lose from Amaral's
vengeance who've been in the pockets of the parents since 2007,
never to the millions of suckers who believe in the pair and
contributed to the fund – the Mirror and the People. From what they
have published there were three main grounds in the writ. That Amaral's claims were
false. That, in addition, the
claims had caused enormous psychological and behavioural damage to
the couple which deserved financial compensation. And that the "search
for Madeleine" had been, and was continuing to be, damaged by
the inference from GA's "thesis" that the child was dead. Forget the propaganda war
and forget the spin. Just going on judicial processes and Kate
McCann's own words they no longer have a claim under any of these
three heads. A complete defence to
Claim One is that "the defendant had good reason to believe his
allegations were true and were made in good faith." The Lisbon
injunction hearing in 2010 heard evidence from officers in the case
that, based on their investigation, they were all of the same opinion
as Amaral that the McCanns had presented "a fairy tale" of
abduction. The archiving summary "on the reconstruction"
detailed the evidence against the nine which still existed at the
time of archiving. Clearly he had, and has, good reason. The final appeal hearing
put on judicial record that the Amaral interpretation of the case up
to its archiving was of the same level of validity and good faith as
the interpretation which the prosecutor had made in authorising
shelving on the grounds of innocence of the arguidos. Therefore there
was no evidence of "bad faith". As the Bureau pointed out
last year the judgement in the Amaral v Marcos Aragão Correia libel
case found for the latter on exactly those grounds.
Psychological
and behavioural damage to the couple. Whatever Duarte claimed
in 2009, Kate McCann's words in Madeleine, as well as the couple's
actions since, demonstrate the falsity of this claim. In the final
chapter of the book Kate McCann describes the various severe
difficulties she and Gerry McCann have suffered since 2007. None of
these are attributed to the statements or actions of Amaral or match
the list of symptoms given by their lawyer in the writ. The only
conclusive effect that Kate McCann claims Amaral had on her was to
make her psychopathically furious with him: if everyone who makes
Kate McCann insanely angry was sued for libel the justice system
would grind to a halt.Either she is lying now or she was lying in the
statement of claim.
In that same chapter she
refers to events which demonstrate that she was undamaged by Amaral
in the way she claimed. She refers to going onto the Oprah Winfrey
show, in which her state can be seen in recordings, to dancing and
going to social functions. Photographic evidence confirms this. The claims have not a
shred of evidence so far to support them and appear to be
contradicted in detail by her book.
Damaging or
preventing the search. This was always going to
be near-impossible to prove given that the onus in Portugal lies on
the claimant, not the defendant. In 2013 the situation for the
claimants is much worse. The only "evidence" that Kate
McCann has revealed publicly is either hearsay or her "belief".
The matter is so subjective that there would have to be very
convincing quantitative, not qualitative, evidence to make a judge
even consider the claim. There is none that we know of.
Secondly the "search"
to which the claimants were referring no longer exists, having been
stopped in March 2012. The McCann website states that it was stopped
because the Scotland Yard review is now doing the "searching".
No claim that Amaral's thesis could affect the Yard search has been
made by the McCanns nor, obviously, could it be made bearing in mind
the statements of Redwood on behalf of the inquiry. So the claim is
not just wrong but a non-sequitur argument. No evidence for the
claim. Written evidence to the contrary. Does anyone seriously
believe that Amaral or his lawyer would be pleading with the McCanns
to drop their case given these facts? We'd love to know the evidence
that anyone can produce on the net to refute the three statements
we've made above. Sooner or later the parents are going to have to
face the reality of the situation. The longer they pretend the more
crushing the defeat.
They just don't get it –
25.01.2013
The poor boobies in the
McCann camp think this is some temporary blip that they'll weather if
they keep their heads down. They can't get to grips with what's going
on. So let's spell out why the libel trial suspension is no ordinary
news item. Since 2008 and the
publication of Goncalo Amaral's book the strategy of the parents and
their team has been simple, as all the best deceptions are : Deliberately highlighting
the tabloid rubbish of autumn 2007 against them so that everyone,
from the house of Commons to Oprah Winfrey to the on-line audience
for the Leveson inquiry, knows the mad accusations by heart, while
muffling and blanketing the truly dangerous, accurate, stuff from
beginning to end. Capitaliser sur les excréments de la presse-caniveau.
That's it folks, it's that simple: no need for hidden allies, protection or political help. That is the plan that they have consistently followed and it's worked a treat. But only by keeping the lid on Amaral and the hard core of truth about the PJ investigation. Bit by bit the contents have dribbled out and the pair have struggled to screw the lid down even tighter. The steam started to rise in Lisbon in 2010 and spouted out with Kate McCann's ill-conceived Madeleine. Now, after five years, the pot has finally burst in their faces. Their proven lies about the course of the PJ investigation go back not to May 2007, where so much is still uncertain or a matter of opinion, but to the beginning of August of that year. That is when the proof of Kate and Gerry McCann's attempt to prevent the UK public finding out about the details of the investigation at any cost becomes visible. And that's why the end of the case against Goncalo Amaral – for it will not be resumed in six months – is so crucial. That's why the Bureau splashed it. Leaving aside the couple's role earlier in the investigation, at all the subsequent crucial junctures of the affair the parents have either lied or deliberately misrepresented or muffled events to deceive the British public about the interrupted investigation.
That's it folks, it's that simple: no need for hidden allies, protection or political help. That is the plan that they have consistently followed and it's worked a treat. But only by keeping the lid on Amaral and the hard core of truth about the PJ investigation. Bit by bit the contents have dribbled out and the pair have struggled to screw the lid down even tighter. The steam started to rise in Lisbon in 2010 and spouted out with Kate McCann's ill-conceived Madeleine. Now, after five years, the pot has finally burst in their faces. Their proven lies about the course of the PJ investigation go back not to May 2007, where so much is still uncertain or a matter of opinion, but to the beginning of August of that year. That is when the proof of Kate and Gerry McCann's attempt to prevent the UK public finding out about the details of the investigation at any cost becomes visible. And that's why the end of the case against Goncalo Amaral – for it will not be resumed in six months – is so crucial. That's why the Bureau splashed it. Leaving aside the couple's role earlier in the investigation, at all the subsequent crucial junctures of the affair the parents have either lied or deliberately misrepresented or muffled events to deceive the British public about the interrupted investigation.
• On August 2 2007, they
began the calculated lying about the police activities against them
which form the core of Amaral's claims.
• In summer 2008, they
deliberately misrepresented the Portuguese archiving summary which
had confirmed the Seven's refusal to co-operate with the inquiry and
the McCanns' failure to "demonstrate their innocence".
• In January 2009, they
secretly commenced the silencing and libel actions against Amaral
while lying on the greatest possible scale that they were in Portugal
for different reasons.
• In 2010, the
Portuguese courts demolished their human rights claim against Amaral
and one of the three legs of their libel claim. There was no media
statement from the McCanns.
• In January 2013, the
McCanns accepted defeat in their libel claim but refused to make any
statement or answer any questions about the matter.
On August 2 2007 a police
squad turned the McCanns over. The house was searched, possessions
were seized and they were left, according to Kate McCann, with "just
the clothes they were wearing." Later their car was seized for
forensic examination. The lies which both the
McCanns told on that date and afterwards – outright porkies – to
prevent the UK public discovering anything of the truth about the
investigation are listed in these Bureau archives below. Kate
McCann's attempted excuse in Madeleine (page 206) that they "had
no choice" but to lie demonstrates how lying is their preferred
or instinctive mode of operation when in a tight spot. The lying
about the investigation and Amaral has never stopped since then.
This is the Team's précis
of the summary which they fed to the UK press on publication and
which, in the usual way of the great days of Team McCann spin, was
written up in the same words in numerous papers. This one comes from
the Standard. The dishonesty and the motive are quite manifest.
The Portuguese police inquiry into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was condemned in the strongest terms by the country's public prosecutors, new documents revealed today. [a deliberate lie; it was not.]
Detectives were criticised for establishing "no element of proof" about what happened to Madeleine or even whether she was alive or dead. [a deliberate lie; they were not]
A source close to the McCanns' legal team said action against the Portuguese police was now increasingly likely. He said: "Given this blatant misrepresentation of evidence, legal action against the Portuguese police is very much on the agenda. [another deliberate lie; there was no "misrepresentation of evidence". We still await the legal action against the PJ].
The lawyers are considering very seriously whether action needs to be taken against individual officers when evidence was clearly misrepresented in such obvious ways at such crucial times. [see above].
As we know from Madeleine
Gerry McCann went to Portugal on January 13 2009 specifically to plot the libel claim
and gagging order with Duarte. In perhaps the most prolonged and
widespread example of his gratuitous lying he gave interview after
interview stating that he was there for other reasons.
Not only was Amaral
vindicated but the judges, as Kate McCann's Madeleine let slip,
knocked away the third leg of the libel claim, damage to the
so-called search. She writes:
"The latest verdict was that Amaral’s poisonous allegations did not damage our investigation in any way." That's one of the three libel claims dead. She and Gerry McCann had known since 2009 that proving Amaral's interpretation of events in the apartment, the subject of the main claim of the three would be very difficult. When announcing the dropping of the libel case against Tal y Qual then Mitchell had said: "The libel action against Tal & Qual has been dropped for a number of reasons. Firstly, the newspaper went bust some time ago. Secondly Tal & Qual could probably have mounted a defence, as they were reporting what a certain police officer believed at the time." Which is the same 100% defence –"genuine belief that something is true" – which worked for Mad Marcos and would work for Amaral in court. So much for Clarence's version. The Telegraph, to whom he had given the story, was rather more blunt: "This week the couple withdrew their defamation action after being advised that the newspaper had a strong defence under Portuguese law. It could argue the story was published in good faith because senior police officers did at the time believe the McCanns may have been implicated in the case." That's two of the three claims dead – but they had to keep the lid on, didn't they?
"The latest verdict was that Amaral’s poisonous allegations did not damage our investigation in any way." That's one of the three libel claims dead. She and Gerry McCann had known since 2009 that proving Amaral's interpretation of events in the apartment, the subject of the main claim of the three would be very difficult. When announcing the dropping of the libel case against Tal y Qual then Mitchell had said: "The libel action against Tal & Qual has been dropped for a number of reasons. Firstly, the newspaper went bust some time ago. Secondly Tal & Qual could probably have mounted a defence, as they were reporting what a certain police officer believed at the time." Which is the same 100% defence –"genuine belief that something is true" – which worked for Mad Marcos and would work for Amaral in court. So much for Clarence's version. The Telegraph, to whom he had given the story, was rather more blunt: "This week the couple withdrew their defamation action after being advised that the newspaper had a strong defence under Portuguese law. It could argue the story was published in good faith because senior police officers did at the time believe the McCanns may have been implicated in the case." That's two of the three claims dead – but they had to keep the lid on, didn't they?
And on the parallel track
the McCanns, despite the statement of one of their lawyers on BBC
television in 2007 that the aim was to "expunge" from the
public memory the wild claims against them made in the press:
• In March 2009
recirculated all the invented tabloid claims against them to the
public House of Commons media committee.
• In 2012 recirculated
all the same claims in even greater detail to the public and on-line
audience for the Leveson inquiry.
Highlight the one. Keep
the lid on the other. The lid's off. They are
toast.
Sitting pretty –
26.02.2013
The current disagreement
on twitter and elsewhere regarding who blinked first in the McCanns v
Amaral case is, on the face of it, simply silly. Soon enough the
court and the two sides will release information about events and at
some point there will be a judgement. So we have to wait, like
it or not. Yet something of
significance is nevertheless happening. On the Net supporters of both
parties, some of them authorised, fight it out and in doing so enable
us to peer through the smoke and haze of deliberate disinformation
and self-deception to gain some sort of picture – for everything in
this world leaves a trace – of what the principals are actually up
to. What is new is that, accidentally or otherwise, the proxies and
commentators on both sides are finally opening themselves up in a way
that will allow their credibility and their judgement to be tested. The parents' supporters,
with the tacit co-operation of the McCanns themselves, have been in
the happy position of maintaining that the pair were officially
cleared in 2008 and that any questions about their conduct are simply
flat-earth expressions of loony Net hatred. The virtual silence of
the UK overground media, broken only by occasional bursts of sympathy
for the couple, or pit-bull attacks on Amaral, is taken as
confirmation that no questions remain for intelligent adults to pose.
That is why we’ve always said that the supporters of Kate and Gerry
McCann are stuck in 2008. But now they've decided,
finally, to come up-to-date and start making their own factual
claims, rather than parroting those of Menezes. It is an obvious and
established fact, they say, that Amaral, originator of the whole case
against the parents and the chief hope of the haters, is not just a
crook but a loser who for years has been trying to wriggle his way
out of the libel case that the McCanns so justifiably brought against
him. He knows for certain,
they say, that he cannot win the case. They then give legal reasons
why he can't win, how "everybody" in the loop is aware he
has no chance. And, they say, he has finally accepted reality by
getting his lawyers to ask for the case to be suspended so that he
can offer the parents vindication without being utterly ruined.
Vindication will mean, obviously, the withdrawal of all the charges
he has made against the pair. Well, there's nothing
weasel-worded or ambiguous about that, is there? No hiding behind
others' views or saying that this is merely their opinion. These are
matters of established fact that the poor Net loonies will soon have
to accept.
