Jingoistic British politicians like to boast that Britain is able to “punch above its weight”. There is one respect in which Britain perhaps still does make a global impact out of all proportion to its diminished status, and that is in its capacity for generating headline-grabbing news stories. What is striking is how somber, how full of dark implications, those stories are apt to be.
The case of the British doctors Gerry and Kate McCann and their daughter, Madeleine, who disappeared from the Portuguese hotel where the couple were holidaying last May, ranks among the biggest, most agonizing, British news stories of modern times. There can be few people anywhere who do not have an opinion about what became of Madeleine McCann or about the extraordinary way her parents have conducted themselves since the child’s baffling disappearance.
In Britain, the case has inspired the tabloid newspapers to do their unedifying worst. If they have milked the McCanns’ plight for every last drop of sentimentality, they have also talked up suspicions that the McCanns themselves may be somehow implicated in their daughter’s fate. At the same time, they have indulged their appetite for nationalistic self-flattery, insinuating that the British police would never have bungled the investigation in the way the Portuguese police are alleged to have done.
A study in its own right, the coverage of the McCann case says much about the hysterical, media-fixated country Britain has become. The couple’s professional status and telegenic qualities practically guaranteed that they would become objects of keen media interest. It was, though, remarkable with what zeal the McCanns positively embraced their sudden celebrity and poured their energies into keeping themselves and their story in the headlines. It rapidly became apparent that the couple were engaged in nothing less than a concerted effort at news management. Gerry McCann and his wife were also availing themselves of the services of a full-time PR specialist — the former Downing Street spin-doctor, Clarence Mitchell.
Mitchell is just one of a number of apparently well-meaning, media-savvy figures who have rallied to the McCanns’ cause, including a number of wealthy businessmen, notably the compulsively self-advertising British tycoon, Richard Branson. It seems doubtful, however, if the McCanns would have acquired such powerful allies had they not possessed so manifestly marketable an image. We must also remember that their story furnished a special type of business opportunity. Branson after all is an entrepreneur whose every move is in some sense a marketing ploy, an attempt to keep his brand in the public eye. Cynics have been quick to suggest that he could hardly have found a better way to revive his own perhaps fading market profile than to become conspicuously involved in funding the search for a missing child whose winsome image has touched the hearts of millions.
Many must have pondered how they would have reacted if they had suffered the McCanns’ fate and whether they could possibly have borne the ceaseless daily publicity to which they have been exposed. Yet in today’s Britain, more than a few people would very likely have behaved in much the same way. Certainly, the McCanns’ conduct is of a piece with the contemporary obsession with reality-television, the mania for self-display and laying bare one’s innermost feelings that has become endemic among large sections of British society.
This is of course a phenomenon that is sweeping the globe but it is especially highly developed in Britain, a postindustrial country that has for some years boasted more actors than it does coal miners. It is perhaps no accident that the most successful British leader of recent times, the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, is a virtuoso performer, less a real politician than a showman with a special talent for impersonating a politician. It might be uncharitably suggested that the McCanns, dining out in Portugal every night with their friends, were more concerned with playing the part of parents than with actually looking after their children, and that in this sense they are indeed the authors of their own misfortune.
Inextricably bound up with this rampant British exhibitionism has been a growing cult of victimhood. So many of the participants in reality-television shows seem bent above all on flaunting their emotional wounds, and on profiting from so doing. Even as Britain’s tabloid newspapers are devoting endless column inches to the McCanns, they are also lavishing attention on Heather Mills McCartney, the disabled ex-wife of the multimillionaire former Beatle, Paul McCartney, who has never been shy of portraying herself as a traumatized survivor of exceptional adversity and who is now seeking a lucrative divorce settlement.
The McCanns, too, have become increasingly prone to project themselves as victims — victims now not just of unbearable loss but also of cruel suggestions that they have something to hide.
The McCanns’ problem is that their all too blatant effort to dictate how they are regarded by the public has become counterproductive. The reaction to the distraught interview which Kate McCann gave to Spanish television last week indicated mounting public impatience with her and her husband, a sense that they have protested too much. It is true that the McCanns still have their sympathizers: As a result of writing about them in unsympathetic terms, the Irish novelist, Anne Enright, winner of the 2007 Booker Prize for Fiction, has been widely vilified.
But the Spanish psychiatrist who concluded that Mrs. McCann is unstable and that she was being less than frank during her interview was voicing suspicions that have become common currency. The harder the McCanns have tried to control their story, the more it has acquired a lurid life of its own, feeding the kind of fantasies that are otherwise appeased by horror films.
It is because the McCanns’ story arouses such primitive emotions, because it has become such an enthralling narrative, that it has survived so long in the headlines. Are the couple innocent victims of a ruthless pedophile? Or did they somehow end the life of their own child, possibly hiding the corpse in the fridge of their hotel room before disposing of it elsewhere? Such are the questions being debated by the public whose trust the McCanns have been at such pains to win. Gerry and Kate McCann have become caught up in a real-life horror movie, with the watching world unable to decide whether the two Britons deserve to be pitied or reviled.
