Hm. Is This an Audition?
Shambles Time
The disarray as every seam of the McCann’s oh-so-clever
strategy starts to unravel at once is something wondrous to behold. Yet the
more it unravels the more puzzled many people are. It just doesn’t seem to fit
in with the supposed invulnerability of the couple, courtesy of Unknown Forces and Hidden Hands.
And, to be fair, there's a secret, much more forgivable, can this really be happening? feeling abroad, a pretty reasonable response to eleven years of well-rewarded deceit.
Yes, it can and is. And no, we haven't said that before. The McCann strategy that has been clear since
2007 and has never changed is starting to collapse under pressure. And that strategy is? No extradition.
As we know, the head of the McCann legal team, Smethurst, gave
the game away in 2007. After stating that the couple had been subject to “trial
by media” since their return to the UK he told BBC Panorama “… 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…”
More Than Meets the Eye
Now that famous statement posed a couple of serious
questions. Why should adverse media comment in the UK affect a Portuguese
prosecution? How
could changing opinion in Britain help the couple if they stood in a Portuguese
dock? And secondly, it suggested a certain lack of confidence that the facts
alone would ensure they walked free out of a Portuguese court.
The answer to both questions is the same. The defence aim
was to ensure that they never came within a hundred miles of a Portuguese courtroom, let
alone allow the facts to “demonstrate their innocence” in one. Smethurst and
his team were many things but they weren’t stupid, which is why one of the two
senior members of the team was Britain’s foremost extradition lawyer.
In extradition cases law meets politics – and politics
usually wins since countries generally don’t
extradite people their “public” feel sorry for. So, in a case where innocence is hardly self-evident, you get stuck in and work on manipulating people's emotions in the suspect's favour by inventing simplified, show business models of them to replace the rough stuff you're actually defending.
The public, in general, can't handle real human beings but crude, highly coloured, celebrity cartoons of them, victims or villains, always go down a treat and the McCanns loved being soap opera characters and played them beautifully except in their unguarded moments, apparently untroubled that it might end up making them lose their minds. Again Smethurst’s team wasn’t
stupid: the other of the two senior
lawyers was a media celebrity expert, with the usual skills and contacts.
The details and methods can be found in the most open of these
cases, that of Gary McKinnon the “superhacker,” to which the reader is referred.
It’s all there: a budget provided largely by sympathetic well-wishers, a huge
PR campaign to create the “victim” role (and mental health issues), to whip up xenophobia, (“wicked American dungeons” “against “wicked
corrupt cops”) to trivialise the charges (“just a bedroom hacker” against “we’ve
all done it”) and so on. The similarity isn’t surprising – the McKinnon people were
following the same template. It’s dirty but it works. No extradition!
Smethurst didn’t decide this strategy, any more than the
other “experts” who grew fat on the fruits of the Madeleine case. By some
instinctive brilliance, or exceptionally unusual cunning, the parents found
their own way to the “twin strands” within days of the disappearance, stumblingly
at first and then gaining pace and conviction as time went on, with the assistance, no doubt, of Gerry's bedside reading, Lance Armstrong's memoirs. Thus, as we know
from reading Nigel Moore’s McCann Files, the “second strand”, the endless,
glutinous media sentimentalising about the poor parents’ suffering, building on
natural public sympathy, was accompanied by a quite different, much more brutal
first strand – secretly working behind the scenes, through
proxies and anonymously, to muffle the
facts and divert attention.
That's The Way to Do It
Strand Two, Suffering Victims
And...
...Strand One, Operating from the Shadows
And all this is what the Bureau and others have been addressing over recent weeks. The fraught
interviews, the “blogs”, the desperate attempts to conceal the search of their
home and the seizure of their property, the fantastic lying at the Edinburgh
festival, the claims that they were being forced into confessions – those aren’t
random reactions but have had a single aim: don’t let the UK public think badly of
you. Countries don’t extradite people the
public feel sorry for. And within
days of arguido time they legged it to the safety of the UK and never came back
until the case had been shelved.
No extradition. The attempt to stop Amaral
from bringing his theories to the British public; the innocent-schoolgirl fiction
of Madeleine; the toe-curling
anniversary celebrations and the regular reminders of the empty bedroom shrine;
the performance at Leveson, with its repetition of the Edinburgh lies. Whatever happens keep the dimmo public believing in the cartoon goodies.
And then look at the other strand. The passage of time has
not produced anything to counter or dismiss the official reservations about
their innocence. The Attorney-General’s specific claims about their failure to
assist the investigation and the lack of explanation for it, the Leicester police
statement, still not withdrawn, that there is no evidence to exclude them from involvement
in the disappearance, the Portuguese Supreme Court’s 2017 detailed refutation
of their “cleared” claims. Nothing there to make them look forward to demonstrating their
innocence in a Portuguese court. No extradition is still the only game in town.
So the distortions of relations
between Scotland Yard and the Portuguese police over the last five years can
hardly be unwelcome, can they? Nor can
the threats to Grange funding. Nor can the repeated, and invented, attacks on
the professionalism of both forces and the supposed list of “last suspects”
garbage.
Shambles
But now they’ve nearly all run out. Since Grange tightened
the screw on the couple in April all that stuff has suddenly stopped. The mysterious
Mr Pal, so voluble and useful in those fictions
has disappeared with them. Instead of
the confident assertions about the course of Grange that Heriberto Janosch had
been providing to the UK media, courtesy of a mystery English PR man’s media contacts
book, for the last three years we have the extraordinary collapse of the entire
Team McCann media machine.
Just look at that “machine” - the professional feeds
featuring Mr Pal, a spokesman for the couple and a “source” have disappeared since April in
favour of a disorganised and leaderless ragtag collection of junk – first of
all the amateurish Totman lead balloon and now GM’s depression, poetry (poetry and the McCanns?!) and a bizarre set
of stories on the “fund” that twitter readers, understandably, suspect are elaborate
practical jokes, so gross are they in their untruths and so opaque in their
aims.
As we said, it would all be happening in 2018. Perhaps it’s
time to call up Mr Smethurst. Oh, and a family member to remind us of what she said repeatedly in 2007/8 - that poor Kate McCann might be "too mentally fragile" to travel to Portugal. Just like Gary McKinnon. Or even a crazed-looking Gerry McCann.