Which actually means that the debate about who blinked first isn't trivial at all. The fact of Amaral's withdrawal and the parents' victory, if true, as they say, really is a huge development. It will finish the job that the archiving summary began and it will demonstrate that the parents' critics have not only lost the focus of their hopes but have been shown up as both wrong and, worse, as either naive or as fibbers who are still trying to pretend that this hasn't happened. Joana Morais and her crowd and the drug-taking fantasist Blacksmith and his crew of losers will have been caught out in their deceptions and are going to have to fall silent. It's big, big stuff. You know what? We agree with them. It isn't just a matter of a futile guessing game. It's a key moment for credibility. If Goncalo Amaral is found to have pleaded for terms and withdraws all his claims against the McCanns then yes, whatever Joana might do, we'll accept the reality, accept that our information and judgement hasn't been good enough, accept that maybe we've been used, apologise and close the Bureau down. Now what about the other side of the coin? Let us suppose that any settlement, in or out of court, clearly shows that Amaral wasn't wriggling, hadn't pleaded for terms, doesn't withdraw his interpretation, doesn't settle on the parents terms and demonstrates that if anyone has won it isn't Kate and Gerry McCann. First, what will it say about the truthfulness of these supporters? The claims they've explicitly made that we've listed above. That one's easy: they will either be shown to be truthful or outright f****** liars, no ifs and buts. And their information about the case? Well that one will be easily answered too, won't it? Either invented or they've been deliberately misled. Of course that in turn might bring up the question who has been doing the misleading? And why. Lastly, what will it say about the balance of reliability and judgement of the two sides over the last five years, about whether the active supporters of the parents, including those who have had direct access to the couple, have had the right end of the stick all along? And about the reliability and truthfulness of the McCanns' own site, which came out with its own authorised statement on the rumours? But that's just speculation. The uncomfortable fact is that the active McCann supporters have got us right where they wanted us: they know the truth and they can sit back and laugh that the truth, when finally acknowledged, is also going to close the little Bureau down. It's a very big moment. Another one gone. What more could they want?
Still sitting
comfortably? - 27.02.2013
Who to believe? Then let's get back to
yesterday's subject, the question of credibility. Since 10pm on May 3 2007
credibility has been at the heart of the case; in fact, in the
absence of tangible evidence, forensic or otherwise, it is the case.
At 10pm the babble of voices began, appropriately, with a loud,
public scream, followed by apparent panic and hysteria not just from
Kate and Gerry McCann but from their middle-aged doctor friends, all
experienced in handling emergencies, who say they "ran around in
circles shouting and bumping into each other" rather than trying
to assess what might have happened to a missing child. Since then the
raised voices have never stopped. That problem, for those
who are simply interested in the truth of what happened that night,
remains exactly as it did on May 3 and the succeeding weeks. Who is
telling the truth and who's trying to con us? We can say at once that
the parents are practised, self-admitted and incorrigible liars as
the evidence quoted section by section in the Blacksmith Bureau
proves beyond any doubt. That, and not a belief that the McCanns are
guilty of anything involving their daughter, is the reason for the
Bureau's involvement in the case. That's why we have as many enemies
among the anti-McCann groups, especially those on the losers' forums,
as we do among the activist supporters. The former, firm in their
beliefs that the McCanns dunnit but rather weaker when it comes to
evidence justifying their view (they haven't got any) squeal loudly
about the little Bureau's inability to demonstrate "what side
it's on". The vocal supporters hate
us for a different reason, apart, that is, from their general
propensity for hatred. They can't stand our habit of pointing things
out with supporting evidence – proof – from primary sources, not
newspaper junk, that they are unable to challenge let alone refute,
and it pisses them off no end. We'll add a bolt-on to the Bureau soon
so that the posts become searchable and readers can ignore our
opinion pieces, which aren't worth much anyway, and retrieve those
sections where the proofs are laid out. Among many examples we've
listed the lies in the 2007 "blogs", Gerry's attempt to
fool the British public about the progress of the investigation.
There has been no rebuttal. We highlighted Kate McCann's own
description of how she had lied to and deceived the media in August
2007 together with her equally dishonest "justification"
for doing so, and Gerry McCann's public lie that he was "ill"
on August 2 rather than being turned over by the police and left with
only the clothes he was wearing. Any rebuttal? Not a word. Any
acknowledgement, then, from the same quarters that any of this had
even happened? Nope.
We've published the
evidence showing that six of the seven friends gave public commitment
after commitment of their willingness, their keen desire, to return
to Portugal to assist the investigators if requested – and then,
when they were requested, they refused to do so, the nasty little
liars, this time hoping that nobody would find out.
Ils ne pouvaient vraiment pas savoir que les PJFiles seraient publiées sur DVD ! Même leurs enfants, d'ici à quelques années, pourront lire leurs interviews "rogatoires".
Any rebuttal? You know the answer. We've published the transcript where prosecutor Menezes states under oath that the nine "did not tell the truth" in their statements about their movements on May 3, something he somehow forgot to mention in his archiving summary. Refutation? Discussion of the implications? Acknowledgement? Nothing. Il parle de "non-vérités".
Ils ne pouvaient vraiment pas savoir que les PJFiles seraient publiées sur DVD ! Même leurs enfants, d'ici à quelques années, pourront lire leurs interviews "rogatoires".
Any rebuttal? You know the answer. We've published the transcript where prosecutor Menezes states under oath that the nine "did not tell the truth" in their statements about their movements on May 3, something he somehow forgot to mention in his archiving summary. Refutation? Discussion of the implications? Acknowledgement? Nothing. Il parle de "non-vérités".
The list goes on and on,
demonstrating that whatever happens, whatever one's views, it is
impossible to accept the unsupported word of the McCanns about
anything. And "anything" obviously includes not only Kate
McCanns' claim that the PJ "offered her a deal" (they
didn't) but more importantly her description of the empty apartment
on May 3, shutters, window, storm-force wind and all. That's why
we've taken the view that only a re-examination of eight of the nine
by the Portuguese police can demonstrate whether, on this occasion,
the parents did, most unusually, tell the truth and that's what we go
on campaigning for. Simples. No hate. No
theories. No disciples. Just recognition of the proof of verbal
dishonesty which makes the couple, backed up by their friends,
completely unreliable, literally incredible, witnesses. So we can't
accept their unsupported claims of an abductor. That's our position. If either the parents or
a single one of their supporters had the guts to confront these facts
and stand up and say, honestly, "look, we accept there is a
problem, it looks bad but..." we might feel differently. Instead we see an
unarguable pattern of lies from the parents since 2007, and an
absolute silence about the porkies they have been been caught out in
– and we find exactly the same pattern in their active supporters.
Whether it's the cudgel bearers on Twitter, the laughably lightweight
countering-the-myths forum and website "think" pieces, the
"analyses" of that Pooter of the Willesden streets debunker
or the demented violence of the McCanns' various butch enforcers
whose posts bulge like their biceps – you know them, I'm sure –
the one thing you never get is an acknowledgement of the questions
the parents' extraordinary behaviour poses. None of them will touch
the subject.
The Portuguese libel case
is one of the very few opportunities that the judiciary has had to
examine, weigh and assess the credibility of Kate and Gerry McCann
and their claims. At the first such opportunity, the Portuguese human
rights hearings in 2010, their defeat was total. What about this
time? The verdict or settlement will have a decisive impact on the
reputation of both parties. The McCanns' credibility, given the above
facts, can never be repaired by any court but their position with the
public will certainly be improved if they win their case. If Amaral
is vindicated, on the other hand, his credibility and
"interpretations" naturally gain added weight and, since
those interpretations include his observation that things have gone
"badly for the McCanns" in Oporto, the implications could
be very far reaching indeed. It is a key event in this five year long
drama. We've already said that
if Goncalo Amaral withdraws his claims we'll accept all the
implications because it's the truth we're interested in, not
buttressing any position of our own: we'll be off double quick, which
naturally means we won't be around to attempt to spin the settlement
or verdict. Do you think a single one of the supporters is capable of
making any similar commitment respecting the truth? Just watch. Next, the evolution of
lying: what is a Kate McCann "rumour"?
Not beginning to fidget yet? - 28.02.2013
(...) Have others on that side
of the fence ever really tackled the issue of suggestibility in this
case? To paid spin? For instance, do activists think that the
affable lawyer Smethurst was just being windy in 2007 when he said
that it was "incumbent upon
us to portray the truth to the media and in particular to try and
expunge any ill-founded theories about Gerry and Kate's involvement
so that the media attention can focus back onto the abduction and
therefore onto the fact that we have a missing little girl out
there."
In 2007 Smethurst, along
with everyone else at that time, couldn't have known what "the
truth" was, could he? Yet he was confident that, given the
money, given the people and the time, he could get the British public
to believe a certain version of "the truth". And he was
speaking on a BBC flagship programme. Do the activists think that
they aren't part of that public? That he was only swaying others?
What about that Hanover Communications claim, that people like to
tweet
…by giving journalists positive stories to report, coverage turned from hostility to the McCanns to sympathy about their ordeal. This campaign won the crisis communication category at the 2008 CIPR awards.
(...) How "credible, reliable
and concerned with the truth" do you think the supporters of the
parents will be when the verdict/settlement arrives? Clue: not one of
their sites has yet attracted attention to the Lisbon Appeal Court
human rights judgement back in 2010 by devoting a thread to an
accurate appraisal of it. They've got the Bennett slaughter judgement
up in full after only two weeks but not Lisbon's after two years. In
denial yet again – is that because there's no Hanover
Communications to guide them on handling it?
But don't listen to us:
get your own answer by watching the tweets and reading the posts.
Kate McCann and when is a
rumour a rumour? Sorry, that will have to wait for tomorrow.
Then I'll begin – 01.03.2013
John Blacksmith (Antony
Sharples) writes: Now that the McCann Affair has reached such a
crucial stage it's increasingly likely that the public won't need
people trying, however poorly, to be guides to it anymore. If Goncalo
Amaral resiles and asks for mercy then my assessment of him, the one
I've passed on to readers for several years, will be seen to be wrong
and I'll take the consequences. If, however, he is on the verge of
victory then, frankly, I'm going to feel sorry for Kate and Gerry
McCann and I don't want to stick around to comment on what threatens
to be a very painful process for them. So – and only for those who
are interested in reading some minor personal details about the
affair – I can speak a little more freely now that I have no future
position, or sources, to protect. When I got the email from
a journalist on one of the UK nationals a few weeks ago asking me if
I knew anything about a McCann rumour that had hit the desks, I had
to reply that I couldn't help because I didn't know anything. A few
hours later I received another email, this time from Portugal,
telling me briefly that the pair had given up and asked for terms. I sat there for a while
staring at the screen and turning it over in my mind. I found it
almost impossible to believe, so critical were the implications for
the couple. If the story was true it was the beginning of the end of
the affair, of that I had no doubt, for I felt that nothing except
desperation in the face of impossible odds, not necessarily confined
to the libel trial, could have prompted such a move. So before even
trying to think it through I needed to get some confirmation – but
how? In April last year
Goncalo Amaral recorded his measured and surprisingly unruffled piece
for Panorama before firing a warning shot across the bows of a
certain Andy Redwood, reminding that gentleman of the limits beyond
which the officer's contribution to the programme would not be
allowed to go. In a short but explosive interview he revealed the
existence both of the Oporto squad and the hitherto unknown
Anglo-Portuguese liaison team, as well as adding his now famous
assessment of its progress: things there "were not going well
for the McCanns". The creaking and
secretive wheels of the Portuguese justice system now whizzed round
with unprecedented speed and transparency: within days the
authorities were forced to concede the truth of his revelations about
the structure of the review: those warning shots had not been aimed
at Redwood alone.
With that Amaral went into seclusion. He refused to enlarge on his comments or discuss the details of his own case, as far as I could tell, with anyone outside his legal team for the rest of the year. People I'd known who were close to his thinking found that their relations with him remained affable but uninformative and were able to tell me nothing.
Cette équipe a pour principe de base de se méfier de tout. Le public qui a pitié du sort de GA contribue financièrement, mais ne bénéficie d'aucun éclaircissement ni ne peut faire savoir ce qu'il pense. Comme si on attendait du public "payez et fermez-la".
What was clear was that he and his new legal team were now giving the McCanns zero to use or spin; on the contrary the parents and their lawyers, who had known nothing about the Oporto and liaison teams, were reduced to a panicky attempt at damage limitation themselves by using, yet again, the one UK newspaper still fully committed to their support – the Mirror. The price of this restraint by Amaral and his team, of course, was that he had to accept without response the continuing mud and filth that was calculatedly thrown at him, part of a renewed (and increasingly desperate) campaign of defamation which those who organized it may well come to regret. So when I tried to find confirmation of the parents' request for terms I found, just as the press had found for the previous few days, that nobody could give it. There was no trace of a source and Amaral's team said nothing, not "no comment" but literally nothing. Amaral himself remained in seclusion. Readers of this blog may never know just how murky the waters surrounding this affair really are. Trying to sort the real from the fictional in an environment where people are constantly providing misinformation, sometimes amateurishly, sometimes with disturbing professionalism, is a nightmare and even when you've satisfied yourself about a source you can't quote it without damaging the information supply or the people providing it. As with all leaks the questions were the old ones – what's the reason for leaking, who stands to gain? And who has suddenly gone silent and why? In this case everybody was bloody silent and trying to get your head round the possible gainers led you into a long chain of dizzying "what ifs". But I had one little advantage. I had been so shocked by the incredible winner-take-all malice of the McCanns towards the officer who had worked on the case that for a brief period in late 2009 I decided that commenting alone wasn't enough: I would take that pair on at their own game of spin to try and do something, anything, to counter what I saw as a piece of wickedness on the part of the parents. For me it wasn't the Madeleine McCann Affair anymore but the McCann Affair in which the pair attempted to inflict pain on another person as great as any pain that they had suffered in 2007.
Une façon comme une autre de mettre quelqu'un du côté de ceux qui souffrent, leur côté.
