Rebecca Hamilton Reports(Scroll Down)
Saturday, April 19, 2008
THE UNFORTUNATE McCANNSApart from the tragic disappearance of their elder daughter, Madeleine, the biggest problem Kate and Gerry McCann now have seems to be their resentment they cannot control the media.
They want publicity but not if they don’t like what is reported about them.
From the start this unfortunate couple have enjoyed the unique benefit of top, high powered PR help - a chunk of it at taxpayers’ expense when Gordon Brown sent the then government spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, to Portugal to oversee the publicity and ensure a high profile for the ‘Find Madeleine’ campaign.
But since their successful libel action against the Express Group of newspapers and the hint more might follow, neither they nor Mitchell, who now works full time for Team McCann, seem quite so sure footed in handling the media.
One day this week Mitchell was saying there seemed little point in the couple returning to Portugal, where they remain official suspects, to stage a reconstruction unless there was the publicity benefit of it being broadcast Crime Watch style.
The next Gerry McCann's whining voice was bemoaning the possibility of a ‘media circus’ if they did.
And events seem to overtake them.
Off to Brussels on a high profile trip to impress the European Parliament with the need for an Amber Alert for missing children in Europe, they must have hoped for favourable publicity the next day. Instead what made headlines was a Portuguese police leak that the day she disappeared Madeleine had asked her mother why she and her siblings had been left to cry by themselves in the dark the previous night.
Mitchell had to play catch-up on the TV news, denouncing the leak as ‘a blatant attempt to smear them’ and demanding a full investigation and the Portuguese government ‘get a grip.’
If they want to keep their search for Madeleine in the news, the McCanns also need to get a grip, accept that not every story will be favourable to them and stop their unremitting efforts to try to control and manipulate the media.
