GM and recent supporter at the House of Commons
Out it all came
In the Beginning...
When we wrote about the “Foundation Lie” we
described Gerry McCann addressing the Commons committee in March 2009 by reading out a framework of a history, a narrative of
events in 2007.
It began with a brief paragraph on the
usual “we had to engage with the media who’d suddenly
appeared” stuff before moving on to the
real beginning, the “decision to step back from the publicity” in the summer, followed
by the “mysterious” onslaught on the McCanns by a wicked media. It excluded almost
all that had happened in between.
It was essentially a development of the
story that GM had started telling everybody at the time of his visit to
Edinburgh in festival week, also in a recent Bureau, and that was no accident. By 2011 the narrative
appeared in its final form in Kate McCann’s Madeleine
and was expounded to the Leveson inquiry in 2011/2012.
Why did history for the McCanns begin in August 2007?
The short answer is - that’s when the McCanns engaged a
criminal lawyer.
Game Changer
They did so knowing they were going to be questioned as arguidos. From then on, their task was
to prepare a convincing defence case to save themselves. And, eventually, they would have a battery of lawyers and journalists
to help them do it.
Until August the McCanns had been obliged to play the tabloid-invented
role of innocent suffering victims “working with the police”. Now, with the PJ finally showing their hand, all
that was going out of the window.
There were limits to what could be done about the police
statements: they were fixed in stone. There was room, though, to hide or muffle them
using the secrecy rules, the language
barrier, the confusion and their state of trauma early on. If a police vendetta was added in – impossible while
playing the “working with the police role” - then
they might withstand all but a determined prosecution.
But there was no appetite for a prosecution, in Portugal or the
UK. With luck the PJ, who, as GM guessed on September 11 had “nothing” solid, would
abandon the case and the police documents would never see the light of day. Who
then would start combing through the millions of words of leaks and counter
leaks to decide stuff like whether GM had used his key to the apartment
door at 9.05 or not? Most of it wasn’t even available in English.
“Yes,” goes the final
narrative, “ we used media at first because they suddenly appeared and to help find
our child - the police were sceptical and backward but we
stuck by them for Madeleine’s sake - under pressure for results the PJ
turned on us, saying we had got rid of the child! They fed horrible stories to the media who lied
about us – the PJ couldn’t accept they were wrong and hounded us until we
were terrified – in the end we proved they had no evidence, it was all just
invention by a suspect cop and an incompetent team. We don’t hold this against
the decent Portuguese people, of whom we’re very fond but it all hurts terribly
to this day.”
See? It's the same story we're telling.
But…
Universal and all purpose, eh? Defence document, attack on the lying media document, libel claim document and, importantly, "the truth" for the good old British public. All one story.
There was, however, a problem. The McCanns are pathological liars.
That doesn’t make them guilty in the disappearance, not at all, but it’s a
complicating factor. It means that, however much they might want to tell the
truth, their mental database doesn’t necessarily
provide it when called up. It's just a disability: the old Mark Twain saying, “if you tell the truth you don’t have to
remember anything” applies.
So the construction of this narrative, even with the help of
defence experts, was a great deal of challenging work.
So much for our own narrative. Now, let’s just lift the
corner of the tablecloth, as it were and give you a small example of the process
in action.
Let’s take the December 2007 Times article Beyond the
Smears. As the Times boasts, it
represented six months of work for its author David James Smith. They say little about the fact that, whatever
its original aim and form, by December it was being used as a conduit for the developing
narrative by the parents.
By then the "history's" construction had been in public view for
three months as the McCanns and the defence
used Mitchell to fill in the gaps and inconsistencies and
counter Portuguese claims – about the sighting, GM’s “memories” about
intruders and the rest, and, particularly, about PJ suggestions that a KM too-unstable-to-be
safe-with-her-own-child had suffered “missing hours” before 7PM. All that, together
with the Panorama blockbuster, was
demonstrating that the narrative was not just for the Portuguese courts but the
British public.
So how did it develop on the way to Madeleine? The truth always
stays the same, doesn’t it? Have a look at Part Two.
