Woolfall had of course been talking patent nonsense!. Everything that he and Kate had said, and their relatives and friends, was 110% consistent in insisting that Madeleine had been snatched by an evil abductor. Probably an evil paedophile, in fact. Indeed, a resident of Praia da Luz at the time, June Wright, speaking on the Channel 4 Dispatches programme,’ Searching fore Madeleine’ had amply confirmed this.

She had said: “I arrived at the Ocean Club reception at around about 10pm to 11pm – and at the time that we arrived, a police car arrived. As the police officer got out, a man approached him, who I now know is Gerry McCann, and said that his daughter had been abducted. He went on to say that there was no way that she [Madeleine] could have opened the shutters herself, she’d definitely been taken”.

If, as Woolfall told ‘The Times’, he and Kate had had no thoughts of an abduction, then why would he have been sent out at all? What crisis was he supposed to be managing?

Was it just forgetfulness on his part? Or maybe it was a cunning lie. Gerry had learnt rapidly that these media people often lied in order to promote ‘the greater good’, as they saw it. Outright lies and half-truths would be promoted by PR folk who took ‘the long view’. Gerry couldn’t figure out why Woolfall had made these three errors. Maybe it was all deliberate. After all, he was the head PR honcho at Bell Pottinger.

And he had said one very good thing in that article. He’d said: “I saw Kate and Gerry McCanns’ despair – and if they were acting they deserved an Oscar. If they had been involved and in any way been guilty, to me they would have to win every Golden Globe and every Oscar ever awarded”.

Yes, that comment had been absolutely spot on, he reflected, tipping his glass back for another slow sip of wine.

And Woolfall had been nothing short of brilliant when he had explained why he and Kate had left the children on their own six nights in a row, over 100 yards away. He’d told ‘the Times’:

“When I first got to Praia da Luz, I asked Mark Warner to put me in the chair at the Tapas restaurant that they had sat in, and show me where the apartment was. It never struck me that it would be a particularly odd thing to leave your children in that apartment, given that it was so close. It is incredibly sleepy and quiet in Praia da Luz. There is no traffic noise. One day, when he was standing on a balcony, Gerry was saying how they felt when they first came to the resort. The pool was close, supermarket round the corner. They felt everything was a stone’s throw”.

Yes, Woolfall had put the case for going out wining and dining, leaving their children in an unlit holiday apartment where they could not be seen or heard, absolutely superbly. It just sounded like the most natural, everyday, common-sense thing to do. Which is exactly what Gerry wanted his PR advisers to get across – and get across in no uncertain terms.

No doubt Woolfall and that bloke in the Social Services – he could never remember his name – who had said that what he and Kate had done was ‘well within the bounds of responsible parenting’, would heartily agree with each other.

Gerry recalled another paragraph from ‘The Times’ article. Woolfall had said: “In the second week, Gerry behaved very much like a doctor would do. Doctors are analytical. He started to have much more strategic conversations with me about what they might do. They became more aware that getting Madeleine’s photograph widely distributed in Spain and possibly North Africa was sensible. Gerry said to me, ‘We don’t want the awareness that Madeleine has gone missing to disappear overnight, and that we are a family whose child went missing on holiday, and that is the end of it. We want to try and find her.’ When I left Portugal, the beginnings of the idea of having a campaign were probably forming…they soon got some good control on things. For example, the walk on the beach by Kate and Gerry, filmed by dozens of journalists, was all part of their desire to show they were in charge”.

Yes. Gerry had very much liked that article. Analytical, strategic, ‘good control’ and ‘in charge’ – that was him, all right.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT