With the investigation into the child’s disappearance apparently in good hands in Portugal and the UK  we’re content  to wait for the outcome.  Should any UK citizens be charged here in connection with the disappearance of the child then, obviously, the constraints of  British contempt of court rules – which, historically,  stipulate that a commentator should exercise caution in what is written “once charges appear a real possibility” –  mean  we won’t be commenting on them until the trial is over.

The question of  McCanns v Amaral is a rather different matter.  

In the UK the result of a libel trial is not usually a matter of argument but of observation: one party sobs and the other is exultant, telling us more or less all we need to know. In this case, though, we assume the spin and misinformation will continue awhile, though with every day that passes the energy and conviction, not to mention the  expertise,  that once accompanied the McCanns’ attempts to misrepresent the facts bleeds away a little more. If you’re a dynamic fund raiser, a paid PR liar, a grande horizontale  journalist  with ambition or a lawyer on the way up, up, up, then working with the McCanns against  Amaral hardly looks like a good career move these days, does it?

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

Look around you. The sense of weakness and loss in the claimants’ camp is perfectly portrayed by Duarte’s weary resignation, Mitchell’s graphic impression of an increasingly unwell man seeking to walk away,  the curiously bloodless tone of UK MSM support and the apparent specks of dust which turn out, on examination,  to be celebrities disappearing over the horizon. In late 2007 you could detect unfathomable power in the McCann defence team, a confidence  that the hapless and outmanoeuvred Portuguese authorities were going to be massacred in their attempts to lay hands on the couple, all exemplified by the shadowy Angus MacBride,  fresh from his triumph with Pinochet and fuelled by apparently bottomless funds. Six  years on in Lisbon he emerged, blinking, from the shadows to a different world, one no longer driven by the tsunami of public hysteria which Gerry McCann and the MSM had accidentally triggered and which had then been so brilliantly channelled by the PR men and lawyers into the harmless culvert of the archiving summary.

Spellbound!

Those were the days! – when tsunami power washed all opposition away so that creatures like Smethurst could strut and waddle amid the dripping BBC, James Landale and all,  and be granted an episode of Panorama for the explicit  purpose of  preventing the extradition of two police suspects in the disappearance of a child.

Six years of case files and Portuguese legal judgements instead of  hysteria and rumour made the Lisbon courtroom a   very different place by 2013 and it showed: the quietly  menacing  MacBride of a defence team which boasted  that it was going to expunge bad thoughts about the McCanns – a megalomaniac as well as  unusual strategy for an innocent couple, don’t you think? – sat impotently with absolutely nothing of substance, importance or even interest to offer the court. Close your eyes and it could have been Pa Healy talking on September 8 2007. The power has gone.

Public hysteria spells, from Titus Oates to Profumo, always fracture in the end, leaving people baffled and wondering  what was all that about? How could people have believed that? But that alone is not the problem for Kate and Gerry McCann; nor is the well-known lack of any emergent evidence of abduction since 2007. The real and quite insurmountable difficulty is that every single time for eight years that light is thrown into  a specific corner of the case, whether from the files or the other primary sources or the courts, the original McCann version is never confirmed, let alone strengthened. Not even, incredibly,  something as obvious and measurable as the weather, for Christ's sake. Only the McCanns could have described the weather – the door-slamming Praia da Luz wind – and have it refuted by the records. Does it get any worse?

The process continues, naturally, with the Lisbon trial material. On top of the humiliation of most of their witnesses we have the findings of fact and other material that is emerging in Portugal. We are no longer, for example, so dependent on the UK Mirror version of the libel writ since the real details are now entering the public domain. Here’s a quiz for you: given the McCanns’ history  would you expect the Team-provided Mirror version  of the 2009 writ to be revealed by legal records as an exhaustive and truthful account of its contents?

It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it? Still, we won’t bore you with all the stuff that the Mirror left out since the Find Madeleine website is bound to put the original out in the interests of truth, perhaps alongside the picture of Bundleman. Maybe the writ’s contents ring less weirdly in countries where wild legal rhetoric is more common than in the straitlaced British system but to us the now-revealed details of claim seem to have completely taken leave of reality. A sublimely comic moment follows a momentous and no-holds-barred list of GA’s wicked crimes which reads like the declamations of an Old Testament prophet  and stresses time and again the famous permanent and irreversible nature of the damage to the couple.

In  Duarte’s own Alice in Plunderland, though, words mean just what she wants them to so “permanent and irreparable” definitely doesn’t mean giving up hope, oh dear no. Liberal applications of a mysterious wonder-product  called money, it seems, can work wonders and turn back time, or as Dr Duarte tells us in the writ,  “pecuniary compensation can possibly minimize an irreparable condition”. 

On a more serious note the writ makes a very far reaching claim against Dr Amaral. Instead of the approved line parroted by the McCann camp and its mouthpieces that GA was incompetent and uncaring, a buffoon who misread evidence, we have a much more serious charge: that the whole “thesis” was a criminal plot, a pack of lies invented by Amaral, not the police team,  purely and solely to make himself a millionaire. Even the dirty little Mirror’s “lawyers”   blanched at printing that in the UK.

Foolproof Legal Guide

Anyway, here’s the Bureau’s updated winners and losers guide to help  readers, the news agency Lusa and the UK mainstream understand the verdict when it’s announced on judgement day - taken directly from the writ’s summary of claim.
 

Has the court ordered Goncalo Amaral to pay € 1 200 000 damages? If so he weeps, Kate and Gerry exult and the kids get a pound of flesh from the deal. Otherwise they’ve lost their claim.   Has Goncalo Amaral been ordered to pay interest on the damages backdated to 2009?     If so he gnashes his teeth and Kate & Gerry lose that hunted look. Otherwise they’ve lost their claim.   Has Goncalo Amaral been ordered to publish the trial verdict at his own expense for two consecutive days in a major Portuguese paper, a major UK paper and a major Portuguese and UK weekly in the  fifteen  days following the verdict?   If so Goncalo looks ashen  and the McCanns as cheerful as when the balloons are popping. Otherwise they’ve lost their claim.    Has Goncalo been ordered to pay the legal costs of both sides?   If so  Goncalo is potless and the couple are spotless. Otherwise they’ve lost their claim.

With all the implications that follow.