More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

The Beatification Of The McCanns

I really doesn't get the way Kate and Gerry McCann are being treated like abused saints walking the earth among we mere mortals. Is it just me? Listening to the newspaper review on Today this morning there was all this stuff about how the Portuguese police are 'bungling', and how the couple don't deserve to be questioned repeatedly.

And I just don't get it - the British are traditionally 'a nation of child lovers', yet this pair, who manifestly and admittedly neglected their children (at best), are somehow regarded as the entirely blameless victims in the case.

I've said before that if one of those evil one-parent families had acted in exactly the same way they'd be demonised by that same press, but try as I might I can't get to the exact reason for the McCann love.

Is it simple jingoism that a plucky British couple are being dealt with by an alien police force who must, by definition, be inferior to the British version (who only go around shooting innocent but probably greasy South Americans dead after all)? The way they all leapt on the detail that it was a specially trained British police dog which found the traces of blood in the apartment would support the theory.

Or is it simple snobbery because it's a(n apparently) nice middle class couple who blithely left their three small children unattended in a foreign country, rather than some working class single parent dole scum who did the same in a council flat?

I'm entirely willing to acknowledge that the pair may not have contributed actively to the disappearance or worse of their daughter, but they're not saints, they're pretty clearly bad parents (is anyone intervening with regard to the safety of their other children by the way?) and the Portuguese police have a job to do.