Azaria again

“In Australia, a lone woman
is being crucified by the Press
at any given moment.
With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space.”

It is with a feeling of mounting dread that I watch the media deracination of Kate McCann.

The British press - so anxious to cast the woman as a martyr to motherhood a mere four months ago - are turning on her in a manner sickeningly familiar to any Australian who remembers the anguished case of Lindy Chamberlain. Like Lindy, Kate McCann is characterised by her strong religious faith and her determination to find her missing child (the Chamberlains were Seventh Day Adventists). Like Lindy, Kate has not behaved in the manner expected of a grieving mother. Although - to use poet Les Murray’s phrase - her fault is not “a defect in weeping”; rather, it is apparently unseemly to use the media to publicise Madeleine’s disappearance.

“It’s always for a defect in weeping:
she hasn’t wept on cue
or she won’t weep correctly.
There’s a moment when the sharks are
still butting her, testing her protection,
when the Labor Party, or influence,
can still save her”.

In the view of the media, that is. Here is Andrew Pierce in the Telegraph:

Yet, have you never felt a sense of unease at their omnipresence in the papers and on television? No aspect of their grief seemed out of bounds. We have seen them deep in prayer in church. There was the photograph of them walking arm-in-arm on a deserted beach, reminiscent of Diana photographed alone at a conveniently empty Taj Mahal.

And then there is the almost pitiful sight of Mrs McCann clutching Madeleine’s favourite cuddly toy. Was I alone in wondering whether that was for comfort or because it was what the PR advisers suggested?

I am not singling out Mr Pierce’s copy in spite; he is representative of the slow burn of a story that - from the moment the McCanns adopted to stay in the media glare - I knew could well become Britain’s Azaria Chamberlain case. This time the foreign other is a Portuguese resort popular with middle-class English tourists, rather than outback Australia and its attendant population of peculiar flora and fauna. The press have feasted on the Portuguese legal system, treating its inquisitorial method as somehow probative of something more than an ongoing police investigation.

“Then she goes down, overwhelmed
in the feasting grins of pressmen,
and Press women who’ve moved
from being owned by men
to being owned by fashion,
these are more deeply merciless”.

For those not in the know, Kate McCann is mother of disappeared toddler Madeleine McCann, and wife of Gerry McCann. Both are doctors; she a GP, he a cardiologist. Both are sincere Catholics, a religion still the subject of some suspicion in a Britain that remembers the Troubles. Kate McCann even sought (and obtained) a papal blessing for her missing daughter. Both have had their medical titles stripped away in press reports. From the beginning, the “bad mother” trope that afflicted Lindy Chamberlain has been levelled at Kate McCann: she and Gerry went to dinner, leaving their daughter unsupervised. Even the famously objective BBC had this to say:

As the couple’s search for their daughter continued, through numerous press interviews, church visits, and flying trips around Europe, she has constantly carried around a small pink toy called Cuddle Cat, a favourite of Madeleine’s.

Mrs McCann has expressed her regret at leaving her children alone in their holiday apartment while she and her husband Gerry had dinner within the Ocean Club complex on the night Madeleine disappeared.

“We are just so desperately sorry. Every hour now, I still question, ‘Why did I think that was safe?’,” she said.

But although appearing distressed and distraught, the McCanns have still managed to face a constant barrage of demands from media from across the world, in their attempts to keep their missing daughter in the minds of the public.

In doing so, and as time has gone on, Mrs McCann has grown easier with the press and has given an increasing amount of interviews, some by herself.

Here is The Independent, perhaps a little less harshly:

By Madeleine’s fourth birthday on 12 May, the McCanns’ international campaign to keep the search alive had taken off, with the footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham making appeals for information, while Sir Richard Branson and J K Rowling contributed to rewards now totalling £2.5m. Mr and Mrs McCann launched a website, findmadeleine.com, which would get more than 170 million hits.

And now, both she and Gerry have been made arguidi, or “suspects” in their daughter’s death by Portuguese investigators. That a “suspect” in the civil law system is akin to someone “assisting the police with their enquiries” at common law seems to have passed many people by. It has given the media free reign to speculate, in part because the civil law does not allow the police to discuss any of their lines of enquiry, thus fuelling doubt and innuendo. In an eerie echo of the Chamberlain case, traces of blood have allegedly been found in a car the McCanns hired. The fetal blood in the Chamberlains’ car, you may recall, turned out to be rust inhibitor.

“She is rogue property,
she must be taught her weeping.
It is done for the millions.
Sometimes the millions join in
with jokes: how to get a baby
in the Northern Territory? Just stick
your finger down a dingo’s throat”.

Much of the most risible commentary comes from people who think that their personal experience as parents can be used as a template for everyone else’s experience, a mental collectivisation that forgets the singularity of individual lives. Here is Andrew Pierce again:

I salute their courage in trying to prevent Madeleine becoming just another forgotten missing-child statistic. Some of my friends who are parents tell me that, if they had been trapped in the same nightmare, they would not have been able to face the media at all, let alone three times a day. But they have not lost a child, of course.

We have been transfixed by the story because Madeleine is a pretty child whose parents are as removed as it is possible to be from the stereotypical image of a single mother going to the Costa Brava leaving the kids home alone. The fact that they are doctors, who save lives rather than take them, added to our fascination.

How many times in the past 127 days have you debated whether you would leave a three-year-old and two-year-old twin siblings, without adult supervision, while dining in a tapas bar a 52-second walk away?

But the other reason we have been absorbed is because we’re filled with a mixture of admiration and disbelief at the way Kate McCann always appeared so immaculate in public, when most mums would have broken down long ago.

Only mathematicians can make firm predictions, and only in certain branches of mathematics. As a lawyer, I advise my clients on the basis of precedent, but no lawyer is foolish enough to pretend to complete predictive power, no matter how “regular” the area of practice. “Too often”, as George Clason once wryly observed, “the lessons of experience are wasted on dead men”.

Kate McCann has wept on cue, has kept her womanly end of the bargain. It remains to be seen whether Les Murray’s bitter view of Australia’s treatment of prominent (but unsettling) women is true of Britain as well.

“Most times, though, the millions
stay silent, and the jokes
are snobbish media jokes:
Chemidenko. The Oxleymoron.
Spittle, like the flies on Black Mary.
After the feeding frenzy
sometimes a ruefully balanced last lick
precedes the next selection”.

The poem quoted throughout this piece is Les Murray’s A Deployment of Fashion.