Clarence Mitchell has written an article for the Telegraph

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I notice that Clarence boasts about his BBC career but fails to mention that he was head of the governments media monitoring unit and controlled what came out in the press.
And yes Clarence, you could be a suspect over a minor traffic offence, the same way as you would be an offender in the UK, but this is no traffic offence is it? Kate & Gerry McCann were and still are suspects in a missing child case.  Your clumsy attempt to play this down just doesn't wash.

Fairy story

Rogue-a-Tory wrote:Fairy story

It is but as Clarence says, the bills have still to be paid.

Sceptic wrote:I met Gerry first. It was some two weeks after Madeleine had gone missing, and he had flown back to England to collect some of her belongings and see members of their large, close extended family.


Before that first meeting with Gerry, I was briefed by British police working alongside the Portuguese on the case. They told me then, categorically, that they had “cleared the ground beneath their feet”.

In other words, the British authorities believed that Gerry and Kate were categorically not guilty of any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.



But the dogs werent brought in till 
August - what a loadload of spin and lies as usual

Why would the British authorities say, that? Clarrie was appointed very early on in the case, long before the PJ even suspected the McCanns.  Furthermore, it was the British Police who first suspected them.

Yep - definitely spin & lies

Sceptic wrote:I met Gerry first. It was some two weeks after Madeleine had gone missing, and he had flown back to England to collect some of her belongings and see members of their large, close extended family.


Before that first meeting with Gerry, I was briefed by British police working alongside the Portuguese on the case. They told me then, categorically, that they had “cleared the ground beneath their feet”.

In other words, the British authorities believed that Gerry and Kate were categorically not guilty of any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.



But the dogs werent brought in till 
August - what a loadload of spin and lies as usual

The dogs have been written out of this mystery.

The remit is to investigate the abduction...

It's a bit like the Fawlty Towers sketch where you can't mention the war.

With friends like Clarence who needs enemies.

'Allo!  Top of page 'by Clarence Mitchell' - bottom of page 'as told to Peter Stanford' ???

Did he write or didn't he write - I thought he was more given to talking than writing.

Clarence 'lies through every tooth in his mouth' Mitchell..

"On the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, I continue to assist Kate and Gerry as required, keeping a weather eye on reports and sightings, such as the “significant lead” that Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said this week that Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange is following up."


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"They had left them in an unlocked holiday apartment, though still checking on them regularly, because there was no baby-listening service at their complex."

That's not true is it? There were definately options available aside from leaving them alone...

Divide by Zero wrote:"They had left them in an unlocked holiday apartment, though still checking on them regularly, because there was no baby-listening service at their complex."

That's not true is it? There were definately options available aside from leaving them alone...

Technically true - Mark Warners Ocean Club complex did not offer a baby listening service.  That was the whole pretext of their own DIY listening service.

Options were of course available but that didn't suit their abduction plan - neither did locking doors etc !!!

Still, it matters not - the whole facade is fabrication.

So not since the end of 2007 has he thought they were in reach of finding madeleine.
He's not thought much of Scotland yards efforts or alphaig then.

Sorry clarrie, but 'clearing the ground' seems to mean something quite different to 'We believe x person is innnocent'

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It's quite a clever way to avoid being sued by the police (as if that would ever happen anyway) - it wouldn't surprise me if a police officer had said that to him at some point, but clarrie can claim that's what he understood by the phrase. However, it seems to mean more taking an action or being proactive in a way that allows something else to happen.
Wonder what the police could have meant by that?

And what is the nonsense about an agreement not to photograph the twins? I've seen numerous photoshoots with them that have obviously been organised by the McCanns. Perhaps as they've become older they've made clear that they do not want to be photographed any more themselves.
This constant double standard of the McCanns and their entourage - we're quite happy for press intrusion to occur on a daily basis, and to talk about how to make love to Gerry (barf) until it doesn't go our way and then all of a sudden it's unwanted.
I just hope this article doesn't get too wide a circulation because I think clarrie unfortunately has slightly more credibility in the eyes of the general public than the usual idiots they drag out to support them.

I didn't want to open a new topic for this but please move if necessary Mods.

