Candid Camera: Clarence Mitchell

Ah but who pays the ferryman?

McCann spokesman Mitchell tells of phone security fear

Published

21 January 2011

By Jon Manel
PM, BBC Radio 4

The spokesman for the family of Madeleine McCann says he will contact the police because he believes someone attempted to access information about his mobile phone account and voicemail.

Clarence Mitchell became the family's point of contact for the media after three-year-old Madeleine disappeared from the holiday apartment where her family was staying in Portugal in May 2007.

Journalists from dozens of news organisations around the world regarded him as a key to potential new angles.

I contacted Mr Mitchell after I learned of talk that the McCann story may have been a possible target of phone hacking.

He asked his mobile phone provider, Vodafone, to check his account details. There had been allegations for years about how some journalists got their stories.
'Blatant attempt'

"I was always concerned that if some journalists were up to this sort of thing that I might be a target but I had no proof," he said.

Mr Mitchell was told that records of calls made and received were routinely destroyed after about a year.

However, he was provided with some information including details of calls made to Vodafone about his account.

Two instances were drawn to his attention, the first one on 29 February 2008.

Mr Mitchell said: "The operator lists it, saying 'a gentleman called wishing to check the phone', as he gets calls each night from the number and wanting information and is a 'witness on the CID trial for McCanns'.

"Well, that doesn't make sense. It certainly wasn't me that made that call. I would never use that phraseology and there was no such thing as a CID trial for the McCanns. It's ridiculous.

"That appears to me to be a blatant attempt to get information about whose number it was and what was happening. Thankfully the operator didn't give them anything."
'Fishing for information'

Another call was made to Vodafone customer services in July 2008.

Mr Mitchell said: "Basically it [the entry] claims the person ringing - not me, I stress - had received a text message, claiming that a third party had been trying to access their voicemail but there was nothing on the account showing that.

"Well, that's because it isn't true. I never got such a text. Somebody else is again fishing for information here. The Vodafone operator believed they were talking to me as the account holder, that's why they listed it as customer."

Mr Mitchell says he knows "absolutely" that he did not make either call.

On both occasions, he says, "thankfully" the phone company's security measures worked and no information was divulged.

To his frustration, due to the lack of other information now available, he says he cannot trace who might have done this.

"It is impossible to state with any accuracy who was behind these calls. Given the situation that I was in at the time and the amount of journalistic inquiry and traffic that I was receiving on that number, it would be naive of me to think that it wasn't journalistic in its nature.

"This was a cack-handed, pretty low-level, amateurish attempt. I'm angry, I'm shocked by it but I'm not surprised."

Mr Mitchell also said that Kate and Gerry McCann, of Rothley, Leicestershire, had a "very dim view" of some sections of the British press and therefore had a "world-weariness" about the situation.

"They're angered by this and will be upset, but again, like myself, in some respects not surprised that somebody could be so stupid as to possibly try this," he said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-12245765

Clarence Mitchell

"If she is dead then she is dead, but not by their hand."

Carole Malone, a regular guest on GB News sofa..

HE can't help the way he looks but the McCanns' new PR boss, Clarence Mitchell, looks shiftier than your average car salesman.

However, what he can help is the look of smug self-importance that dominates every TV appearance, a look that says: "This is my moment and I'm going to make the most of it."

Mitchell - like everyone else involved in this case - needs to remember it's not about him, it's not about PR...it's about Madeleine. He will serve the McCanns well if he remembers that.

CAROLE MALONE
Sunday Mirror - 23rd September 2007

Forget Neighbours going to Five – 'McCanns are the real soap'

By John Mair, senior lecturer in journalism at Coventry University

The television world may be all agog at the defection of Ramsay Street from Channel One to Channel Five but the media world and the world’s media are still enthralled by another soap – Kate and Gerry McCann and the saga of their missing daughter Madeleine.

There are only three facts in this story.

Madeleine disappeared from the McCann holiday apartment in the Portugese resort of Praia da Luz on the evening of May 3rd 2007.

She has not been found.

Parents Kate and Gerry are now ‘arguidos’ or official suspects. So too is local expat Robert Murat.

Millions of words have been written worldwide mindful of, and ignoring, those three facts.

Each day literally scores of stories appear all over the world and in all languages (Nearly 2,000 in a Google news search on Tuesday February 12 alone, for example).

On the front page of the Daily Express ‘Missing Maddy’ vies daily with the death of Princess Diana for space.

Former Sun Editor Kelvin Mckenzie calls it ‘the most significant story of my lifetime’. At least two respected British current affairs strands – ‘Panorama’ and ‘Dispatches’ have had a bite at the McCann cherry.