Having offered my
services unconditionally and for free to Amaral's team – I have
never met Gonçalo himself – I set about adding to the documents and
information I'd already accumulated on the case. When the Lisbon
hearing (janvier 2010) was about to begin I made an appeal to SkyNews to provide at
least one correspondent to provide a daily round up of the case. We
all knew that the case was set to be heard in closed court, in other
words in secret, and so Team McCann, in the absence of a balancing
force, would be the only source of information to the UK public.
Provide a correspondent, I said to Sky, and I'll provide bilingual
people with access to the hearings to give a brief view independently
of the McCann spin machine. At least that would supply fairness. I got no guarantees but
then something happened that changed events entirely. Most of you
will know the gist of what Amaral's colleagues and other defence
witnesses said in court and the impact their words had. How much do
you know about what the original McCann witnesses in this case had
said when the injunctions were first sought? Almost nothing? Right,
because those witnesses were heard in secret so that not even Amaral
knew what they'd said. And the McCanns, like the rest of us, were
certain that Amaral's witnesses would also be heard in secret in
January – until, at the last minute, somebody in the dark recesses
of the Portuguese legal system, and I still don't know who, put the
case into open court.
C'est le juge qui décide. En septembre 2013, c'est Amaral and Co qui a demandé que l'audience se déroule à huis clos. La juge a refusé.
C'est le juge qui décide. En septembre 2013, c'est Amaral and Co qui a demandé que l'audience se déroule à huis clos. La juge a refusé.
The McCanns were totally unprepared for this and never caught up, indeed they hadn't even briefed Mitchell to provide the summaries I expected, so convinced were they that there'd be a repeat blackout. It was the shock that the UK public was hearing all these horrible details through the Sky twitter commentary that eventually produced Gerry McCann's memorable meltdown outside court. Once the court had been opened Sky moved very quickly, much more quickly than the couple, and put Jon de Paolo in, so for the very first time since 10pm on May 3 2007 the UK public had access to unspun information about the affair. People have their concerns, or hatreds, about Murdoch and his editors, particularly the adventuress Rebekah Brooks, as well as reservations about the somewhat equivocal Martin Brunt; as I've said before, however, we owe an immense debt of gratitude to Murdoch-controlled Sky for what they did in Lisbon in the interests of truth. If only others had done as much! At the same time I began the same game that the couple had been playing incessantly for years, feeding information first via the blog and then direct to the UK nationals. And that was the little advantage I had in February this year. Being briefly at the centre of a news triangle involving Gonçalo and the couple I knew exactly what the press were reporting before and during the case because I'd given it to them. I was the only one who knew about the additional material I gave the press over and above what I put on the blog so I was able to compare the facts I'd given with the attempted responses from the Team and with the versions that the "activist supporters" of the couple were posting up. There wasn't a lot of it but what there was made some headlines as well as some sizeable waves at Scotland Yard and Leicester police headquarters. As far as the underprepared Team McCann was concerned I discovered that they were attempting to respond daily to the stuff on the blog and making a hash of it. Mitchell, in particular, was in many ways an amateur when confronted with new stories, very slow to think on his feet, despite the relentless self-publicity that had enabled him to convince people of his hidden power.
I found, to my great surprise, that I was able to predict the way the team would respond day by day and put in a counter story before they'd even got their feed published. It was a very strange, indeed weird, feeling to be involved in this way and for the first time I understood the secretive sense of power that behind-the-scenes briefing gives to people like Mitchell. Of rather less importance, but still significant for February 2013, was what I found out about the activist supporters and their methods. Anyone who dismisses my description of them as decent but suggestible, unable to see the McCanns in the round and therefore susceptible to having their strings pulled, as mere insult needs to think again. I made the charge based on some years' insights into their activities but most of all on that January 2010 experience, because time and again that month they were exposed making stuff up to cover their own ignorance and the psychological fixation with the couple that had made them incapable of independent judgement. I had the grim and slightly disturbing pleasure of reading their numerous withering posts about my blog "lies", which they repeatedly compared with the alternative truthful versions of the "real journalists" covering the same stories on the nationals. But both versions came, every time, directly from me! We all know that Amaral lost that round and for the time being there was little more I could do to help, so my brief period manufacturing the news came to an end. But I'd learned my lessons and I'd learned enough about the methods of Team McCann to feel pretty sure that I'd be able to analyse whether the 2013 rumour was true or not before deciding whether to put it out. Always accepting, of course, that I might end up being wrong.
...and conclude – 05.03.2013
So when it came to
evaluating the story that the parents were suing for terms the
predictability of the McCanns and their activist victims made the
task easier.
The-who-blinked-first-yah-boo
stuff was just a trivialization. There was no dispute that both sides
had agreed to discuss terms. What mattered was that one of the two
sides was acknowledging by its actions that it was facing
comprehensive defeat. That also meant the dreaded cycle of appeals
and counter-appeals was now unlikely: you don't ask for terms because
your position is hopeless and then spend money on appeals. So which side? I went for
a walk under bitterly cold January skies to help me think and follow
the logic through. The journalist had contacted us for confirmation
of the rumour that it was the McCanns who were giving up. But all the
UK national journalists possessed the contact number of
ever-co-operative Mitchell. So why would they turn to the little
Bureau, a place with no reputation for confirming anything? It could
only be, I reasoned, because Mitchell had been contacted. The
journalists were scratching around elsewhere, obviously, because
they'd hit a blank wall: he'd refused to comment. Mitchell never refused an
off-the-record answer unless he'd been taken by surprise or was
unable to work out a spin curve with the pair. Never. It stood to
reason that any Portuguese agreement to pause couldn't have come
suddenly: it would have been preceded by weeks of consideration, if
not informal negotiation. If the question came as a surprise to
Mitchell then the parents hadn't yet informed him of events, which
told its own story. If he did know but the three of them hadn't yet
worked out a curve, or even a temporary holding statement, then the
news, again, couldn't be positive. Could the silence possibly be for
legal reasons? No. Everyone knew the McCanns never stayed silent for
legal reasons, whatever they claimed. To me it was beginning to
look open and shut. Still, I went over it again, from the other
angle. What if it was Amaral who faced defeat? There'd been none of
the usual gloating at the "lying cop's" problems from the
Team or the Mirror but leave that aside for a moment.What would a
losing Amaral have to gain by a false story claiming that he was on
the verge of triumph? Clearly nothing at all: it would be a hopeless
lie with no purpose, one bound to drive supporters away when the
facts were finally established. So silence from the McCanns on the
question and silence from Amaral meant two very different things, but
both of them fatal to the couple.
I went on following it
through from every angle I could think of, including, crazily, the
idea that a highly respected McCann expert had put forward that it
might be misinformation to trap and discredit the unimportant little
Bureau. Possible, just, but vanishingly unlikely and, anyway, who
cared? No, after all the thinking, whichever way I looked at it the
analysis came out the same: the story had to be true, the parents
were facing defeat and were temporarily incapable of response. Over the next few days
there was only one thing left to decide: how should the Bureau
respond – stay quiet until the facts somehow reached the public or
publish the story? The risk of betraying readers by claiming an
unsourced story was true was real enough, so the safest course was to
say nothing until neutral information or some other disaster beyond
the libel courts, perhaps connected to "things not going well
for the McCanns", produced certainty. And how long would that
take? There would be nothing of
value from the media, that was for sure. The belief that if pressure
was kept up for long enough the media would do the famous "turn",
pull out their hidden dossiers and destroy the McCanns was, I was
sorry to say, as unjustified as the belief in hidden protection.
Whatever finally appeared in the media would only do so when the
facts had been established elsewhere. Broadcasters were now
reduced to disingenuous timidity about the McCanns, the memories of
their disastrous performance throughout 2007 still fresh in their
minds, as their continuing failure to report the Lisbon appeal court
findings showed so clearly. Only in spring 2012 had the BBC finally
started to move away from its 2007 written commitment "to report
the case exclusively from the parents' point of view" and begun
to tip-toe into slightly more neutral waters in the Panorama
programme. As for the press, it was
now irrelevant. (...) (At Leveson) the McCanns and their
lawyers stood quite apart from the other witnesses: there was a
vengefulness and, more important, a studied calculation in their
performance (in which Kate McCann, notably, wore no make-up) which
placed them on a different level from the others, whether these were
cross (Grant) or comical (Murdoch), skittish (Rebekah) or farcical
(Morgan). The McCanns were deadly serious with only one, unstated,
aim: immunity. (...)
And the McCanns? Well
those "real, professional" journalists hadn't been able to
get the couple to break their frozen silence and confirm or deny the
story, and nor could I. But the Net, now growing stronger than the
overground media, most certainly could. Once the Twitter and Facebook
amplifier was turned up to full volume I thought the uneasy silence
would be impossible to maintain and the pair would be forced to say
something. And why did I feel that if the McCanns were finally forced
into a response by the Net uproar then it would be the fib, the false
denial, that would come? Let Kate herself tell us by turning for the
last time to page 205 of Madeleine:
We'd never lied about anything – not to the police, not to the media, not to anyone else. But now we found ourselves in one of those tricky situations where we just didn't seem to have a choice.
So, we're sure she'll
tell the truth about a matter of this importance.Very recently I received
this message from one of that select group of people in Portugal who
have dedicated themselves to something worth struggling for and
besides whom I feel very insignificant indeed. And it sums up better
than I can the costs, as well as the final rewards, of fighting for
an honourable cause. Its tone is justifiably emotional but intelligent
and dignified, in sharp contrast to the coarse and gruesome
sentimentality – that certain sign of inner dishonesty – that has
always hung like an oily shroud over the defence of Kate and Gerry
McCann. "With the libel
case, I almost went mad when the injunction was upheld. I was there,
throughout the hearings (though of course we hadn't had the privilege
of hearing the McCanns' witnesses, as they had been heard in
secrecy). I thought that I had heard the same stuff that the judge
had heard for I really had gone into it with an open mind. I actually
thought that Isabel Duarte had put on a hell of a show - but I
thought that it was obvious that it was a show, that she was trying
too hard, that she didn't have enough arguments and needed to play
the emotional, almost insane role - emulating the insanity that must
befall parents who lose their children... That ruling from the
Appeals Court restored my sanity. I remember when Gonçalo received
it, he called me and we met at a restaurant in Portimão, and I
started to read it and he said nothing, absolutely nothing, as tears
were falling down my face, because I rarely cry, and most often I cry
out of joy, not sorrow."
Meanwhile – 09.03.2013
Meanwhile, as the
out-of-the-loop activists fight over the bones of yesterday's
battles, there is the next question they haven't even begun to face
because things are moving too fast for them: is there a link between
the Scotland Yard/PJ review and the McCanns/Amaral libel case? Of course there is! Don't
take our word for it: you can work it out from public information for
yourselves. In early 2012, as we
know, Goncalo Amaral received hitherto secret information about the
Anglo-Portuguese review. He then made three public claims before just
as abruptly falling silent. Two of those claims, the existence of
close liaison between UK and Portugal and the existence of the Oporto
squad, were immediately confirmed by the Attorney-General's
department as 100% accurate. On the third, "things
are not going well for the McCanns", they were silent, for
obvious reasons. Note that the Attorney-General's department made no
criticism of Amaral for speaking publicly. We know that the original
position of the McCanns and their lawyers was that Amaral was a "lone
voice", a "rogue cop" who did not reflect the views of
his fellow investigators. That position was destroyed in court in
January 2010 by the evidence of fellow officers, the demolition
confirmed by the appeal court later in the year. Duarte then
critically altered her case, as she revealed in her long press
release following the Wikileaks stuff: everything before October 2007
was just "old news", no longer relevant since the PJ had
altered the direction of its investigation. Since early 2012 and the
Amaral revelations, Duarte has had to wrestle with the possibility
that Amaral's informant, or informants, on current, not old, PJ
thinking might be called at the libel trial. Note that Amaral's
complete silence on the matter has given her no clue. Whether the informant's
name is now on the current Amaral witness list, visible to both
parties, we don't know. But does anyone seriously believe that Amaral
made public everything about "things" and how they were
going? And that his lawyers are not going to bring this information
to court?
Still living in the past – 12.03.2013
Got a minute? Here's a little task for
people with ten minutes to spare: look up "Gonçalo Amaral"
on Google, varying it, if you like, by adding typical UK media insult
terms like "liar" and "shamed". You'll find that the UK
press stopped abusing Amaral completely in spring last year. The
final story was a questionable, but by previous standards harmless,
piece on April 28 (long after everyone else had stopped) when Martin
Fricker of the Mirror squeezed out "the bungling cop who led the
botched Madeleine McCann investigation last night backed calls for
the case to be reopened." Only two months before,
in February 2012, the Mirror had still been writing about him in
their traditional terms: "thrown off the case in disgrace...made
a fortune spouting lies...peddling his outrageous claims...booted off
the investigation...I don't know how he sleeps at night, knowing he's
cashing in on the tragic story". Does this mean that the
famous "turn" in opinion against the McCanns has taken
place? Nope. It's purely to do
with the lawyers. And the facts. The board of TrinityMirror, in particular, as a PLC (programmable logic controller) is open to a challenge of putting
shareholders' funds at risk if its long-term defamation of Gonçalo
Amaral can be characterised as "clearly reckless": Tweeters
may wish to ask the company press office whether the board has
considered this risk. Their pursuit would be
clearly reckless if they continued it while knowing they had no
prospective defence in truth or public interest for a repeatedly
defamatory campaign against him. The words quoted from the February
12 story above are, unlike the words of April 28 but like nearly all
their previous stories on Amaral, quite clearly indefensible – key
in "Martin Fricker McCanns" for juicy examples. But then
the press, with its consistent ignorance of Portugal and Portuguese
law, assumed that Amaral was yesterday's goods and would lose his
libel case there: being sued by him in the UK was unlikely (he'd be
too skint if he lost, apart from anything else).