SUMMERS & SWAN write for the Sun

Two articles in the Sun today


'we’ve moved backwards'
Top cop says lessons ‘have still not been learned’ after the disappearance of Madeleine McCann ten years ago

Former senior police officer Jim Gamble gave a series of recommendations in 2010 to try to ensure such errors were never repeated
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
29th April 2017, 3:04 am

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maddie - 10 years of agony
A decade after Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, our definitive case file looks at trolls, DNA blunders and an intruder with ‘weakness’ for little girls

Her mother Kate and father Gerry still grieve — and do so in a glare of publicity
Exclusive
By Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan
29th April 2017, 3:13 am

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Summers and Swan - the utter stupidity of writing an article in a national newspaper, commissioned by the parents, complaining that the national media keep writing about them!!

I for one would be very very happy if I never saw another tabloid or broadsheet piece about the pair. I'm quite happy to read the case files, Goncalo Amaral' s book and come to a conclusion about what happened purely on that. The public doesn't need a load of spin, lies and bullsh#t from Mccann sponsored articles.

Tweets in response to the article.

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A PLANE was once put on standby with its engine running ready to race to Morocco to pick up a girl thought to be missing Maddie McCann, Kate and Gerry’s spokesman has revealed.

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Yet he said nothing at the time. Nope, he had to keep it on the backburner for the 10th Anniversary - the BIG milestone to tell us. Just so he could make money out of Maddie's death with this fabricated story.

Could someone check the old newspaper reports of the time? I seem to recall the McCanns commenting that they had never had hope of the Moroccan child being Madeleine and that they were quick to distance themselves from the shambles when an innocent family were traumatized by this false report. Clarrie has the Irish papers in pocket. Comments not being posted. No wonder they are so concerned about trolls. It's the one area where they cannot "manage what comes out". Long live free speech!!

He is a paid employee of Mr and Mrs.   He is their PR man so why would I take any notice of what he has to say?

YAWN AND TREBLE YAWN.

Err, that last post seems to have attached the Sun newspaper to itself!!!

I think if you'd been living in a cave the last 10 years and read Mr Mitchells article you'd think, the poor parents, what an awful ordeal they've been through in a foreign country. They wouldn't understand the language and would be feeling isolated and bullied by the media.

However, reading it with 10 years of lies, changes of story, legal teams that specialise in extradition and libel it looks a very different piece.

Not a scrap of evidence of abduction

Contradictory evidence to Police

Changed timelines

Mobiles switched off and texts deleted

No search

Press contacted against advice

Dubious legal teams hired

Refusing to answer 48 of the PJ questions

Eddie and Keela

Hire car DNA/weird smell, boot open

Running home when made arguidos

Suing Goncarlo Amoral

This list can just go on and on... then Clarence Mitchell's story is just that, a story and makes no sense at all IMO. Just more muddying of the waters.

Really Clarence?

You have the 'chance' match of Madeliene's DNA in the hire car that just by chance was pointed to by blood and body sniffing dogs.

You have the impossible statistics of 'stranger abductions' with only 2 or 3 a year happening in the USA out of about 20 million children that age)....and 70% of them taken from hospitals and later recovered but you think it is logical that in a place the size of Prai da Luz with a few thousand people an abduction from an apartment just happened to take place.
   
How is it logical to think she is alive? It's delusional.

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Exclusive: 'Twice in the past ten years, I thought we'd found Madeleine McCann'
Clarence Mitchell

28 APRIL 2017 • 9:30PM

A former BBC reporter, Clarence Mitchell was appointed to assist Kate and Gerry McCann as their media spokesman following the disappearance of their daughter, Madeleine, in Portugal in 2007. Mitchell now works for a public relations company and continues to assist the McCanns when necessary. Here is his  incredible account of the youngster's disappearance, the police operation to find her and the  subsequent 10 years of anguish....