BBC Radio Four has too, Oprah Winfrey is said to want the McCanns exclusively to speak for a large sum and the feature documentary makers like John Smithson are circling for the big one.

Just what is the appeal of the McCann story?

The obvious elements are there – the sheer horror of the crime if it is that. Abducting a beautiful three-year-old from her bed.

Her parents, Kate, and Gerry too, play their part in the ‘soap’ in that they are upper middle class and attractive.

The McCanns are the first private individuals (or suspects according to your view) to have their own ‘spin doctor’ figure to sell their story.

He is Clarence Mitchell, a former BBC Royal Correspondent has worked nearly full time for them for nine months. He resigned a well paid UK Government post to do so. His job he says is to ‘help’ them and be a ‘buffer’ to the media for them. It is a highly controversial role.

In the last three months, I have produced two public events with Clarence. They were packed out – more than 200 at each. There was much heat and some light generated at them, much of it about his role. Clarence held his own. Usually.

The McCann story is a morality tale for our times.

Some have taken against Kate and Gerry simply because they feel they ‘abandoned’ their daughter (and her siblings) for a night of fun with friends. Others simply dislike them because of their class. Others for manipulating the media in their favour through Clarence and cleverness.

The McCanns and Clarence have proved masters at turning the story when needs arise.

‘The McCanns; Guilty or Innocent?’ is a ‘debate’ fanned by the internet. One squeak in Praya de Luz becomes a shout in London in minutes.

‘Stories’ in Portugal’ become ‘fact’ in Britain then go back to Portugal to be embellished even more The printed media have proved adept at recyling.

As Mitchell bitterly puts it “If there were green awards for recycling it should go to the British and Portuguese press”.

It’s not just the professionals. Everybody has a view on the McCanns. Blogs following the Media Society Clarence event at the LSE last month attracted hundreds of postings – most of them lacking in any rhyme or reason. If you want to see raw bile look up the3arguidos.net. It does not make for pleasant reading.

This particular soap opera will have an end in tragedy or in triumph. Then it will be ripe for the historical documentaries to be made and for the media – print and broadcast – to audit itself. That should be fascinating.

Forget ‘Neighbours’ and Channel Five tune into “The McCanns – an everyday story of not so ordinary Leicestershire folk. Playing on a screen or a newspaper very near you”.

John Mair produced ‘The McCanns and the Media’ for the Media Society at the LSE on January 30.

https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2008/news/forget-neighbours-going-to-five-mccanns-are-the-real-soap/

Gerry McCann returns to Portugal

18th January 2009

Gerry McCann, father of the missing five-year-old Madeleine, who disappeared in Praia da Luz in 2007, flew back to Portugal on Tuesday for the first time since returning to the UK after the disappearance of his daughter.

The family’s spokesman, Clarence Mitchell, said that Gerry McCann was in Portugal to meet with his lawyers and discuss the search for his daughter.

“Gerry and Kate continue to search for Madeleine and do not plan on giving up. This visit to Portugal is part of our strategy to continue that search,” he said. “I can say that Gerry did not meet with police during this visit, the attorney general or the government.”

A spokesman from the British embassy told the Algarve Resident that Gerry McCann landed at Faro airport on Tuesday morning, but contrary to media reports was not met by officials upon his arrival.

“This was a private visit. Gerry McCann did meet with the Ambassador in Lisbon to discuss ways to take forward the search for Madeleine,” said the spokesman.

Gerry McCann told Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã: “I have only come to speak with my lawyers to define strategies and analyse other possibilities to continue looking for Madeleine.”

He added: “This is a short visit, but I plan to make others. I arrived this morning (Tuesday) and will leave tomorrow morning (Wednesday).”

Gerry McCann added that he was accompanied by a British lawyer, who was working with his Portuguese lawyer, Rogério Alves, with whom he also met.

At the time the Algarve Resident went to press on Wednesday, Rogério Alves was unavailable to comment.

Kate McCann did not accompany her husband on the visit.

Madeleine McCann, of Rothley, Leicestershire, was three when she vanished from a holiday flat in Praia da Luz in the Algarve in May 2007.

https://www.portugalresident.com/gerry-mccann-returns-to-portugal/

Believe me I'm not going bonkers, well not quite - I am today reminded of the unparalleled hypocrisy demonstrated by Team McCann and their association with the press and media (my favourite subject). At the same time taking the reader on a magical mystery tour of CMOMM past and present.

How else can anybody know what they're missing?

Big question of the day .... why would Gerry McCann need to discuss 'the strategy to continue the search' [sic] of his missing daughter with lawyers and ambassadors.

Wouldn't it be more pertinent to discuss the case with the police?

