SANTA'S LITTLE HELPERS by Dr Martin Roberts

So there we are in Lisbon, the court suffused with an eerie glow from the assembled journalists' lap-top computers, when Isabel Duarte, or whoever the McCanns' advocate happens to be, looks toward the judge's bench, whilst opening their hands in a melodramatic gesture of appeal: "How can anyone possibly decide that the author's conclusions are correct, whether they be based on prior police work or not, when, even at this very moment, police inquiries are continuing into the child's whereabouts? Such conclusions are clearly premature, with every chance of being wrong. As such they amount to nothing more than scandalous surmise!"

So what do you do as a team manager, when you know that, position for position, your team is the weaker? Stop the opposition from playing their game of course. And with a team of thirty-seven detectives engaged in the pursuit of thirty-eight persons of interest, Scotland Yard are busy man-for-man marking, the player-coach ready to leap from the bench with shouts of "Leave him! He's mine." once the lynch-pin of the criminal operation has been identified.

Eliminating possible abductors, given the likelihood of some other kind of crime, is akin to tracing all local gun owners in connection with the recent discovery of a corpse with a knife in its back. Rigorous yet meaningless. You have a link to the caboose when all the time it was the first carriage that sheared off, causing the train wreck. Scotland Yard are actively engaged in re-writing history just as surely as King James knowingly commissioned re-writing of the gospels. And 'knowing' is what the McCann case is all about.

In mid-August 2007, Correio da Manha published a claim that Alipio Ribeiro, then head of the Policia Judiciara in Portugal, was contacted at about 11.00 p.m. on 3 May by the British Ambassador John Buck, the ambassador being so desirous of discussing the disappearance of young Madeleine McCann that he interrupted Ribeiro at dinner that night in order to do so. Three weeks after this report the McCanns were made arguidos and, barely a week after that, on 14 September, Correio da Manha produced another, which included an observation of direct relevance to their earlier revelation:

'The first call Gerry made on the night of the crime was to Alistair Clark, a good friend from University days and a diplomat close to Gordon Brown.'

That would go some way toward explaining the extraordinary speed with which John Buck himself, resident in Lisbon, had been appraised of the situation in Praia da Luz, the police having yet to arrive.

Well it might if Gerry McCann had actually made the call in question, but he did not. In fact he did not contact anyone in the UK until he telephoned his sister Trisha, who put the phone down after ten minutes, at 11.51 p.m. Buck and Ribeiro at least were already 'on board'. So too was the Portuguese Justice Minister, apparently; another of Buck's urgent contacts. Oddly, Ribeiro seems not to have communicated with any of his PJ colleagues immediately, or at all, that night. Staff in Portimao only became aware of the incident when later contacted by the GNR.

Someone clearly set the diplomatic wheels in motion very early on and it wasn't Trisha Cameron, nor was it 'Uncle Brian' ('phoned at 11.52 p.m.), as Kate McCann (Madeleine, chapter 5) might wish us to believe. Does it really matter who did so? Maybe it was the Mark Warner management, who knows?

Correio da Manha apparently.

In the wake of the initial tsunami, in December 2007, CdM editor Manuel Catarino published a book, "La culpa de los McCann", in which he repeated his newspaper's earlier claim that, on the night of 3 May, PJ director Alipio Ribeiro was informed of the McCann abduction by Ambassador Buck. He went further however, adding that UK Prime Minister-in-waiting, Gordon Brown, himself already knew of the incident through a mutual friend of Gerry McCann's.

Gordon Brown's insistence on being kept up-to-date on developments in the McCann case has long been a matter of public record, but this little twist is of potentially greater significance.

Perhaps the original claim, of John Buck's early warning signals, is a myth. Yet neither Buck nor Ribeiro afterwards took pains to deny their late-night conversation. Rather, an explanation of sorts, appeared subsequently; an explanation which, if CdM were in possession of it beforehand, would surely have appeared in conjunction with the original story line. Instead it emerged the moment the temperature had risen, within a week of the McCanns being questioned as suspects (persons of interest if you would rather) in their own daughter's disappearance.

To judge from the 'phone records currently resident in the long-since archived PJ files, it is Gerry McCann's earliest call to Alistair Clark, who, by the way, was not a diplomat of any complexion, which is the more fictional.

Was it really Alistair Clark who 'must have immediately contacted people at the highest level – before the PJ were informed'? And was he the 'mutual friend' of both Gordon Brown and Gerry McCann? Whatever the identity of the mystery informant, there are two parameters of singular importance to be observed: He/she was UK based, and a confidante of Gerry McCann's.

If the first of these conditions is true, then the diplomatic initiative in Portugal cannot be attributed to any direct altruistic intervention on the part of a McCann affiliate or other interested party inside Portugal, with either the British embassy in Lisbon or the Algarve consulate, whose initial instructions must therefore have emanated from the Foreign Office in London. If the second is true also, then third-party intervention (Portugal via London) is ruled out completely, on account of the conduit being a personal friend of Gerry McCann's, who would obviously have made the call himself.

Neither before nor since have the McCanns offered any rationalisation of the original CdM story of August 12. They should, and for one very good reason: Whether Gerry McCann personally took ownership of the information flow at the outset, or had it gifted to him by a 'spokesperson', the fact remains that he did not communicate anything of significance 'on the night of the crime' to anyone in the UK, in time to enable John Buck to telephone Alipio Ribeiro at dinner. If the various CdM attributions are fundamentally correct however, then whoever had that information, i.e., whoever 'phoned the FCO and/or Gordon Brown from within the UK, was in possession of it prior to 10.00 p.m. on 3 May, 'the night of the crime'.

http://www.mccannfiles.com/id232.html