All that is, as the poets
say, changed terribly. The last act began with Goncalo Amaral's well
aimed broadsides immediately before he went into libel trial
seclusion. In those interviews he
strengthened and augmented all his original claims against the
McCanns (not the actions of a man looking for a way out), dismissed
their chances of succeeding ("the McCanns [legal] action is
inept"), mocked them for their ignorance of Portuguese law and
the legal process ("I am beginning to doubt the McCanns are
aware of the decisions of the Portuguese courts"), hinted that
Isabel Duarte was letting the pair go nose-down kamikaze to keep the
fees coming in as long as possible, despatched the then
half-forgotten Metodo3 with contempt ("creating bogus
sightings"), thus presaging their downfall this year, and
pointed out the increasingly defeatist tone of the pair's libel
lawyer ("...some panic in the opposing side"). The journalists could
ignore these strong warning signs if they chose: the lawyers could
not, so in common with all the other UK nationals, the Mirror has
withdrawn from the Amaral defamation game. Under UK law libel
complaints have to be made within a year of the appearance of the
offending article so all of them are, just, covered, as long as they
continue to be good boys – which they most certainly will, both
before and after the McCanns' defeat in the libel case is announced. As always those poor
boobies, the activist McCann supporters, are out of the loop and
living in 2008. Key "Goncalo Amaral liar" into Google and
you will note the usual forum/blogger suspects all foaming madly
against Goncalo – but doing so alone. The media have left the
losers behind and moved on without a word. Isabel Duarte said they were
confident of victory, adding: "We reasonably expect compensation
for the dreadful damages this book has brought the family." Any payout will be spent
entirely on the continuing global search for Maddie, the couple said. Mr Amaral led the bungled
investigation but was sacked for criticising British police. Kate wrote in her 2011
book Madeleine: "That man has caused us so much upset and
anger."
Now we're talking... - 15.06.2013
"Under the plan,
Yard detectives will seek the assistance of the Portuguese to carry
out some inquiries on their behalf. British police do not have
jurisdiction in Portugal but they have the right to investigate and
prosecute any British suspects who might be linked to Madeleine’s
disappearance." As Gonçalo Amaral has
said repeatedly, the original investigation was "incomplete"
and the Attorney-General's department in the archiving summary
detailed the exact ways in which it was incomplete - the common
factor was that British persons of interest were beyond reach. If the
review, which we remind readers is a joint review, had led to the
re-opening of the case in Portugal then the authorities there would
be faced with exactly the same problem that they had then: no way of
forcing those people back, insufficient evidence to seek European
arrest warrants and another crisis in Anglo-Portuguese relations as
the paid shysters stall, wriggle and spin on behalf of their British
clients. That cannot happen now that the Yard are taking over the
inquiry. The only British "persons of interest" to the
investigation are the holiday group: the others are now dead. Forget the forthcoming
rumours that the Portuguese will be upset by the decision – that is
a Scotland Yard steer and untrue. The fact is that the two countries
have finally found a way to cut the Gordian knot. Everyone who wants
the truth to come out, such as the parents of the child and their
supporters, will naturally welcome the news. Hooray!
Agony-Aunt Bureau –
your question answered – 21.06.2013
The London CPS (Crown
Prosecution Service) covers the
Metropolitan police (Scotland Yard) area.
As the principal prosecuting authority in England and Wales the CPS is responsible for criminal cases beyond the police investigatory stage. The CPS will advise the police on cases for possible prosecution, review cases submitted by the police, determine any charges in all but minor cases, prepare cases for court and present cases at court. Primarily, the CPS will review the evidence gathered by the police and provide guidance. [Bureau italics] During pre-charge procedures and throughout the investigative and prosecuting process the CPS may assist the police by explaining what additional work or evidence could raise the case to a viable charging standard thereby rectifying any evidential deficiencies. Once the evidence is gathered the CPS will then decide, on the basis of this evidence, whether a case should be pursued or dropped.
"London's chief
crown prosecutor Alison Saunders and her deputy Jenny Hopkins flew to
Portugal in April to meet counterparts to discuss leads identified in
the Met's review." Evening Standard, June 21 2013. (...) what can the
CPS Metropolitan police area heads have been doing there? Well, they are
prosecutors, so even in this crooked old world it's fair to infer
that they went to discuss possible prosecution in accordance with
their role quoted above.The answer can only be
either people who were neither arguidos nor persons of interest in
the original Portuguese investigation or those who were. The former,
in theory, could be, literally, anybody: ink-blots from the troubled
but vivid imagination of Gerry McCann such as paid toddler-thieves
and international paedophile rings; others who have hitherto escaped
any study at all and may be living anywhere from New Zealand to
Brazil; still others who might have been highlighted by the Yard team
in their "opportunity" investigations and, lastly and most
fatuously, the unfortunates like Hewitt whose names were bandied
about by the paid liar Clarence Mitchell, the sheep-strangler Edgar
(seen above demonstrating the tools of his trade) and their
paymasters. The one thing we know for
absolutely certain about this disparate group is that the same
Portuguese Attorney-General's department which highlighted the
absence of any evidence of wrong-doing by the McCanns and archived
the case has repeatedly stated that "no new evidence" of
significance has been provided to it during the period of the
Scotland Yard review. Unless the
Attorney-General's department is publicly lying on the record, which
we consider absolutely out of the question, then no material has been
provided to that department to justify even investigation of any new
names, let alone possible prosecution. So the answer to the
question who could have been the subject of Anglo-Portuguese
discussions regarding prosecution is self-evident and
incontrovertible: persons against whom the evidence for prosecution
has already been gathered (remember "no new evidence") in
the original Amaral/Rebelo investigation.
Forgiveness is all –
01.07.2013
Be your own expert. "British detectives
have expressed dismay over flaws in the Portuguese police
investigation in which dozens of people were allowed to trample over
the crime scene." Such is the song we've
heard for many years until, like so much in the case, it is accepted
as obvious fact. Much of the local
"trample" colour was provided originally by an extremely
dodgy press leak by two policemen who spoke, surprise, surprise, on
condition of anonymity. Note the date the stuff appeared – November
2007: "counter-attack month" for Team McCann. The articles are
worthless except as signs of the Team's successful efforts to sap the
Portuguese case against Kate & Gerry McCann by anonymous
disparagement. As local journalist Brendan de Beer pointed out,
(himself used by the Team then hung out to dry, as he ruefully
admitted to us years ago) certain journalists were going around
offering fat fees for anonymous interviews with policemen. But starting a debate on
supposed police shortcomings served its purpose: diverting attention
from the question of what the nine holidaymakers were doing between
ten and midnight and just what they permitted to happen. Any writer on the case
with a gram of honesty could have pointed out that "crime scene"
for apartment 5A should be used with care. "Crime scene"
conjures up images of a dead victim with a knife in the back, or a
puddle of blood on the pavement. "Contaminating the crime
scene", in that naff TV watcher's pseudo-expertise first brought
to us by Gerry McCann (Helicopters, I tell you!) and David Payne
(Seal the borders men!) suggests thicko coppers slipping on the blood
as they blunder. Like those bunglers who
opened cupboards in 5A to look for the child instead of calling a
national emergency. What they should have done was march the McCanns
out to a police car, lock the apartment doors and say, in peasant
Portuguese, "right, it's a crime scene. Nothing can be done
until forensics arrive in a couple of hours. We can't even look for
her under the bed." As always, trying to help
the McCanns led to ridicule and contempt.
In normal parlance a crime scene is a specific location where a crime is known to have taken place. There was not then, and there still is not now, any evidence that 5A was the scene of a crime between 9.15pm and 10pm on May 3 2007 demanding immediate forensic precautions. None. Ever. Perhaps the Yard will tell us.Kate McCann: "It's inexplicable, of course, that we should ever have been left in what was now a crime scene." Her statement, made in 2011 in Madeleine, has precisely the same value as her claim that she "knew" it was a crime scene at 10pm. She has never provided evidence to justify either of her assertions.
People had been in and out of the apartment for the last three hours, [i.e from 10pm] and until one of the PJ officers "stuck a piece of police tape" [note the intentionally contemptuous language about the people who were simple enough to try and help her] across the doorway of the children's room, it was Gerry who tried to make sure everyone kept clear of it.
So there it is. Unlike
anyone else, unlike any of the police at the time, the couple were
both certain that it was a crime scene. And Gerry explicitly accepted
responsibility for protecting it from contamination: "...it was
Gerry who tried to make sure everyone kept clear of it. " How did he try? Did
he sit on a chair in front of the bedroom door? Did he ask someone to
deputize for him if he was called elsewhere? Like Matthew Oldfield,
say, or O'Brien. Gerry could have ripped out a page from a child's
colouring book and made a sign for the door – no entry! Come to
think of it they could have taken the table the three were using to
create their timelines and placed it in front of the door while they
went on "working". It's a wonderful word,
"try", isn't it? Was he trying while he
was rolling on the floor screaming like a wounded buffalo about
paedophiles? Did he make his numerous phone calls while supervising
the door? Do any of the recipients of those calls describe him
saying, "can't talk any longer, there's someone by the bedroom
door." As always with that pair,
everything is somebody else's fault, from Mrs Fenn, with her "plummy
voice" and casual attitude to the doltish "tweedledum and
tweedledee" coppers, who drove too fast and didn't keep their
police station as clean and tidy as a Rothley redbrick loo. Unless it's one of the
"friends". That's different. No, says Kate, doesn't worry
me at all that Jane Tanner, who had only to shout and the bogeyman
would have left the child and legged it, did nothing and kept her
trap shut. No, no, we forgive nice
Robby O'Brien who was supposed to do our 9.30 check but betrayed us
by caring only for his own kid. And Matthew? Well, she's not terribly
warm towards Matthew but has no criticism for his criminal
negligence, which like Tanner's behaviour eighteen minutes before,
prevented the alarm being raised to save the child's life. She really is all heart,
isn't she? It's just a pity that the
media people, so full of questions for the Portuguese bunglers, could
never bring themselves to ask Kate McCann, "What exactly did you
mean, Kate? How did he try?"
Avant d''essayer" de préserver, on sait qu'il expérimenta l'ouverture du volet roulant de l'extérieur. Pour ce faire, il dit avoir fermé la fenêtre et descendu le volet roulant. Une fois dehors, il tenta manuellement de soulever le volet et... réussit à, déclara-t-il, sa plus grande stupéfaction. Il oublia de raconter ce qu'il advint du volet ainsi levé, mais non enroulé... On n'aurait pu polluer davantage la scène de crime.
Ici s'insère chronologiquement BB Spécial MC v GA
More on Munchin' Mitchell
– 31.10.2013
A beach
What exactly is the
status of Clarence "Maggot" Mitchell?
That question begins to
loom as the bright new investigation gathers momentum. Should it
"vindicate" the McCanns, then their position as proven and
practised pathological liars and intriguers will be left unchanged.
But what if something more serious occurs? Where exactly does he
stand then?
Mr Mitchell is most
commonly described, of course, as a "spokesman" but that's
clearly an inadequate description of his role. But even as a mere
spokesman his role is significant: a spokesman has to know a great
deal about the activities and behaviour of his employers to be able
to field questions and voice opinions on their behalf: he has to be
familiar with the way they think.
As he says, he's a Very
Important Person
But he isn't just a
spokesman, is he? Ever since the autumn of 2007 Mr Mitchell has been
something much more, a self-taught reputation manager for the
parents, a trusted strategist and, particularly in 2007/8, a vital
member of the defence team which so successfully turned the tables on
the Portuguese prosecution authorities. It was Mr Mitchell, remember,
who toured the offices of all the UK national newspaper editors with
defence lawyers and gave a confidential and categorical assurance to
each of them that the McCanns were completely innocent and that
continuing to print accusatory stories would result in legal action.
Unlike his fellow
travellers, however, Mr Mitchell is not a lawyer. As someone who left
school early without any qualifications, indeed, he isn’t a member
of any profession. Does that matter or are we being snobbish?
Oh, it matters all right;
it matters a great deal and with every day that goes by it matters a
great deal more.
Thinking the Unthinkable,
Mr Mitchell
Professional advisers
such as chartered accountants or lawyers have immunity regarding
their clients' actions. However repulsive their behaviour – and the
McCanns have collected just about the most repulsive crew of lawyers
to be seen since the OJ Simpson trial – they don’t go down with
their clients if things go wrong.
The Maggot has no such
protection if the unthinkable occurs. As a spokesman he is a paid and
trusted servant of Gerry and Kate McCann with intimate knowledge of
their affairs. As a spin doctor, that is a paid liar by definition,
he is self-taught and, importantly, he did not have a PR agency of
his own to give him even a fig-leaf of quasi-professional protection
or distance from the pair: he did it, as he himself has stated, for
personal reasons. And as a member of the 2007/8 defence effort he had
a crucial role in protecting them from the possible legal
consequences of their actions.
In law, therefore, rather
than in his own very high estimation, Mr Mitchell is both an employee
and, more important, a voluntary "member of a joint enterprise".
The question of exactly
what that joint enterprise set out to achieve, and how, is being
closely investigated by the police of two countries right now*, who
are very anxious indeed to repeat that the McCanns are not suspects,
definitely not, absolutely not, no question, Christ no, not, as Kate
McCann used to love saying, not in a million years.
* For those interested,
the "tractor driver" farce has unravelled quicker than one
of Mr Mitchell's sightings: the widow has freaked out and is already
suing the people who made the claim and the doors in the AG
department are banging loudly as people rush to distance themselves
from it.
