Let’s hope this is end of the McCanns’ ordeal
David Aaronovitch
But perhaps this time it’s different. Possibly the German paedophile referred to as Christian B (because of German privacy laws) is, finally, the answer to the mystery. As I write this, news updates on the story are making my Apple watch vibrate every few minutes. The German authorities in Braunschweig have been confident enough to say that Madeleine should be assumed to be dead, even though Scotland Yard detectives are being more circumspect. The man is said to have been in the area at around the time Madeleine disappeared in 2007, was known for committing burglaries, and was already on the list of 600 or more potential suspects who were investigated. All circumstantial but perhaps a fragment of someone’s memory has been jogged after all this time. For the sake of the family, I hope so.
But for many of us, the McCann case ceased long ago to be primarily about a missing girl. There is no other child, as far as I know, who the police have spent £12 million investigating. Almost from the beginning, as it became clear that the poster campaign was leading nowhere, Madeleine herself stopped being the issue.
In May 2007, two weeks after she disappeared, I went up to the McCann’s home village of Rothley in Leicestershire to look at the shrine that had been created beside the war memorial. To the railings, I wrote, “hundreds of yellow ribbons have been attached, accompanied by flowers, cards, children’s drawings, soft toys and, above all, images of Madeleine McCann. ‘Expect a miracle,’ says a card depicting hands clasped in prayer and draped with a crucifix. More typical is: ‘Maddy, we didn’t even know you, but you are with us in our hearts.’”
By then nearly a hundred thousand posters bearing the now iconic photograph plus the legend “Madeleine Missing” had been downloaded from the Sky News website alone. People were putting up posters of a child lost in the Algarve in British streets where she had never set foot and was never likely to. A website called “Find Maddy” received 60 million hits in less than a fortnight. A fighting fund to help search for the girl raised vast amounts of money and celebrities and sports figures were falling over themselves to urge everyone to look out for her.
Why? One phrase back in 2007 was ubiquitous: that Madeleine’s disappearance was “every parent’s nightmare”. People identified with these middle-class parents, living an ordinary life and who went on the kind of holiday so many of us have taken. And then disaster struck. The missing child was pretty and photogenic, and that always makes a difference. It shouldn’t but it does.
But the manner of the disaster was incredibly rare. Children almost never vanish into thin air, let alone are plucked from hotel rooms. There were no lessons to be learned here. Ask someone who has lost a child to a road accident, a fall, a drowning, a dangerous toy — approximately 120 children aged under nine die in accidents in Britain every year – and they’ll be able to remind you what you really need to worry about.
The disappearance of Madeline McCann also coincided with a period of intense anxiety about childhood, and in particular the threat to children from outside the family. This despite the fact that the most threats come from inside. There was the Bulger case in 1993 which raised the spectre of “feral” truants, there was the Sarah Payne murder in 2000, the Soham murders of 2002 which led to comprehensive and bureaucratic checks on anyone working with children, and the rolling revelations of years of past child abuse in institutions.
Not only were our children imagined to be in danger from other people, but they were also in danger from what they ate (allergies, intolerances, obesity), what they did (computer game addiction, phones, social media) and what they had (autism, attention deficit disorder). Some of this was justified, some much less so. But Madeleine McCann was the perfect apex of that pyramid of anxiety.
And the McCann case also started at the moment when social media was becoming a phenomenon. Facebook started in 2004, YouTube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. The mystery of the case was perfect in the first instance to drum up empathy and solidarity, in the second instance to allow people to speculate publicly about what had happened, in the third to create space for the development of conspiracy theories, and finally to permit some people to abuse the McCanns.
One who did so was called Brenda Leyland. A woman in her sixties, described by friends as “eccentric and opinionated” but also fun, Leyland posted 400 tweets inside 11 months accusing the McCanns of murder. She was by no means alone — that accusation had been made by many “trolls” over the years (indeed the McCann case spawned them) — but Ms Leyland was tracked down by journalists and challenged about her statements. She killed herself.
I’d argue that Brenda’s obsession was only a perverted version of a wider shared obsession. In 2008 Express Newspapers paid out £550,000 in damages to the McCanns for publishing more than 100 seriously defamatory articles about them. In that period Madeleine had replaced Princess Diana as the front-page story that sold copies. After all, don’t we all know that when a bad thing happens, the first person the police suspect is always a family member?
And now in the era of Netflix documentaries and “true-crime” podcasts, the Madeleine case lives on as diversion for a new generation. These are the modern versions of the Sunday newspaper stories that Orwell wrote about in 1946, where after lunch, your pipe in mouth and the fire lit, “in these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder”.
I never liked this story. I always assumed the poor child was dead and I found the public agony of the parents almost unbearable. Not only that but they have become the objects of our often hypocritical and neurotic interest, and the providers of our entertainment. For these reasons let’s hope that Christian B is indeed the answer and that we can put this, and Madeleine, to rest. It’s time for Scotland Yard detectives to fly somewhere else.
