Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

We have treated the McCanns as if they were Big Brother contestants

Madeleine’s disappearance sparked a grotesque media circus

Madeleine’s disappearance sparked a grotesque media circus

Did Kate McCann inadvertently kill her daughter Madeleine and then confect a four-month long parade of grief and concern for the benefit of the media, in order to avoid being done for the crime? This seems to be what the Portuguese police have come to either believe or hazard. The McCanns are back in England but they are now — exotically — ‘arguidos’, which means that the Portuguese cops suspect they may have a case to answer. One or both of them may yet be charged, so far as we understand the machinations of the Portuguese legal system. It is said that traces of DNA found in a hire car used by the McCanns some 25 days after Madeleine’s disappearance provide up to an 80 per cent match with little Madeleine’s DNA.

I’m no expert, but I would have thought that my own DNA would also provide at least an 80 per cent match with Madeleine’s, along with Vladimir Putin’s, Ruth Kelly’s, Graham Norton’s and indeed that of a polecat, honey badger or a fruit-fly. In fact, so far as I’m aware, there is almost nothing on this planet which doesn’t share 80 per cent of its DNA with Madeleine McCann; maybe some rocks, certain lichen, KFC chicken nuggets and David Miliband.

Or perhaps I have got hold of the wrong end of the stick and the new Portuguese evidence is rather more conclusive than this. Perhaps the DNA match is nearer 98 per cent, meaning that one might confuse it only with a member of Madeleine’s own family — her siblings or her parents, for example. We may never know: the Portuguese police have their own way of dealing with intense media speculation. Police forces the world over have come to understand that in certain cases the usual rules fly out of the window, that there is a higher authority than the simple requirement to investigate and impartially judge the available evidence.

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