The vulnerabilities of Mr
Mitchell – continued – 01.11.2013
Kate and Gerry McCann
with Clarence Mitchell
Three people – one
enterprise
We now know, nearly seven
years on, that the harm done to the original investigation by the
McCanns is much greater than we supposed.
In May 2007 the one and
only physical "search for Madeleine" that has ever taken
place, the scouring of PDL and other areas for traces of the child by
the PJ, was placed under critical strain by the unauthorised ("no
media!") and illegal ("please observe judicial secrecy")
interference of Kate and Gerry McCann. Helped by some of their
friends.
Culpability
Their media activities
led directly to a mass of irrelevant, and in many cases half-crazed,
"sightings" of the child worldwide. The resources of the PJ
were stretched to the limit by these reports, each of which had to be
investigated.
Whether the child was
murdered by a panicking abductor as a direct result of the parents
actions, as the PJ feared would happen unless the parents saw sense,
we may never know.
That alone is a crushing
burden of potential culpability, one which the parents have never
acknowledged. But it gets worse. The activities of the couple and
their friends over the weekend of May 5/6 when they constructed a
narrative of events built around an "abductor" seen by Jane
Tanner led to yet further diversion of effort and resources. Every
man-hour spent on tracking the JT suspect foisted on them by the
group was time stolen from the real PJ search. Without the loss,
again, we cannot know if it might have been successful and the child
traced.
But with the recent
revelation that Tanner never saw any "abductor" the
culpability of the parents and their friends grows even greater, if
that is humanly possible. The search, the one real search, was
hamstrung and corrupted by a complete fantasy, the sole
responsibility of the parents and their friends.
In search of a sense of
shame
It is a quite shocking
episode, one which, you might think, would have led to shamed silence
for the rest of their lives by the people responsible. But no.
Instead of well-merited silence and shame at their culpability,
unwitting or otherwise, they have led an insane, megaphone attack on
the very people who tried to warn, to plead and to prevent their
fatal interference, the PJ.
You'd think it can't get
any more rotten or shameful, wouldn't you? It can.
Not content with their
2007 wrecking ball the parents engaged an accomplice, a paid liar, to
help breathe life and credibility into the abductor who never was.
This project of invention and untruth was largely entrusted, in a
truly Faustian way, to hungry Clarence Mitchell.
Sports News –
19.11.2013
Are we all relaxed?
The smooth and untroubled
progress towards a denouement of the Affair following the carefully
planned Bladerunner vaporization of Tannerman, the shadowy Praia da
Luz replicant on whom the entire abduction-by-aliens depended, gives
us, the increasingly smug critics, the luxury of breathing space to
enjoy the successful re-opening of the case.
The parents, though, have
been uncharacteristically restrained with their celebrations about
the re-opening – the culmination after all, of their hopes for the
last four years – and their triumphant appearance on Crimewatch
lacked, shall we say, a certain joie de vivre. Still, they must, like
us, be bubbling within at the prospect of vindication. Mustn't they?
The lack of obvious
celebration probably has other reasons. Perhaps they are, ssshhh,
operational, a big word for an Important Couple Who Move Unobserved
Near The Levers of Power.
Or could they still be
following that famous advice they received about not showing emotion
in case it turned an abductor on at long range? The mind boggles.
Most likely it's that
typical Scouse decorum which Kate exhibits on those frequent
occasions when her dreams come true, as for example, her memorable
response to Phil "Barrow Boy" Green's offer of a private
jet for the couple's personal use — "but what would people
say? That we were hobnobbing with celebrities and swanning around in
the lap of luxury while our daughter was suffering?"
Strange. Perhaps we'll
find out one day.
On a Lighter Note
Meanwhile to more
cheerful subjects and the reflections of the Bureau's sports
correspondent the delightful Henry Brooke-Percy, who has returned to
us with the renewal of hope in the McCann case, the abrupt ending of
his civil partnership and his release from a short stint in Leyhill
open prison over a misunderstanding involving some credit cards and a
young male friend.
'Henry Brooke-Percy'
[Ernest William Swanton, CBE]
Henry in better days
Underneath his bluff old
Etonian veneer Henry is a perceptive observer. The other day we were
sitting around in the Bureau's office spending an extremely pleasant
afternoon sipping champagne and laughing at the latest tweets from
the Lisbon libel trial while Henry was talking about the American
writer and journalist Norman Mailer, an oddball with a thing about
violence and a lifelong love of boxing. Mailer, the subject of a
massive forthcoming biography, once wrote, said Henry, that you can
usually identify who is winning a big bout, even on television,
because they seem to swell, literally and physically, while their
opponent, in contrast, begins to shrink.
"Just have a look,
old boy," he said, sipping someone else's drink, "watch a
bout on TV and you'll see it happen. Really does. Cheers."
"Always?"
someone asked.
"The big fights,"
said Henry, "oh yes, the ones that really matter."
He Could Be Right
And yes, remembering past
brawls at the TV ringside, Mailer seems to have been largely right
with this – let's face it weird – generalization. In When we Were
Kings, the movie about Muhammad Ali's "rumble in the jungle"
in which Mailer himself made a typically ungracious appearance,
opponent George Foreman looked like a giant rather than a man yet
late in the fight it was as though he was leaking air while Ali began
to bounce and grow.
George Foreman...
beginning to shrink
...beginning to shrink
Another, more
conventional and much more widely accepted observation in the fight
game, is that one of the boxers, usually the champion, will "have
the centre of the ring", according to Henry's phrase, that is,
occupy the middle area of the canvas while his opponent is forced to
dance in circles around him as he attempts to land his blows.
After Henry had left with
the tenner he'd borrowed the rest of us returned to the pleasures of
the trial. Still, this writer at least couldn't help thinking again
about Henry's words. Did winners really swell and losers shrink? And
did they "lose the centre of the ring"?
Trauma Time – Again? Part I – 28.11.2013
That Was Then
Back in 2011 or so the
Bureau came out with a piece on the Yard review, basically saying
that the public would have no idea which way the tide was running
until pretty near the end, since the Yard was never going to leak
about its true knowledge and intentions and the words of the parents,
then as now, are too provenly dishonest to be trusted about anything.
So how did we suggest
that, despite these problems, we might get late clues to the eventual
result? Regular readers won't be surprised to know that a discovery
of a living child, or a dying hunch-backed paedophile's confession,
didn't feature as one of our markers, but we'll leave that aside. No,
we suggested that the McCanns were going to maintain near-silence or
claim they were "pleased" with the review, whether through
gritted teeth or not; if they stuck with this line until completion
was imminent then we could infer that their future would be looking
bright. If, however, the information they were gaining suggested
looming trouble then – and only then – they would start leaking.
And give the game away.
We won't give you a full
account of that post for the same reason we won't give you a link:
blogs – with the important exception of The Cracked Mirror,
http://madeleinemccannaffair.blogspot.co.uk/ which isn't really a
blog and was built to last – are, like the opinions of the people
who write them, pretty worthless after a week or two and so we
regularly delete them.
But not only did we
delete the thing but we also forgot our own warnings in it that the
Yard's words would never give us a clue about what they were actually
up to, just as Leicester Police's words, after nearly seven years,
never have. Once the CPS was involved we reckoned the End Game was
approaching and were suitably contradicted, and chastened, by the
Yard itself, with their explicit "not suspects" statement.
Whoops!
How Does it Work?
Why, though, would it be
such a significant marker if the leaking/spinning started? Because,
as the Bureau has hammered home since 2007 the McCanns' statements,
however concealed by cut-outs like the Maggot or others, are an
integral part of the case against them.
Without their consistent
pattern of proven lying and evasion and without their colossal
appetite for the pleasures of the media game which they attempt to
conceal and dignify with talk of the, ahem, "search", few
would agree with ex-head of the Yard John Stalker's claim that the
couple hold "a big secret"; there wouldn't really be a case
of any sort against them and not much appetite for pursuing one
either, whether for neglect or more serious matters, such as those
suggested in the Lisbon libel trial evidence.
Quite the reverse:
dignified silence and humility [one sighs at the sheer absurdity of
the prospect] from the couple since May 2007 would have done more
than anything to guarantee increasing sympathy for them and an
untroubled future for their surviving children. It was, after all, a
Portuguese policeman who, in answering the charge that they could
have been more sceptical of the couple in 2007, recently said that
cops, too, have a heart and are exceptionally reluctant to press home
accusations against relatives of a missing child.
Kate McCann's Normality
Policemen can be stupid
as well as sympathetic but they know their Standard Operating
Procedures well enough to keep an eye on – and sometimes
deliberately provoke – comment and reaction by relatives of a
missing person, "suspects" or no. So, for instance, Kate
McCann's admission of successful deception in Madeleine page 206
would hardly be ignored by any cop not actually senseless from too
much scrumpy, since it immediately destroyed the "nobody could
have behaved normally in the Tapas restaurant knowing her own child
had suffered..." argument, best expressed in the Archiving
Summary:
"...their behaviour
until the moment of the disappearance was perfectly normal, not
manifesting any kind of preoccupation or any other similar feeling,
contrary to what happened after that moment when panic was manifest".
For Kate McCann avoided
"manifesting any kind of preoccupation or any other similar
feeling" to journalists as she acted out her role on August 2
2007, even though she bore the burden of knowledge as she lied that
the police were coming to "do some forensic work" regarding
the investigation, news that she believed would be absolute dynamite
if it got out.
The Balance of Risks
So why damage herself
with those dangerous words in the book four years later? Well, she
writes on the same page about the decision to deceive that they "just
didn't seem to have a choice", an interesting cop-out and an
interesting insight into the lying mind. The truth was that she was
choosing between risky, or dangerous, alternatives and the same words
can be used about her decision to write about the event four years
later in Madeleine. Stripped of the deception and self-deception on
both occasions she had only a choice of risks: ignore the lie in the
book and wait for the PJ to read it and betray her by giving the
world and the Yard the real reason for the "upset stomach";
or kill that certain result by admitting the lie and accepting the
accompanying risk to her "normality".
And, such is the nature
of the path they have chosen, exactly the same has applied ever
since: with the Review/ Reinvestigation the choice of risks is
between speaking to try and influence, somehow, the direction of the
inquiry or maintaining silence and an impression of guiltless,
unflappable confidence in the result, difficult though that is these
days when one wears the uneasy, hunted look of a bird watching out
for the guns. The risk of the former is that even the most doltish
cop is capable of asking "just why are they worried?" and
of the latter that silence leaves them unable to try and influence
their fate.
Kate McCann on
Crimewatch, 14 October 2013
Living with Paranoia
The parents, of course,
have no more knowledge of whether the police of either country are
speaking the truth about the case than the rest of us and,
accordingly, no knowledge of how their risk calculations have worked
out. How could they know? There are no sources of such certainty for
us or them, just as the honeyed words and first-name greetings of
Leicester police's Stuart Prior to all the Nine back in 2008 meant
nothing compared with that force's tigerish response to the pair's
attempts to find out what their files held. The difference is that
for the rest of us the question of police sincerity in this case is
largely academic whereas for the couple it is shatteringly important,
hence, perhaps, their present appearance – a stark contrast to all
those photographs showing them well-fed, comfortable and often
laughing once they had adjusted to the disappearance of their
daughter some years ago or, as "psychologist" Alan Pike put
it in Lisbon, once they "had recovered from their initial
trauma."
So is it Trauma Time
again? Might the parents fear that yet another police attempt to
stitch them up lies behind nice Mr Redwood's comforting burr? Are we
near the point forecast, rightly or wrongly, by the little Bureau two
years back? Let's have a look and see whether Mr Mitchell's words
give us a hint. In Part II, later today.
Trauma Time – Again?
Part II – 29.11.2013
...this is Now
And so to the Mirror
article here – In Keir Simmons Land
It's something of a
period piece: just as the parents, like all celebrities, are
insulated from the real world by fandom and don't know how absurdly
they come across on the box these days, so Mitchell seems to have no
idea of how old-fashioned his "news management" on behalf
of the couple looks in 2013. And note particularly how the
off-the-record sourcing – as dated as a Monty Python sketch –
makes a mockery of ancient Keir Simmons-land claims that, unlike the
wicked and anonymous Net, the mainstream puts a name to its reports
thus guaranteeing the reliability of its stories. Dream on!
So the piece is a
two-headed "pal and spokesman" Mitchell feed – somewhat
vitiated by the fact that the McCanns can't afford a spokesman
anymore and never had a pal – using the now-debased mainstream
press to help the McCanns achieve something. The risks to themselves
that we highlighted yesterday, magnified in this instance since it is
their first public intervention in the Review/Investigation process,
exclude the possibility of simple media meddling, so the question is
what are they trying to achieve? Or put it another way –
Who Gains?
Do the Portuguese and the
PJ?
"Not pulling their
weight …frustration…PJ are back to their old game..."
Obviously not; far from helping them the piece is a straight attack
on the Portuguese police, end of story.
So does it help the Yard?
It suggest it's trying
to, doesn't it? All that concern [coughs] from the caring parents and
their pal [retches violently] to get help for Hulk Hogan in his
lonely attempt to "find Madeleine" [dons airline sickbag to
continue] without obstruction from the dagoes who, try as they might,
just don't understand modern grown-up teamwork.
But linking Hogan to this
little bit of poison in the McCanns' only remaining house journal,
the Mirror, is hardly going to increase co-operation is it? On the
contrary it's pretty much guaranteed to scratch at the tender sores
of Portuguese resentment at any attempt by the Yard to "nudge"
or manoeuvre them from long range. No, the article is clearly not
helping the Yard either. In fact it could hardly be more inflammatory
if it was deliberately designed to put the two organizations against
each other, what with its alarmist talk of "mounting tension".
