We just hate – but they know
by John Blacksmith
Despite the quote I gave from Boris Johnson, describing how he, a journalist and editor to his fingertips before he became mayor of London, now used Google as his primary source of information, poor old Keir Simmons just doesn’t get it, does he?
Let’s make allowances for his seriously gungy life’n’ style page heading – “How long, oh lord, how long?” – we all have a salary to earn after all - and treat the man as if he were a serious player with something to say worth analysing. An ITV newsman. I know, I know.
Good ol’ Keir’s case amounts to this:
He was in PDL in the twenty four hours after the disappearance. He is a journalist. He knows all about the case because he is a journalist and knows these things. He has decided that Gerry & Kate McCann are not just likeable, which he knows because they have let him get “close” to them, but beyond suspicion. We are cruel and wrong. He has spoken.
I mean, really.
Do you remember travel agents? There used to be a couple of them on every high street. They were people who were “experts” in travel. They rented an office and took perks from the people who were plugging hotels, resorts, car hire and the rest. Then they sat their arses in front of computer screens containing the schedules and prices – for flights, hotel rooms, whatever. And then they took your money and told you how to have a holiday. Experts, you know.
One day people suddenly started thinking, wait a minute, I can afford a computer now, I can look at the screen myself, instead of paying someone to look at it for me. Then they found out that the travel agent wasn’t really an expert at all, he was just reading from the screen. And then they clocked that all those special offers plugging certain holiday places weren’t kosher but were based on what nice Mr Travel Agent had been told, sold or perked. more
I've only just read this, the price of a day off I suppose. If you haven't already, enjoy.
My, how things can move
by John Blacksmith
This blog began when we discovered that the witness list for the Lisbon hearings in January this year had the Dirty Pair and their team staggering for the first time since October 2007.There have been many ups and downs since that week when the lights burned late into the night while the group struggled to think of something – anything – that would help them cope with what was emerging. For the very first time the parents began to realise that amongst all the soap-opera phantoms they and their group had created – abductors, paedophiles, allies at the heart of government, all that tawdry Scouse fiction - there was somebody real: Goncalo Amaral was not only an enemy but a very dangerous one indeed. So dangerous that they couldn’t even discuss their deepest fears with Mitchell.
Always willing to help the Bureau pointed out to interested readers – and they included the loathsome Coffin – that, yes, Goncalo Amaral was engaged with them in a fight, a proper fight, not PR crap from people like Mitchell who’d only ever confronted real struggle as a voyeur from the media sidelines, not battles for a bigger NHS hospital budget from provincial doctors but a genuine fight that really – yes, really - was going to end with either he or they being destroyed.
The soap opera that they created is now being pushed aside by a genuine drama: not the cheapo version of their deprived imaginations but something as strange and disturbing as any No Country for Old Men script: a fight to the finish before our eyes.
And just as they struggled and gasped in January 2010 now, as things move towards the climax, they are struggling again but with fewer options and less hope.
The media suspect what is going on; some politicians have sensed what is happening and are quietly backing away from the case.The Bureau has, shall we say, a feeling about what is taking place. The supporters of the pair, however – there were 3 million plus of them when the fund was set up, 30 000 plus now – are out of the loop: bafflement has taken over.
Enjoy Lisbon, Gerry.
