We have treated the McCanns as if they were Big Brother contestants

Madeleine’s disappearance sparked a grotesque media circus

Did Kate McCann inadvertently kill her daughter Madeleine and then confect a four-month long parade of grief and concern for the benefit of the media, in order to avoid being done for the crime? This seems to be what the Portuguese police have come to either believe or hazard. The McCanns are back in England but they are now — exotically — ‘arguidos’, which means that the Portuguese cops suspect they may have a case to answer. One or both of them may yet be charged, so far as we understand the machinations of the Portuguese legal system. It is said that traces of DNA found in a hire car used by the McCanns some 25 days after Madeleine’s disappearance provide up to an 80 per cent match with little Madeleine’s DNA.

I’m no expert, but I would have thought that my own DNA would also provide at least an 80 per cent match with Madeleine’s, along with Vladimir Putin’s, Ruth Kelly’s, Graham Norton’s and indeed that of a polecat, honey badger or a fruit-fly.