And that's our answer,
the only one that makes sense: it's a deliberate, poorly disguised
and poorly executed attempt to increase friction between the two
forces and weaken the likelihood of a JIT by three people whose time
is gone. Only the McCanns, and perhaps the unblinking Mr Redwood,
know why they fear co-operation so much that they risked it.
Too late. And too
desperate.
When Drama Turns to Farce
– 04.12.2013
When do we know that
public perceptions of people have changed and support is bleeding
away? When the evidence is known? When someone is obviously a
monster? When they are tracked down by dedicated investigators?
No, no and no. When,
mysteriously, they and belief in them start to become ridiculous.
The Mainstream Media gave
it...
The evidence, for
example, that Robert Maxwell, a favourite of these pages, was a thief
had been on record twenty years before he got hold of the Mirror and
its pensioners' savings. You look at that bloated toad's interviews
now – the hypnotically grotesque waist and crutchline, acres of it,
so appropriate for someone who simply wanted to roll over and squash
anyone he couldn't buy off, the lizard eyes and the Broadmoor smile
–– how come people didn't, no couldn't, see it then? How come
they didn't laugh at such an absurd, pantomime villain but fell for
him, starry-eyed, like supposedly hard-bitten Alastair Campbell, a
pretty typical mainstream journalist, who sobbed at the news of his
hero's last swim?
For obvious monsters we
need look no further than the BBC, not for Jimmy Savile but someone
who made that typical showbiz operator look like a model of sexual
restraint: the sculptor Eric Gill, whose paedophilia was so extreme
that it not only regularly encompassed his infant daughter's birthday
party friends but the infant daughter herself, a habit which his arty
middle-class friends – and mums – observed but accepted without
much comment. Eccentric, you know. What on earth did the
church-going governors of the BBC have to say when little Eric turned
up in his "easy-access for the young" skirt every day to
create, on the front of Broadcasting House, the largest tribute to
child abuse ever sculpted and one which still, ahem, stands? What can
you do but laugh grimly?
Eric Gill Expressing BBC
Values
But enough: the examples
of those who mysteriously manage to get taken at their own valuation
long after the facts are screaming for Christ's sake get real are
countless and, we guess, always will be.
What do people say, long
after they've bought Waterloo Bridge for £250 from a couple in
frayed suits with charming smiles? "I don't know what came over
me." Because in the end, granted when it's often too late, the
spell is broken and people look back in wonder at their own
credulity.
… and You Tube Takes It
Away
Kate and Gerry McCann are
right there, right now. The mainstream media, as always these days,
lags behind while the public finds the truth for itself elsewhere, in
this instance often on You Tube. The Mirror, with its unfathomable
death-wish, prefers, publicly at least, to wait a little longer for
the arches and piers to arrive from Waterloo; the BBC simply keeps
its head very much down about the couple these days, just as its
directors do every morning as they hurry under Gill's mocking
erection into Broadcasting House's welcoming embrace. But the spell
is broken and eventually they, and all the others in Keir-Simmons
land who gave the pair a stage, will have to acknowledge it.
Not that the couple are
thieves on the Maxwell scale, of course, no, not at all, just as they
definitely aren't suspects in the relocation of their daughter, as
the police have told us so often, no not at all. But their behaviour,
no longer seen through the sharp prism of shock and sympathy of six
years ago, now looks quite different: their interviews, every one of
them, look like crushingly poor performances.
Readers will surely have
noted the significant comments by those on Twitter and elsewhere
whose curiosity about the couple was stimulated by Crimewatch and who
turned to You Tube to find out more, only to be struck by the
extraordinary, even absurd, nature of this long-running double act.
Many of these converts had watched the interviews in the past,
perhaps with only half an eye, without noting anything odd about the
couple. And in a sense that's quite natural and a tribute to the
decency, rather than credulity, of ordinary people – if they see a
person lying unconscious in the middle of a road they don't ask
themselves is this person worth helping? They just help.
The McCanns, in one way,
are like that unconscious victim in the road: the overwhelming "prism
of shock and sympathy", that gave them their chance no longer
exists to protect or empower them and without it their performances
look cheap and shoddy, above all quite unbelievable. "I don't
know what came over me," says the bridge buyer, whose own prism
was constructed of normal human greed rather than sympathy, "I
just don't know why I believed such a ridiculous story but I did."
Once people start saying
that there's no way back.
Soul Food Issue – 06.12.2013
Read the f****** small
print, suckers
Along with many others
we've noticed that for the first time in nearly seven years the
begging bowl has a lid on it. The McCanns missing a chance to add to
their personal fortune – never! That's the Find Madeleine Fund
remember, the great gravy train, the fund started with money poured
in by shocked well-wishers who wanted to express their help and
support somehow – and ended up paying for countless fat arses on
flights to the sunny Algarve and pampered nights in the Dom Pedro
Hotel Portugal for a "searching" Gerry McCann.
"Of course,"
Clarence "Maggot" Mitchell, of whom more below, might say,
"of course it's all right to spend Fund money that way. Kate and
Gerry have been assured that what they have done is well within the
bounds of good Funding."
"Of course,"
say the supporters dismissively, "of course it's legit for the
family to do anything they like with the money. People knew exactly
what they were donating to, didn't they? Why look at the small print,
the legal papers setting up the fund, for goodness sake. It's all
there for everyone to see." Asked if the small print was
available to donors in May 2007 the supporters use the now-famous
Lisbon Courtroom Response: speechlessness.
A Financial Whizz Speaks
"Everybody beyond
this circle of moral cripples," says Henry Brook-Percy, the
Bureau's financial ("Got a tenner old boy?") correspondent
and general good egg, "everybody knows the impulse behind death
and disaster donations – they're a cry, look, I just want to help
in some way, to ease a terrible episode, it's all I can do, I feel
helpless but I want to do something at this terrible time. Right?"
Right, Henry. But no, not
with the McCanns. With them, it's always read the f****** small
print, isn't it? Imagine if that gang had held up huge placards at
Everton Football Club's ground with a bit of large print:
Do you think they'd have
copped their millions then?
So the gravy train has
rolled on, a bit like a Wonga loan. Skint people – and some of the
people who sent in pathetically small donations in May 2007 were
skint – suddenly faced with 5000% Wonga interest they hadn't
bargained for? Read the small print, you suckers!
Now it's don't give us
the ackers!
But now the pink site has
an updating notice and a "check back soon" message so that
you can't hurl money at the pair anymore or buy their revolting tat.
"Soon" has a special meaning in McCannland, remember, as in
"Metodo will have the child home soon", so the notice has
been up for quite a while. Can you imagine all those poor luxury
hotel managers trying to work out their winter budgets and finding
the same dismal message greeting them every morning? How very unfair.
After 6+ years we all
take it for granted that just as nobody, public or private, expects
an answer if they ask for details of Buckingham Palace seating
arrangements, so the idea that someone might ask servants of the
McCann Dynasty what's up with the donations and tat on your crappy
pink site? is, well, ludicrous. It's just not done.
In the meantime we are
free to speculate as to the problem's cause. Could it be a software
glitch – overflow on stack 33 ##4 – that nobody, not even another
McCann relative showered with another thirty grand website fee from
the Fund, can crack? Or a result of recent flooding in the Tatroom?
Want a Clue?
Check out the "Purchase
Our Book" button on the site and you'll find, lo and behold,
that it's working perfectly. Hmm. So why is it possible to buy a
piece of printed tat but not a rubber glove wristband? We can't see
any difference ourselves, except that getting royalties on a book
you've written is legally unchallengeable – the money is
watertight, yours, even if you're serving thirty years in the nick.
Whereas public
"donations", even to a private fund, are altogether more
tricky. If young Madeleine McCann had actually been found at the
beginning of this month, for example, but we plebs hadn't yet been
told, it might be dodgy, even illegal, to go on asking for search
money or selling schmutter to help locate a child if it could be
proved that beneficiaries knew the money was no longer needed.
And who's to say that
nice Mr Redwood hasn't already found Madeleine and she's at this very
moment being counselled by trauma experts, lollipops in hand, in a
Rothley safe house? After all, the parents keep telling us how well
the Yard are doing so her return, or at least some dramatic news
about her, could well be in hand. couldn't it? So we think that all
those lawyers credited in Madeleine's introduction are making sure
everything is absolutely dead straight and above board, as they
always have, and have jammed the lid on the bowl. Better safe than
sorry, you know.
Is Mitchell OK?
Clarence "Maggot"
Mitchell after he was dug up by volunteers from the No Regrets Club*
Rubber gloves, search
poles and body bags can be purchased from the Tat Fund for £2000
each will be available soon
Our medical correspondent
writes: Ever since Mitchell was found lying under the detritus, dried
students' vomit, empty bottles and manifestly used condoms on
Brighton beach after swimming away from the shipwreck of his dreams,
there have been concerns about his health. Mr Alan Pikey, well known
expert on abducted Travellers believes he is suffering from the late
stages of Trauma Nihilismus, or to give it its vulgar name, Extreme
Nonentity Disease.
He knows y' know
Speaking from a deserted
Travellers Site filled with empty caravans, Mr Pikey said confidently
and in a funny voice, that the "progression" of TN is
always the same and, even though he somehow missed making an
examination of the sufferer, he could diagnose it without difficulty
due to his "great expertise about these matters and diploma in
Pikeology".
TN, which is closely
related to Munchausen's Disease By Proxy (do check it on Google, here
for instance) and sometimes associated with the barely known Fundgal
infection Scammer's Syndrome, begins with severe psychological
feelings of inadequacy, social and sexual, compensated by an
irrational belief that the sufferer is "meant for better
things".
A pattern of complex
fantasizing and constant and uncontrollable lying ("doing it"
) takes hold, at first hardly noticeable but soon nakedly
pathological, with an itchy and compulsive desire to "do it"
in public and to the widest possible audience, with a complete
absence of normal feelings of shame. Sufferers are also overcome with
an embarrassing need to "do it for money", sometimes with
imaginary sexual partners to whom they give lovingly affectionate
names, such as "Pal" and "Friend".
The unfortunate victim,
says Pikey, tinkering obsessively with a piece of scrap-iron as he
talks, typically sleeps badly and experiences terrible fear of being
returned to "paltry insignificance" and a small house,
manifested by recurrent nightmares of being forced into Hendon
Central by uniformed men demanding to see his GCSE grades. He dreads
the future. There is no cure although a period of confinement is
sometimes indicated.
There is an Alternative
Others are unconvinced,
particularly believers in organic remedies. "It could be a
dietary problem," says attractive Internet Health Monitor
Michaela Rong, occasional Guardian writer, part-time windmill
mechanic and close friend of child-loving directorial genius Emma
Roach, speaking in the cocktail bar of Lisbon's Dom Pedro Hotel.
A self-described
"volunteer for Maddie" she takes an interest in Mr
Mitchell's health via the internet, since she feels it's "preferable"
to being in the same room as him. "The poor man might have
swallowed a lot of seawater as he swam for his life," she
trills, "he looks puffy and bloated and with the beginnings of
Alopecia Roseus. Or else he's on steroids".
M/S Rong, a green vegan
who eats alone in the fabulous Searcher’s Suite penthouse above,
adds, "I think there is a mystery component which natural
treatments and possibly Tantric yoga could ameliorate. Plus
super-sized hourly enemas! The jumbo tube!" She stops and pushes
back her hair. "God, that would be great, wouldn't it...sorry,
where were we? Yes, I'm sure lots of people who've met Clarence would
recommend those. But he absolutely has to get a grip on his munching.
When did he start binge eating?" She squints at his picture on
her iPad for a moment, "hmm, looks like about six or seven years
ago".
Mitchell being taken by
H&H Health Centre Security Man to discuss payment day
Note the hair, the
weight, the "smile" and the dead eyes running on autopilot
Aren't Doctors Wonderful?
For New Age Michaela the
problem is something to do with trouble in the "soul",
whatever that might be. But others, more realistic, more worldly, put
his chronic malady down to a group of doctors he met in 2007, when in
his own words he was "searching for something". Mr Mitchell
himself admits that one of these people, the controversial Dr Faustus
of the Hendon & Hades Heal Yourself Health Centre, whose fees are
described as "scary, even though you're given a lifetime to
pay", approached him that year with a "tempting"
special offer that he was "strangely unable" to refuse.
The initial results of
his treatment were "brilliant", he says, giving him a
wonderful feeling that the suddenly watching world revered him. His
earning power "vastly increased" after each consultation,
he says, his hair, a lifelong disappointment, improved dramatically
and new friend Helen, a sophisticated blonde from the glittering
Mediterranean shores of southern Turkey, introduced to him by Dr
Faustus, brought a thrilling, if disruptive, element into his
personal life.
But despite being the man
who has almost everything Mitchell still suffers with his mystery
ailment and dead eyes. Now, to make things worse, Faustus, who has
left Hendon & Hades and gives no interviews, is rumoured to be
talking about his fees being due "soon".
All of us who care for
him will wish him the best.
*Named after comedian
Peter Cook who, when asked in an interview what his greatest regret
was, answered "saving David Frost from drowning".
Oscar Nominations in
Lisbon – 12.12.2013
Enter PR Genius
A special correspondent
writes: watching the Lisbon libel trial was akin to having a curtain
jerked open. To take just one example out of dozens, the evidence has
given us something of an answer to an abiding, if trivial, puzzle
dating from the first weeks of the affair. In a famous Times piece
describing his work with the McCanns in May 2007, here Alex Woolfall,
the PR man despatched to Portugal to protect Mark Warner's reputation
(their turnover has been in unbroken fall ever since), mystified some
readers by writing "They gave no indication that they thought
she had been snatched, let alone by a paedophile."
