OTHER PEOPLE’s CHILDREN

Is there any child presently missing whose name is not Madeleine McCann? I ask because the media – print and broadcast, daytime and evening, tabloid and ‘serious’ – seem locked in agreement that the fate of the Liverpool girl evidently abducted in Portugal is the most compelling story of the day. The fortunes of Gordon Brown are lucky if they get to share the limelight and even he felt the need – or was advised – to utter a few mawkish platitudes on the matter.

Other parents, worried sick about their own missing children, must wonder what they should have done to commandeer such a stupendous level of publicity. Or perhaps some of them had the good taste and good sense to deny the media access to their grief. The McCanns, walking unseeing through the days and the throng, appear as though participants in some macabre reality show: I’m Available for Photographs – Get My Kid Back.

Why this child, these parents, this story? It would be unkind to suggest that the Portuguese setting allows reporters and crews to jet off to the sun and get paid for it; or that it presents the opportunity for more glamorous shots than would, say, the streets of Liverpool; or that the probability that the perpetrator is some kind of filthy foreigner takes some of the dread out of whatever the denouement proves to be and permits a barely discernible subtext of xenophobia.

How these child-horror stories select themselves for maximum coverage invites close study. Sarah Payne, the Soham girls and now this case suggest that somehow the sex of the victim is a deciding factor. With the deaths of James Bulger and Jason Swift there were other factors that weighed. The Moors Murders – long ago but still a benchmark for crimes against children – were more notable for the murderers (names that still resound) than their victims (can you name any of them?) That football can be dragged into the mix also helps to glamorise the story. If you want your missing child to be on everyone’s lips, you’d better get yourselves in good with a world-famous sports star quick.

Madeleine McCann – inevitably dubbed Maddy by scores of reporters and their readers who know nothing about her, including whether the diminutive has ever before been used of her (cf “Jamie” Bulger) – may still be lucky and be returned to her parents. No doubt there will be services of thanks in Liverpool Cathedral (both of them) at such a resolution. But in some horrible way, working to its own momentum, the tragic end is now the expected and almost the willed one. Newspapers and increasingly populist news bulletins thrive on tears and grief – “every parents’ nightmare” – and cannot but present a reprieve as a sort of anti-climax.

I suppose it must be because people want to suffer vicariously that this case, with its stark and simply understood facts, plays so strongly. Richard Bilton, the BBC1 6.00pm bulletin editor’s favourite reporter, was doing vox pops over the border in Spain the other day, showing people photographs of the McCann girl. There was an implication in his manner that anyone who didn’t recognise her was mysteriously uncaring or ill informed, this last possibility also reflecting badly on the local police (Spanish or Portuguese, it hardly mattered which). I would like to suggest, in the gentlest possible way, that declining to be bullied into obsessing about a hitherto unknown child missing on holiday is not evidence that one is a bad person. I’m sorry for the McCanns, just as I am sorry for the families of those killed in last week’s anti-government riots in Pakistan and today’s suicide bombings in Iraq. But quite frankly it doesn’t have much to do with me and if I never again see that woman clutching her child’s favourite toy, it won’t be too soon.

PS: In ‘BLAIR – REST in PURGATORY’, I forgot to mention that his first Cabinet also included a blind man, a remarkable first (I think) in politics anywhere in the world. But it didn’t include anyone who wasn’t white and, though Paul Boateng was elevated in 2002 and Baroness Amos thereafter, Britain has some way to go yet before its government is as integrated as several have been in the USA.