As with all worldly events, the press and media are ever present with a readiness to tell it like it's not - Clarence Mitchell was no exception when he took up the reins to protect and help the McCanns through the mire of press and media intrusion in those early days.

Jeremy Paxman tackled the distortion of fact so considerately when interviewing Professor Gerald McCann about press intrusion - to follow.

It's always been a wonder to me exactly how M. Mitchell escaped justice himself, with so much recorded material to condemn. Perverting the course of justice springs to mind.

The McCanns Inc. readily put themselves in the hands of the press on the night of 3rd/4th May 2007, soon after encouraged by their appointed media monitoring representative .... Clarence Mitchell!

They say there is no such thing as bad publicity - to that I'm inclined to agree.

Clarence Mitchell slams 'lazy' Madeleine McCann coverage

Oliver Luft
Tue 11 Nov 2008 10.20 GMT

British journalists following the Madeleine McCann case in Portugal last year were responsible for lazy and distorted stories, the press adviser to the missing child's family, Clarence Mitchell, has said.

Speaking at the Society of Editors conference in Bristol yesterday, Mitchell told delegates that he faced the daily problem of dealing with inaccuracies created by a hungry British press pack. He added that 99% of the stories coming out of the local media in Praia da Luiz were "totally inaccurate lies".

Mitchell said that the local bar in Praia da Luiz effectively became the newsroom for the British press pack, with its "lethal combination of Wi-Fi and alcohol".

"The British press out there in Portugal, and I'm not singling out any particular publication, were - I'm afraid to say this and I don't like to say this because I'm a former journalist myself - they were lazy," he told the conference.

He said: "The Portuguese police hid behind the law of judicial secrecy saying they weren't able to comment, either on the record or off the record, but that didn't stop lots of information finding its way from police files into the Portuguese press.

"However, when the British press made inquiries they came up against a stone wall so they resorted to sitting in the local bar, which had the lethal combination of free Wi-Fi and alcohol, and that became the newsroom predictably enough.

"It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases.

"This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."

Mitchell said that British newspapers put reporters under pressure to come up with new angles and exclusive stories in the months after Madeleine went missing in May last year.

"I had certain reporters from certain groups almost in tears some mornings saying, 'If you don't give me a front-page splash by 4pm I'm going to be fired," he added.

"I can understand the pressure they are under but when I said 'I can't help you, we honestly haven't got anything of value or anything to warrant that coverage' nevertheless a front page would then duly appear in certain titles."

Mitchell added: "Things that were allegations or suggestions in the Portuguese press were hardened up into absolute fact when they crossed the Channel."

He also told the conference yesterday that more than £1m in compensation had now been paid by British newspapers to Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, and the friends - the so-called "tapas seven" - with whom the McCanns dined on the night their daughter went missing.

In March, the McCanns accepted £550,000 from Express Newspapers after the Daily Express, Sunday Express, the Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday ran numerous defamatory articles.

Express Newspapers was again forced last month to apologise and pay £375,000 in libel damages to the "tapas seven" after the publisher ran a series of defamatory stories about the group.

The News of the World also apologised in September for publishing extracts from Kate McCann's private diary without her permission and made a financial contribution to the search for Madeleine.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/nov/11/clarence-mitchell-madeleine-mccann-reporting
....................


What McCann spokesman Clarence Mitchell really thinks happened to Madeleine

By Madeline Goodwin 3 June 2019 • 5:20pm



This article was originally published in March 2019.

When Clarence Mitchell picked up the phone at work one morning, he expected yet another routine conversation.

But it was a phone call that plucked him from the mundane life of a civil service job and dropped him right in the heart of one of the biggest missing children’s cases the world has ever seen.

An ex-BBC reporter, Mitchell was by then working in a government-led arm on media monitoring, but had asked ex-colleagues to keep him in mind for any big stories that broke. “I thought it might be something like bird flu, or foot and mouth. A general crisis that flares up from time to time,” explains Mitchell.

But this was May 2007, and a three-year-old Madeleine McCann had just been snatched from her hotel room in Praia du Luz, Portugal, taken from her bed while her parents dined in a nearby restaurant.

“The ambassador [to Portugal] had sent a couple of press officers down there, but they were overwhelmed by the media response. He asked for some extra help from London,” Mitchell recalls.

“I was sent out and told it would just be a fortnight or so." Mitchell is still helping the family. Fascination with Madeleine's case has never abated - a recent Netflix series, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, was released in March - and Mitchell has been handling Gerry and Kate's media dealings ever since.