Twice in the ten years I have worked with the McCanns, I genuinely thought we were within reach of finding their missing daughter, Madeleine.
The first moment came very early on, just weeks after her disappearance on May 3, 2007. I had been sent by the British government to the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz to assist Kate and Gerry in dealing with the already huge media interest. Shortly after I arrived, I started to get phone calls, always at three o’clock in the morning, always the same ghostly man’s voice, repeatedly naming a farm where she was being hidden.
The British police recorded the calls and it turned out there was indeed a farm, fitting his description exactly, near Seville, over the border in Spain. As it was raided, and turned out to look exactly as he had painted it in those calls, I really felt we were on to something. But she wasn’t there, and those tip-offs – like so many others that we received from hoaxers, ransom seekers, conmen and psychics – were never explained.
The second came at the end of 2007. I was now being employed by Kate and Gerry as their press spokesman, and they were back at home in Leicestershire with their twins, Sean and Amelie. Spanish private investigators working on their behalf had found a blonde-haired girl who spoke English in a village in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco. All the information coming back to us suggested heavily that it could be Madeleine, so much so that an aircraft was put on stand-by, with its engines running, waiting to fly to pick her up.
Kate and Gerry sat tight. They had learned by that stage to be sceptical, not to give in to natural hope only for it to be dashed. They preferred to wait until the Moroccan authorities had checked it out. And when they did, it became clear she was not Madeleine.
On the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, I continue to assist Kate and Gerry as required, keeping a weather eye on reports and sightings, such as the “significant lead” that Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley said this week that Scotland Yard’s Operation Grange is following up.
Beyond that, rightly, the Metropolitan Police do not go into operational detail publicly. So, wherever this latest lead may take them, be it Portugal or elsewhere, this time around, like Kate and Gerry, I will sit tight and simply let the authorities do their job before getting my hopes up.
I had spent 20 years as a BBC journalist before becoming a civil servant and helping the McCanns. I met Gerry first. It was some two weeks after Madeleine had gone missing, and he had flown back to England to collect some of her belongings and see members of their large, close extended family.
Obviously, he was distressed, but also very rational. As I have subsequently learnt by spending time with the couple at close quarters, Gerry deals with trauma by compartmentalising it and being in control. His emotions, then as now, are poured into what he can do practically to raise awareness of Madeleine’s disappearance.
In Portugal, I found Kate very friendly, grateful for the support I could offer, but already wary of the media attention. Even though she realised that it was invaluable in keeping awareness high, she – more so that Gerry – found it very intrusive.
That was before it turned into something altogether more cruel, with the McCanns becoming widely vilified for making a mistake in the way in which they chose to care for their children on that fateful night in Praia da Luz. They had left them in an unlocked holiday apartment, though still checking on them regularly, because there was no baby-listening service at their complex.
They were always the first to admit their mistake, but what a price they are still paying. God forbid it is a price they may have to pay for the rest of their lives. I was with them, in private, away from the cameras on many occasions, when they were in absolute grief and misery.
For all the doubters, they have never done or said anything at any time that has given me any cause for suspicion that they were anything other than the innocent victims of a dreadful crime. Before that first meeting with Gerry, I was briefed by British police working alongside the Portuguese on the case. They told me then, categorically, that they had “cleared the ground beneath their feet”.
"The British police working on the case told me that they had “cleared the ground beneath their feet” - in other words, that Gerry and Kate were categorically not guilty of any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance"
In other words, the British authorities believed that Gerry and Kate were categorically not guilty of any involvement in Madeleine’s disappearance.
Yet the Portuguese police turned against them, naming them as arguido, a technical term conferring certain legal rights that is clumsily and misleadingly translated into English as “suspect”. You can become an arguido over the most minor traffic offence.
By that time, though, I had been called back by the government to London, but Kate and Gerry were ringing me at four in the morning saying: “We’ve been out here in Portugal too long, we’ve been stitched up, we’re about to be arrested, it’s all dreadful.”
Other than being sympathetic, I couldn’t do anything to help them. So when the offer came to work for them full-time, I took it in an instant.
What stands out, looking back over ten years, is the sheer lunacy of the accusations made against them.
There was, for instance, the theory entertained by the Portuguese police that their daughter had somehow been killed accidentally and that they then had used their hire car to remove her body and bury it in a secret location. I was there when the keys to that car were handed over to them, at their apartment; they hired it several weeks after Madeleine had disappeared.
Even if they had already got their daughter’s body out of the holiday apartment and stored it somewhere (a fridge was suggested, ridiculously), the police theory would mean that, in the full view of the world’s media, who were camped on their doorstep around the clock, the McCanns would have had to put her into the boot and then shaken off the ever-present paparazzi to dispose of her. It was as implausible as it was utterly offensive.