Woolfall based his
comments on his own powers of observation and appraisal. As you will
note if you bother with the article – which now reads like a comic
period piece – Mr Woolfall is very pleased indeed to be Mr A
Woolfall, whom he rates very highly. He has no doubts that his view
on what the couple thought and felt didn't derive from what they told
him. or what they said for his benefit, oh dear no, but from his own
astute judgement. "All the time I was around," he said, "it
was whether she could have wandered off and had an accident or
somebody had actually taken her in, perhaps not with ill-intent."
All the time I was
around. It assuredly never occurred to Mr Woolfall, whose
professional speciality is protective spin, i.e. manipulation of the
truth for financial gain, that a couple might have used the tools of
his own lying trade against him – no, no, no, that only happens to
the "little people" whose strings he's been attempting to
pull for most of his life. The article is headed "I saw Kate and
Gerry McCanns' despair and if they were acting they deserved an
Oscar." Really Mr Woolfall?
And now the Professionals
This lethal combination
of inflated self-belief and fallible judgement was, by no accident at
all, much in evidence in Lisbon. Most of the claimants' witnesses
came out with the now well-known description of the long ordeal of
Kate and Gerry McCann, that touching narrative of gradual "recovery"
from initial agony, as though they were the victims rather than the
child they mislaid, with the skies suddenly darkening again in Wizard
of Oz mad Technicolor as the wicked Amaral blew into view. With his
equally wicked lies he stirred the world up against them and their
"Search" until their despair finally overcame their
well-known tolerance and reluctance to take legal action. They sued.
What was quite
extraordinary about this once again essentially soap opera tale was
not its repetition by different witnesses but the way they told the
same story from quite different angles, all of them believing, just
like sharp Mr Woolfall, that they hadn't been fed this junk but had
worked it out for themselves after observing the couple's behaviour.
That is much more interesting and valuable than the stories we'll no
doubt be hearing from the worldly-wise that claimants and witnesses
planned and scripted the whole performance. If only life were that
simple.
Kith 'n' Kin,
Pikopathology, the media pronounces, Trickey blames the future on
Amaral
Thus Mr Wright was sure
he'd had unique access to the couple's real personalities and
unguarded behaviour through his intimate family connection with them,
deducing from his own observations, not hearsay, that the only
explanation for their plunge into misery in 2008 was Amaral's vile
campaign against the "search"; little Mr Pike, on the other
hand, a comic character straight out of Dickens in his mingling of
pomposity ("I have a diploma in psychology") and
wrong-headedness, believed his professional skills gave him unique
access to, you've guessed it, the real personalities and unguarded
behaviour of the pair. Amaral, he decided – for himself, of course,
and without hearsay. of course – was the root cause of their
collapse. He'd never actually examined them – the couple don't do
examinations – but he'd observed all the symptoms.
The ineffable Emma Loach,
on the other hand, was certain that her "expertise" about
the case, gained through friendship with the McCanns and her
qualifications as a media queen and occasional Guardian contributor,
gave her a unique insight into the unguarded couple that only, well,
important broadcasters and documentary makers like her can possess,
enabling her to see for herself the progressive torture of the pair
by ignorant media comment provoked by a certain Portuguese detective.
Hearsay from the McCanns never came into it.
Trickey, the child
psychology expert, didn't have much to say about the couple's
disintegration at Amaral's hands because that wasn't his brief, but
his "study" of the surviving children via zero
examinations, one informal meeting and much parental phone hearsay
information gave him unique access to make judgements about them.
Amaral hadn't actually caused them any harm yet, partly due to the
parents' brilliant work on their behalf, but he might in the future.
Spellbound?
And so on.
There are some major
issues here that will have to wait.There is the huge question of Emma
Loach as a representative of the British media-mind-set and the
strong evidence she provides that the media never needed gagging
since, contrary to common belief, their bullshit detectors have
rotted away due to their divorced-from-the-people hothouse
environment. Then there is the extraordinary repetition of the
"jemmied-shutter - phone call phenomenon" in which
information which could only have derived from one source, complete
with tell-tale errors and untruths, is blithely repeated as fact.
There is the quite
stunning, chameleon-like talent of the couple for showing different
aspects of themselves to different people, and an even more
mysterious ability to "touch" people and bind them into a
voluntary but uncompromising, and to the outsider troubling, loyalty.
Here,though, we are moving away from the law into deeper realms of
psychological interdependence: as the court gradually exposed the
witnesses' dependence on the McCanns for information about the case I
found myself thinking why are they so resolute in their refusal to
look at the case evidence? Can it be that they're deep-down scared
that reading it will somehow be a betrayal of the parents? Or all
parents? But enough Watson: that way madness lies.
Trickey. Suddenly wished
he was somewhere else
But even the judge
appeared to be taken aback as, one after another, they revealed their
ignorance of the investigation coupled with those dread words "Gerry
and Kate told me". Both Pike and Trickey were clearly
discomfited by this exposure of their own ignorance. Trickey, more
honest and less self-deceived than most of these witnesses, looked
slightly shocked at the situation he found himself in while Pike, who
runs on narrow rails, took refuge in grumpy silence or wandering
beyond his area of supposed "expertise" to make bitchy and
ineffectual personal attacks on Amaral.
Michael Wright, who like
Ed Balls will never win a popularity contest, attempted to justify
his failure to look at the Archiving Summary with an ill-judged
assault on the Portuguese justice system itself, straight out of
Alice in Wonderland. There was no need to read the Summary, he
insisted, suddenly red-faced, his voice rising, what use would it
have been? He knew without reading it that it wasn't the truth!
Don't Scare the Horses!
Emma Loach hiding from
the limelight
Smithman is probably on
the left, holding the camera
Emma Loach didn't shout
but instead took refuge in girlie upset at a bad school report, even
though her teenage years are long behind her. She had reason to be
troubled since she'd begun with a performance quite beyond satire,
breezily telling the court that she was an "expert" on the
case and quoting audience statistics that proved how influential
Amaral had been in corrupting the public. Ah the public! Modestly she
told us how lucky she was to be able to understand complicated things
so much better than they, a public that she consistently referred to
in terms that an average eventer would use about her horse. Within
ten minutes one was almost feeling sorry for her, so plentiful were
the hostages she gave to fortune. Amid this rubbish, psychology once
more raised its head: just like her fellow Guardianista, Bridget
O'Donnell, Emma Loach seemed simply star-truck by the pair.
But that didn't help her
when the questioning began and Emma dissolved slowly into her chair
like a messily melting ice-cream. Her "expertise" was based
on a few case files that the McCanns had thoughtfully chosen for her.
The Archiving Summary or PJ report? No, she'd never read either. The
source of her audience statistics? Ah, now that she was asked well,
hmm, she thought that she'd read them somewhere but, oh dear, no,
perhaps she hadn't. Amaral's book, which she had read – no wait a
minute, no she hadn't actually but she'd read, well, something on the
Internet somewhere – anyway it was so influential because, you
know, it was "so easy to read" that even the public (given
an apple and a nosebag to go with it?) could understand it, unlike
those Case Files which were far too complicated for the poor
darlings. How did she know they were complicated if she hadn't read
them? She didn't say. With each answer the lip trembled a bit more.
Enough of this intrusion into private grief! – let's pull the
curtain back again before the judge starts on her.
The only one of the
claimants' British witnesses who brought a trace of dignity to these
proceedings was M/S Cameron. For a short time the self-importance
and vapidity of this procession of wilfully deluded "professionals"
was interrupted and M/S Cameron, measured, sincere, dogged in her
belief in family unity and action as a balm in a situation beyond
understanding, spoke quietly of the support that the pair have
received over the past six years and the pleasures of her
relationship with the surviving children. It was a brief, very human,
respite from this fascinating but horrible McCann affair.
Now, Mr Woolfall hasn't
talked about the McCanns lately, has he? Do they get that Oscar now
or later?
Xmas Appeal –
13.12.2013
Oh dear – that pesky
donate button on the Find Madeleine site still isn't working.
Strange, isn't it? Especially just before Xmas, when as our social
affairs editor Antonia so memorably said anyone can get rich, even
bloody pit-bull charities. She suggests overcoming the frozen bank
account problem by packing the High Streets with Polish chuggers in
Father Xmas beards (to disguise their native melancholy, she says)
rattling plastic buckets from Poundland.
Lady Antonia
Family motto: do you take
cash?
Has anyone asked Kate via
Facebook if she knows exactly what's happened? Back in the spring
when there were some unhelpful rumours going round, Kate told us
everything we needed to know via that site. People were suggesting
then that it was too dangerous for her to answer the question about
the rumours, though we never understood why. But that couldn't be the
case now, surely?
Bang!, - 16.12.2013
At the beginning of
September 2013 Gerry and Kate McCann's position, as expressed by
their support team and lawyers, rested on two pillars. The first was
that their daughter had been abducted on May 3 2007, a claim
corroborated by the so-called Jane Tanner sighting of a stranger
hurrying away from their apartment with an inert child in his arms.
And, secondly, that their claim was vindicated after a year long
investigation when the Portuguese authorities explicitly exonerated
them from suspicion in the disappearance.
How rapidly old
certainties change.
For since then, as we all
know, the first pillar has been demolished by a carefully placed
charge of Redwoodite. There are no arguments, no ifs or buts, the
sighting was fully investigated and produced the first result of the
Yard/ PJ review: Jane Tanner had never seen a stranger hurrying from
the apartment, and nor had anyone else. The sighting has been blown
away, a conclusion which Jane Tanner herself has not challenged.
The implications are
still sinking in even now, even if they haven't yet reached the
official "Find Madeleine" website where a picture of the
child-snatcher is still prominently displayed. But then in those
irresistible You Tube videos of demolished tower blocks there is a
rather wonderful pause just after the Redwoodite charges have
detonated when one side of the structure, for an instant, defies
gravity.
Demolition of flats
Way Back When
By far the most important
of those consequences is that we are back in "jemmied shutter"
territory, that brief period when it was only the words of Kate and
Gerry McCann suggesting abduction, nothing else. Without M/S Tanner's
vision the claims of a hysterical couple are just that – claims
without support, which ultimately have to be assessed against the
likely truthfulness of the claimants.
Even before the Big Bang
that was a tall order since the question of the McCanns' "likely
truthfulness" had already been answered in 2011, in the pages of
Madeleine. In her description of the episode in August 2007 when the
PJ had evidence that the couple deceived journalists about the
investigation to maintain their credibility in the UK, M/S McCann
admits that she and her husband lied when they felt they had no
alternative.
It is self-evident that
people who are proved to lie when they feel "they have no
choice" face serious problems in asserting that – this time –
they are telling the truth. For any desperate situation can leave
people feeling that their choices are non-existent or highly limited.
But not everyone chooses to lie.
That is the reality of
their situation now. They would, for example, have been in serious
difficulty from defence lawyers clutching their copies of Madeleine
if they had testified in the libel trial, rather than giving the mere
"verbal statement" which cannot be cross-examined by the
lawyers, that they are supposedly considering.
Look out!
And as if this wasn't
enough, the secondary leg of their position, their "formal
exoneration" by the Portuguese legal system, a fiction which has
existed ever since August 5 2008 when the McCanns produced their
version of the Archiving Summary and released it via Mr M. Mitchell
to a media which had no translated copy of its own.
http://www.mccannfiles.com/id143.html or Here
Over the past five years
the parents and their libel lawyers have used the bewilderingly
labyrinthine Portuguese legal system, in which interpretation can
play a startling role, to give the Summary a status as a legal
finding and confirmation of the parents' innocence. By the time the
media had seen the translated document for themselves they'd given up
on coverage of the investigation, fingers-burnt, opting instead for
the more cuddly – and safer – "McCanns' Agony" tale. As
a result the various legal hearings at which the meaning of the
Summary was explored were ignored in the UK media and were clearly
not brought to the attention of Judge Tugendhat in the High Court.
Irrespective of the
verdict, the transcript and judgement of the 2013 libel trial, when
published, will bring things nicely up-to-date for the judge and
others. Briefly, the views of investigators, including Mr Amaral, in
2007 have not been invalidated by the Attorney-General's department
and have not been overtaken by further investigation or new facts.
The theory that Madeleine McCann died in the apartment on May 3 and
that the parents disposed of her body remains un-refuted. More
parochially, for what it's worth, the claim by some of the parents'
less intelligent supporters that Leicester police's own formal
statement on the status of the pair has lost its applicability since
the shelving of the case, a particularly noxious piece of special
pleading on their part, is an invention.
Thus ends, after some
five years, the attempt of Kate and Gerry McCann to prevent any
public mention in the United Kingdom of the investigating officers'
hypothesis that they took the dead body of their own daughter from
the apartment, disposed of it and simulated an abduction. For a time
they were supremely successful: the first occasion since 2008 that we
remember the hypothesis being mentioned neutrally and without
elaborate verbal arse-covering by the mainstream media was on
Panorama in 2012. And is anyone harmed by this gift which the
Portuguese justice system has now granted to the British mainstream
media, helped by the new U.K Libel Act which privileges the reporting
of court proceedings from that country?
Everyone who wanted to
could find out the facts of the investigation through the Internet
and, particularly, the case files which were deliberately made
available so that all, but particularly those involved, could see the
evidence for themselves. This was an act of faith in democracy and
one that looks a good deal less eccentric than it did in 2008 with
respect to privacy now that, it seems, there is nothing which a broad
mass of the people are ashamed of publicly presenting about
themselves. In this regard it is the words "those involved"
that are particularly relevant. It has always been the Bureau's
contention that Kate and Gerry McCann involved every U.K adult in the
crime by making their appeals and asking people to "get
involved" with the case, a conclusion shared by the Portuguese
courts when they judged that the parents had "sacrificed the
right to privacy" by their media actions, a statement the court
made factually, not critically. It was desperately ignorant, and more
than ignorant, to suppose you could call a whole population to your
aid and then control and suppress the facts once the money was in and
people had served their purpose.