“Some of the coverage had been very negative, and so I thought this was a chance to help them," the 57-year-old says.
Gerry and Kate McCann's daughter Madeleine disappeared from a holiday flat in Portugal



“We have a good working relationship. Friendly but professional," he adds. "We do not socialise, it is not necessarily appropriate, but the media coverage is still pretty intrusive and they see me as a part of dealing with it."

Mitchell had to consider the impact that taking on such a case would have on him - his own children were 10, eight and one at the time. “I could not help but think of my kids when I was at the height of it... I was away from home a lot of the time as well," he recalls.

“That said, I treated it as a job. Although it was upsetting, and I could see the pain it was causing the family, I could not afford to get emotionally attached to the situation. I just had to look at the set of facts in front of me, and treat it as dispassionately as possible."

He admits that it was "upsetting," but adds that, "without being callous, I had to keep the actual emotion to one side. Not wanting to sound cold-hearted, but I do not think it has affected me particularly badly. I tried to be as impartial as possible, and still try to this day.”

Over the years, the McCanns have faced a great deal of criticism over their parenting, and perceived role in Madeleine’s disappearance. “A lot of it is misinformed, misguided and based purely on assumptions or lack of knowledge," Mitchell says. Mostly, though, it is "prejudice. People deciding that they don’t like the McCanns.”



Mitchell estimates that "thousands" of people have told him they have seen the little girl in a dream - including a lot of psychics - while "one of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories I have heard was that Madeleine was born as the result of a government cloning project.

“People also assumed the worst. That [the McCanns] were getting drunk, that they were having fun and that they did not care about their children."

Further criticism of Gerry and Kate has labelled them "neglectful. There is even those who say that the parents know what happened. They don’t. It is just not true. But try explaining that in the noise of social media and general coverage.”

The McCanns' restrained emotional response to the cameras in the immediate aftermath of Madeleine's disappearance provoked questions: how could they be so contained after something so terrible had happened?

“One of the reasons they were so controlled was because they were told very early on that often, in the case of paedophilic kidnaps, the perpetrators watch media coverage and enjoy seeing the distress that they have caused," Mitchell explains.



“So, the police told them not to cry. Not to show any over-emotion. Kate and Gerry, both doctors and both logical, were not going to let that b------ have that satisfaction and so were very rigid.

He understands, though, that “for someone who does not know that, they might think it looks a bit suspicious. It is almost like the public were expecting the parents to react in a certain way.”

Things were worsened still by what he calls "a spin-cycle of madness." The papers were full of "McCann fury", he remembers; "the tabloids exaggerated and distorted the information." He is also critical of the Portuguese authorities, as "there would be certain bits of information that could have only come from interviews with the Portuguese police, who wouldn't then confirm anything due to Portuguese laws prohibiting the discussion of legal cases.”

Since the McCanns entered the public eye in 2007, they have received mountains of abuse; Mitchell, too, has had his fair share of online trolls.

“I get slammed online all the time for defending them," he says, adding that while he ignores it as best he can, "it is hurtful and it is unnecessary. The McCanns ignore the online negativity and so do I. We only act if there are specific, actionable threats which are always reported to the police.”

Certain tabloids have cashed in on public fascination with Madeleine, Mitchell believes, as "every time they put [her] on the front page, circulation would go up" - whether there really were new developments in her case or not. Front page apologies from a number of red tops followed, while "substantial damages" were paid.



A major source of ill feeling towards the McCanns has been the considerable funding the case has received. The Find Madeleine Fund was established in 2007, made up of public donations as well as settlement money from the Express newspaper group, and proceeds from Kate McCann's book.

“The family asked for help in finding their daughter, as anybody would, and the Government chose to support them," Mitchell says, "I do agree though, what do you say to the parent of another missing child? The mother of Ben Needham, for example, has occasionally been upset that the McCanns' case gets so much coverage.”

It is our digital age, however, that Mitchell believes has made all the difference.

“Madeleine has been, arguably, the most high-profile missing child case in the internet era. It was not a decision of our making.”

Nowadays, he does little work with the McCanns, and remains uncertain over Madeleine's fate. “I asked the British authorities what they think happened and if there was any family involvement, and they assured me it was just a rare case of stranger abduction.

“It’s very rare, but it can happen." A sexual motive, he says, is an "obvious" possibility. Kate and Gerry remain hopeful that, as per "other cases, where a missing child has been found alive after many years," there remains hope: that, coupled with "the complete absence of any evidence that Madeleine has been physically harmed," gives them the sense that their eldest daughter may well still be alive.

Though Mitchell hopes the mystery "could all end on one phone call tomorrow, so far, it hasn’t.

“A child was taken to order from that room.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/mccann-spokesman-clarence-mitchell-what-thinks-happened-madeleine/