Later, in the autumn of 2007, when we were all back in England, a team of Portuguese police officers came to interview me about the times I had ridden in that car with Kate and Gerry. Did I notice any unusual smells in the hire car, they asked? It was beyond laughable. It also revealed, I felt, frightening ineptitude.
By then, a whole, vile cottage industry had grown around the case, with retired police officers who had nothing to do with the investigation appearing on Portuguese TV to suggest, for example, the McCanns had been at a swingers’ party on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance. It all compounded their pain.
Kate, in particular, got deeply angry. There was no shouting, sobbing or throwing things. It was more of a simmering but intense rage that things could be so misrepresented and so blatantly unfair.
Their real fury, though, was that such lazy reporting of wild untruths would actually mislead people and so hinder the search for Madeleine. That was why they took legal action against Gonçalo Amaral, the Portuguese police officer who wrote a very unpleasant book about them after being removed from the investigation. If people in Portugal, or elsewhere, believe the claims of an officer who never interviewed them, then Kate and Gerry feared that the public would simply assume Madeleine was dead and forget her.
The pressure would have broken other couples. Occasionally, I would catch them in tears, or hugging each other. But they seem to have coped. If anything, it has brought them together even more, rather than split them apart.
The McCanns are private people. I have never been privy to their innermost thoughts. It is not that sort of relationship. We haven’t even discussed politics. I am hoping to stand as a Conservative candidate in the forthcoming election, and my flag is blue; theirs, I’ve always believed, is red. It certainly didn’t affect our friendship.
They have thrown themselves into looking after the twins, trying as best to create a home where reminders of Madeleine are all around them, where she is still very much part of the family, and where they can shield Sean and Amelie against this constant gaze that the family is still under.
We have a good understanding with the British media that, until they are 18, the twins should never be photographed, but we can’t always enforce it. A local paper here or a foreign agency photographer there has occasionally managed to include them “by accident” in a photograph at a school sports day or other public event.
Despite the support they have received, there are still bills to pay. Before Madeleine’s disappearance, Kate was a locum GP, but she has never returned to work. Gerry continues as a senior cardiologist. (It is a tiny point, but symbolic of how almost every fact is twisted in this story. Gerry is not a surgeon, as often inaccurately reported. He is the man who keeps you alive and your essential tubes open when you are having your heart operation under the surgeon’s knife.)
Kate and Gerry hate being recognised. When I was with them, we would sometimes walk into a restaurant and the whole place would go quiet as they entered. People are mostly sympathetic. Many just don’t know what to say to them.
Nobody in my experience has ever been bold enough to accuse them of anything unpleasant to their faces. All of the worst, ugly nonsense is online – that Gerry is not Madeleine’s real dad, that paedophilia is somehow involved, that there’s a huge global government conspiracy to cover something up.
One of the most ridiculous and offensive theories I have come across online – and there are many – is that Madeleine had somehow been hidden at the church in Praia da Luz inside a coffin, beneath a body awaiting burial.
I continue to believe Madeleine was abducted for some reason. Kate is sure that, just short of her fourth birthday, Madeleine would not have been capable of wandering out of the apartment, closing the curtains, sliding doors and two small gates behind her.
And so the couple keep her bedroom in Leicestershire ready for her return, with the presents there for all the birthdays and Christmases with them that she has missed. It is very much a family-only place. In all my time in their house, that door has remained shut.
They hope and pray that, wherever she is, Madeleine is being looked after. What sustains them is that there is absolutely no evidence of physical harm coming to her. So they will always believe firmly that it is as logical to think she might be alive as it is illogical to assume the worst.
As told to Peter Stanford.
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"By then, a whole, vile cottage industry had grown around the case, from which I have greatly benifited personally from, to the tune of at least £224,000 paid to me from 'donations' to Madeleine's Fund'

"Even if they had already got their daughter’s body out of the holiday apartment and stored it somewhere"(a fridge was suggested, ridiculously)

I believe 'that's' called 'leakage'!

HOBS!

Sorry all, my post demonstrates my technical inadequacy. Mods, can you delete it please to keep the place tidy? SO sorry

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With pleasure @ Gingercat.  Post deleted by mod.

Yeah a paid employee who says they have become his friends - so no chance of bias there then? If someone had paid me that staggering amount of money I would become their friend too.

Edited to add - response to JeanM's last post.

Did Kate mccann mention these two instances in her version of the truth

Gingercat wrote:Sorry all, my post demonstrates my technical inadequacy. Mods, can you delete it please to keep the place tidy? SO sorry

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With pleasure @ Gingercat.  Post deleted by mod.

It may not be you this is very buggy it repeatsrepeats wwords and llettersletters unless I go back and deletedelete thethem