Who gained by keeping the
lid on the facts of the investigation's course with repeated threats
of legal action? It was a crazy idea, no doubt encouraged by lawyers
who, like so many other professionals, stood to gain from the vast
Madeleine money-pot, to think that such a strategy could work, just
as it's crazy to suppose, as David Trickey does, that the surviving
children can somehow be "protected" from those facts in the
future, Amaral or no Amaral.
Judging by what kids are
already exchanging via smartphones and the web, for God's sake,
blocking what Amaral and his colleagues said or did will be the least
of the pair's problems. To know the content of the investigation
isn't to accuse the parents of anything and certainly doesn't make
us, for instance, any more likely to believe in the death in the
apartment claim.
And if evidence never
turns up to exonerate, so what? Over-ambitious world-wide injunctions
from the UK protecting the identities of "innocents", a
misbegotten idea anyway, are failing in the face of modern
communications but the universe doesn't collapse. There's a very
successful British journalist with, so far as one can judge, a pretty
down-to-earth and balanced view on life, "Expert" Mr
Trickey notwithstanding, writing at the moment. His by-line name
indicates to anyone with a knowledge of history that his father or
grandfather was probably the killer in a murder case that was once
almost as notorious as the McCann affair, but frankly nobody much
cares and we doubt if they ever did. No doubt there are quite a few
other such examples (although please cesspit sites, don't start a
f*****g thread on who they might be): life goes on.
Which way the tower will
fall with the twin supports now gone we don't know, nor what will
eventually replace it. It is unlikely but not impossible that now
that the McCanns are finally unable to continue their lid-tightening
efforts their reputation could actually improve since nothing could
look more suspicious than their threats and evasions of the last six
years. Either way, the building's down and their attempts have
failed, whether they fully recognize it yet or not.
Louis McNeice had it
nicely summed up:
It’s no go my honey
love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day
to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour
by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the
bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.
Xmas Blog – 21.12.2013
Friday
Kate and I have decided
to have a quiet Xmas in Rothley. Like others our thoughts turn to the
things that matter at this time of year and we have always felt that
simplicity brings us closer to the important things in life. Staying
in Rothley brings us closer to Madeleine.
As you may know we have
had some problems on our Find Madeleine site which are proving
difficult to solve. Our software team was assisted by the directors
of the fund who are experts in these things and the local police sent
a few people along to help as well! Our local solicitor, who once set
up his own website, dropped in to see if he could help with his
expertise. Unfortunately the meeting went on very late. A long day
and the problem is still not sorted out but the police were kind
enough to take us home.
Saturday
Kate brought the twins
over and they wanted their presents today! We had to explain to them
that you sometimes just have to wait. Father Thomas Campanella had
called in to say hello and he re-affirmed that there is more to Xmas
than just presents and how very pleased he was that we were staying
in Rothley this Xmas. Father Thomas convinced the twins to wait a few
more days!
A meeting with one of the
Scotland Yard officers today confirmed that they are in agreement
with us on the lines of inquiry we need to take. Kate has done a
photo shoot with the rugby club Sale Sharks in their dressing room.
She is very impressed with their attitude to Madeleine and is very
grateful to one of the players called Donny Capriati for who nothing
is too much trouble. I am an Everton man myself!! Donny has
apparently arranged for all the Sale players to wear an image of
Madeleine under their shirts with the message "Close to us all!"
Sunday
Met with the GBNSR
yesterday where I am chairman, hopefully a good one! They do
brilliant work. Kate and the twins are off to Sale again for a
pre-Xmas break where she will discuss new initiatives with Donny. In
the afternoon we had to leave our home for a while because one of the
emergency services needed to do some checks on the building. We had
intended to drive to Cannock Chase to visit the dump but our car had
to be taken away since it wouldn't start. It will need some tests
done apparently.
Monday
A peaceful morning. The
Portuguese police came over to wish us a happy Xmas though they were
disappointed that Kate wasn't here. We expect them to award us
something called "Assistiente" status soon, which is a kind
of reward that the Portuguese offer to those like us who have been
helpful. It would have been rude to refuse such an offer. Hopefully
it will speed things up over there. We can't give more information
even though we'd like to in case we prejudice future proceedings
against the people who took Madeleine. Donny rang and said that he
and Kate spent an afternoon touring sports shops to raise awareness.
Tuesday
Today Kate and I had an
early start since we had agreed to be guests at a Scotland Yard
meeting to discuss missing children. Kate came down from Sale on the
overnight train and we went on to SY at 4.30 in the morning, getting
a lift from a helpful police van driver. We had a very constructive
meeting. By chance eight of our solicitors were meeting for the same
event! These co-incidences are very strange. The meeting ended at
2.55 AM as there was much to discuss. Andy Redwood just happened to
be around and came to thank us for supporting them in this way.
Apparently they have some people in their sights.
Wednesday
Our car was returned to
us so we were able to drive up to Cheshire. The garage apparently had
to remove all the seats and carpets and interior lining, boot lining,
spare wheel cage etc. to find out why it wouldn't start. Strange. We
stayed for lunch with some relatives and old friends Jane and John
who have just come back from holiday in Venezuela and made us envious
with the weather rather poor here. In the afternoon we walked on the
sands near Fleetwood. It was very cold! Just before it got dark one
of our relatives had us all in fits as he buried the twins up to
their necks in the sand and videoed them pretending to scream for
help!
Thursday
A very unhelpful news
story today suggesting that Mr Amaral may come to England in 2014.
Kate and I think this would be a mistake and we have asked for an
interview with the Home Secretary to discuss a banning order. It
cannot be right that this man should abuse our hospitality after what
he has done.
This afternoon we had a
surprise Xmas reunion with seven of our closest friends.
Unfortunately, as the local press showed, we had a team of engineers
in white coats arrive to dismantle some of the brickwork under the
house to cure a structural issue and excavate the garden. I am only a
doctor so I don't know what is wrong with houses! So we had to find
somewhere else to meet and all the hotels were full I think. Believe
it or not the only space for a reunion of old friends in Rothley was
a spare function room at Leicester police headquarters!
We were surprised to see
Andy Redwood and the head of the DPP there as well as fourteen of our
barristers who were probably there to buy Leicester's famous red
cheese! It was a very constructive meeting and when we left at 4.40
AM the stars were shining brightly. It was very cold though since for
some reason we forgot some of our clothes at the police station and
Kate has now developed a worrying cough.
Friday
We came down to see Mr
Redwood at Scotland Yard early this morning to give him his Xmas
presents to show our gratitude for his efforts. Unfortunately he said
the rules prevented him from accepting them which was yet another
blow in this sad year. While we were there nine of our lawyers
dropped in for some reason so there wasn't much space! We left at
midnight and walked along by the river but Kate's cough got worse and
I fear she may need a change of climate.
When we got back to our
very cheap and small hotel we had a welcome surprise when we found
some well-wishers from the PJ waiting in our suite with a Xmas card
for us and some paper work to complete I think confirming the obvious
fact that we are not persons of interest in the investigation. We are
both very pleased at these signs of co-operation although I would
like to apologise to the people in the next room who thought that
there was some sort of argument and raised voices going on all night.
It was just a celebration!
Saturday
Kate's chest is much much
worse today so we think we might have to avoid Rothley for Xmas
because of the well-known bad climate in the midlands. Fortunately we
just happened to hear about a place in the warm in Venezuela from
some friends called Fred and Frieda and Donny has offered to come
with us to help with the twins and introduce us to the mysteries of
Venezuela rugby. Father Campanella assured us this was the best thing
to do and stressed how Catholic Venezuela is, so that we can think of
all the things that really matter at this time of year in a way we
can't in busy Rothley.
Apparently the police
have been keen to meet us so that they can assure us at this time of
family values that we are not suspects of any sort which I find
incredibly moving. Unfortunately our flight leaves in an hour from a
private airport but we’ll leave them a message. A happy Xmas to you
all.
Choice and Necessity –
24.12.2013
"…those tricky
situations in which we didn't seem to have a choice." K. McCann,
"Madeleine".
In the treacherous
waters, or perhaps sands, of the committed Internet nothing much
remains the same for long: friendships and alliances suddenly
blossom, new leaders are found, PMs fly back and forth, new enemies
are demonized — until next week or next month, say, when
disillusion sets in or flaws emerge. A bit like real life but speeded
up.
Still, 2013 was a pretty
good year in the McCann Affair, except for the mainstream press which
continued to bleed in a most satisfactory manner. Of course the child
wasn't found but Goncalo Amaral finally got his day in court and for
the first time we were able to see and hear his enemies telling their
stories to a judge under their own names, rather than via the parents
or the Net or the journalists or the backs of their hands. And the
investigation showed signs of leading to the end of a chapter, if not
the end of the affair. The Bureau has never had or claimed to have
the answers to what happened on May 3, nor what will happen in the
future, only that the parents chose to take the wrong path that night
by drawing us in as witnesses in their support and then failing to be
frank with us, something we have described over the years with
various degrees of noise and colour.
Comment is Free
On both sides
psychological forces rather than hidden allies are increasingly
visible as the real drivers of the Affair. The claims of secret UK
government support for the parents, the D notice stuff, Murdoch, the
whitewash and all the rest of it, have dwindled markedly in the last
year, as they were bound to. They will never go away completely,
though, as long as there are people who want [choose] to believe that
they are insignificant pawns in someone else's game rather than free
and equal human beings, as a glance at the comment pages of the
Guardian on any subject reminds us. The startling psychological
powers of the parents to inspire loyalty and active support without
appearing to be trying to do so were finally revealed, rather than
surmised, in the Lisbon courtroom; unfortunately the flip-side of
unquestioning loyalty is a potential well of something approaching
real hatred for the other side, in this case the McCann sceptics, as
the comments of Keir Simmons or David James Smith and others
demonstrate.
So the bottomless well of
belief, loyalty and hatred, much more powerful but less easily
managed than the hidden hands of the secret and rich, drives the
Affair along on both sides. For every tacit incitement to the drones
who populate Facebook support sites there is a corresponding attempt
to enlist and manipulate the sceptics by some guru or deceiver. It
was always thus but the Net makes it easier now for Pied Pipers,
whether mad, misguided or simply vicious. We on the Bureau claim,
unconvincingly, to be somewhat outside the game of selling solutions
and gaining disciples, not because we're clever or above it all but
because we're not much good at it and aren't cuddly enough, being
equally detested by a majority of both sides: so no leadership for
us. Sigh. Or, or course, we might be kidding ourselves.
Good Old Ed
Whatever, the emotional
"well" has its limitations. For a time, properly
channelled, it can achieve amazing things, as it did in late 2007
when the UK population's intense emotional involvement with the
couple was manipulated into becoming a moat against extradition.
Remember the famous words of Ed Smethurst on Panorama that year
demonstrating that the Bureau's belief in the reality, indeed the
primacy, of the psychological battle is not some crank theory of ours
but a fact:
"Part of the reason
why we're here disclosing evidence to you today as opposed to keeping
our powder dry is a recognition that there were two strands to this
case, part of it is the criminal case, but part of it is the media
speculation and the media perception, and we see it as incumbent upon
us to portray the truth to the media and in particular to try and
expunge any ill-founded theories about Gerry and Kate's involvement
so that the media attention can focus back onto the abduction and
therefore onto the fact that we have a missing little girl out
there."
One of the finest defence
teams ever assembled in the UK had a purely psychological aim
alongside its legal one: use money to change ("expunge")
people's opinions and you can change the future. Of course neither
Smethurst, whose company is famous for altering people's opinions and
modifying their [choices] about the beauty or otherwise of expensive
plastic double-glazed windows, nor Mitchell, whose profession we all
know, would put it like that intentionally but their actions and
their occasional unguarded words betray them.
But while "expunging",
with its unintentional sci-fi resonances, is pretty f*****g weird and
creepy when you think about it, almost as weird and creepy as
Madeleine, it's not magic. At some point emotional manipulation has
to conform to the facts and at some point it has to be refreshed,
since people's emotional commitment eventually wanders off to other
attractions. But nothing has occurred to provide refreshment or
nutrition, as we know: no suspects, no physical evidence, no
discovery of the child, nothing – with the result that probably a
majority of people have now come to believe that something, somewhere
is not quite right with the McCanns.
Special Offer – Free
Will
Have they come to
[chosen] that tentative conclusion realistically and independently
or, in the absence of nutrition and the mystifying unwillingness of
people to discover things for themselves but depend on dodgy guidance
from above, has Mr Smethurst and his team simply been supplanted by
other manipulative groups, temporarily in the ascendant because of
the shortage of evidence?
Answers to that question
depend on how free and independent we believe people are, or are
capable of becoming. The "whitewash" and "hidden
forces" people obviously believe we're neither free nor
independent since they say we're helpless zeros unable to prevent the
powerful deceiving and ruling us, a belief which, far from
demonstrating their realistic judgement, paradoxically makes them
easy meat for anyone clever enough to pretend to share their views.
The Bureau retains an uneasy belief – faith? – that people are
not zeros but are capable of choosing to rise above the deceivers who
surround us on every side to determine true from false, and,
accordingly, their own real interests as well. The abiding
fascination of the McCann Affair is that these central questions
regarding belief, truth, free will and choice lie constantly in the
background of the Affair, like real life but speeded up.
On which philosophical
note we wish you a Happy Christmas and thank readers for their time
over the past year.
