Maddie Is The New Squirrel

There would be no greater gift for Kate and Gerry McCann than for them to find their long-missing daughter Madeleine still alive, so many years after her disappearance from a holiday apartment on the Portuguese Algarve. But that is not why Maddie is all over the front pages this morning: the gift which most of our free and fearless press seeks is More Sales And Clicks For The Benefit Of Themselves Personally Now.

Moreover, those titles whose proprietors and editors subscribe to the adoration of alleged Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson have a further reason to divert their readers’ gaze elsewhere: yesterday evening, a Channel 4 Dispatches film lifted the lid on the serial incompetence that is the Government’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic. There had to be something, anything to distract from it. It just happened to be Maddie.

A review by iNews sets a grim tone: “Clear-headed and immaculately sourced, this investigation shamed the Prime Minister and his hapless gang of fools … The facts were simply laid out before us and corroborated by multiple people … What was really striking about this film was the ferocity of the attacks on the Government. The gloves were off”.

There was more. “Behavioural scientist Professor Susan Michie said she was ‘frankly horrified’ after Johnson boasted on March 3 about shaking hands with people at hospital. Professor Gabriel Scally, President of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Royal Society of Medicine, described the announcement on March 12 that the ‘contain’ phase was over as ‘leaving an open playing field for the virus’. He added that he ‘was shouting at the radio’ when Chief Scientific Officer Sir Patrick Vallance alluded to ‘herd immunity’”.

And the one stark fact Bozo’s backers cannot and will not address: “Perhaps the most unsettling moment arrived when health analyst George Batchelor estimated that, had the lockdown been enforced 11 days earlier, 13,000 deaths could have been avoided”. Put that on the front page? The readers might turn against their man. SQUIRREL!

Dispatches also talked to the Italian health minister Pierpaolo Sileri, who confirmed earlier claims of where our own Government was initially heading. “I spoke with Conte to tell President Conte that I’d tested positive [for Coronavirus]. And he told me that he’d spoken to Boris Johnson and that they’d also talked about the situation in Italy. I remember he said ‘He told me that he wants herd immunity’”. The Tories have since denied that. SQUIRREL!

Even before the Dispatches programme, there had been coverage in Byline Times (read it HERE) and before that, this chilling observation from the FT’s Chris Giles: “Sufficient data worldwide now exists to conclude that, to date, the UK has the highest rate of excess deaths in the Coronavirus pandemic in the world … The UK has suffered 60,000 excess deaths, directly or indirectly linked to Coronavirus, according to official figures. Only the much larger US has had more. UK has had the highest global excess death rate (per million)”. Hundreds every day are still dying after becoming infected. SQUIRREL!

That’s the difference between those who support the McCanns, and the press: one wants the family to achieve closure, while the other wants to make money off them. And, along the way, manipulate the story to provide cover for its chosen leader.

The Fourth Estate knew Dispatches would hurt Bozo. So Maddie it had to be. SQUIRREL!

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