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I wrote about Madeleine McCann just after she’d been abducted, and was quite
startled by my postbag. Roughly half the letters sympathised impotently with
Gerry and Kate McCann; the other half were entirely, and brutally,
condemnatory.
Who leaves three toddlers unattended for half an hour at a time, they asked?
The McCanns were “asking for it”, they were “selfish”,
they were “criminally careless”. I hardly think so: leaving small children
alone is never wise, but most of us avoid doing it because we’re frightened of
choking, not of marauding child-snatchers; if we believed that paedophiles lurk
around every corner, we’d all go insane and never leave the house.
I was really taken aback by these letters, chiefly because when an unspeakably
awful thing happens, compassion seems a saner and more
appropriate response than being smugly judgmental.
Anyway: here we are again, a month on. Madeleine is still missing, her picture
still appears in most newspapers every day, and I don’t know quite where the
compassion percentage stands at today. There is clearly a growing rumble of
unease out there at the McCanns’ omnipresence in the papers and on television.
No aspect of their grief is deemed too private to share with the media. We’ve
watched them in church, we’ve watched them walking about, we’ve seen their
other two children, we’ve seen poor beribboned Kate
McCann clutching pathetically at Madeleine’s favourite toy.
They were in Rome
last week, where they briefly met the Pope; soon they’ll be off to a slew of
other countries, cameras in tow, to broaden out their campaign. And it is a
campaign, involving appeals or offers of support from David Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, even Gordon
Brown. Whoever is orchestrating it deserves an award.
Enough, detractors say. A hundred children go missing in Britain every
year: what about them? Do we know even one of their names? The answer,
shamefully, is no. But two wrongs don’t make a right: would it be preferable
for Madeleine to become an anonymous statistic too? Would ignoring the McCanns
and their desperate appeal somehow honour the other 100 nameless missing
children? It’s hard to see how.
The argument then moves on to the cynicism and sentimentality of the media,
which apparently feeds the public’s fundamentally unwholesome and voyeuristic
hunger for images of a lost child and her distraught parents. Well, er, yeah: full marks, Sherlock. Nothing new there: one of
the bestselling books in the country at the moment is called Please, Daddy, No.
It is one of many in the same genre, and it is an unfortunate fact that the
public’s appetite for horrific “true” stories involving children being abused seems,
disturbingly, almost infinite.
The question is, does it matter that some people’s
avid following of the McCanns’ story undoubtedly involves prurience and a
strange sort of hunger for the gory detail? Not really, no.
The point, surely, is that somebody somewhere knows or suspects what happened
to Madeleine, and that her parents are desperate to attract that person’s
attention by any means necessary. If, on the way, they make some of us feel
uncomfortable, or voyeuristic, or even, whisper it, compassion-fatigued, that’s
entirely our problem. God knows theirs is greater.
Speaking of God: what really brought the nay-sayers out of the woodwork was the McCanns’ attendance at
mass in St Peter’s Square last week. They are devout Catholics; they met
the Pope for a few minutes afterwards; he appeared to bless a photograph of
Madeleine. Unacceptable, according to some woman on Newsnight
for whom this was the final straw: the McCann story had now become about
“religion and faith”.
What an extraordinary statement. Here are two parents, stuck in hell, not even
afforded the dubious comfort of grieving. Love the Pope, hate the Pope, meeting
him helped them and brought them comfort. Do we really need to sit in judgment?
The boring leftie middle-class response to the McCanns’ story - clumsily
seeking to intellectualise an event to which most people respond only
viscerally - has echoes of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Reams were
written at the time about how Britain had gone mad, how this syrupy sentimentality
was entirely puzzling, how the writer felt like an alien in his or her own
country, how he or she really didn’t care that much, how plenty of women died
every day, how the fuss and the grief were entirely disproportionate and we’d
all be terribly embarrassed in the cold light of day.
You sensed that the writers of those articles felt brave, like they were boldly
sticking their heads above the parapet, speaking up for a significant minority.
Which I’m sure they were - though perhaps not as heroically as they’d envisaged
— just like the commentators expressing their discomfort at the magnitude of
the McCann campaign.
But what’s the point, exactly? It is an act of off-the-scale egoism to base
your view of a situation such as this one only on whether it makes you feel
“comfortable” or not. What has anyone’s “comfort” got to do with anything? The
facts are simple: a child was snatched; her parents are in despair; the
Portuguese police seem worse than inept. Someone knows what happened to
Madeleine. What are the parents to do? (Three days or so after Madeleine
disappeared, and the media circus was already in full flow, an enterprising
reporter drove over the border to Spain with a photograph of her. He
was met with only blank looks: despite nonstop coverage of the story here, no
one he spoke to had any idea who she was.)
The McCann family’s story is like any other in this respect: you can think what
you like. You can be interested, you can be bored. You can leave News 24 on in
the background, or you can watch Big Brother instead. You can hope for the
best, or fear the worst. You can say a prayer, or rant about the Pope. It’s up
to you, because you can always turn the page and move on to something you
consider more interesting or more cheerful, something that makes you feel more
“comfortable”.
That luxury does not exist for the McCanns. They can’t turn the page. They can
only generate more headlines, because they believe that the end of headlines is
the end of hope. Who among us would look them in the eye and condemn them for
it?
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