Prime Minister's Questions

 

The involvement of then Prime Minister Tony Blair and his sort of buddy Prime Minister in Waiting Gordon Brown in the case raised eyebrows at the time. Had the full extent of their involvement been completely apparent it would surely have aroused consternation.

It’s been a while and those new to the case are often oblivious to the matter because it is not part of the official gospel so persistently regurgitated by the Mainstream Media so its worth reminding ourselves what those clumsy leanings on the scales of justice were. 

1 Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on several occasions admitted to have called Gerry McCann on several occasions.

2 There was an edict to all UK Embassy and Consular staff to provide the couple with whatever help and assistance was needed.  This might seem innocuous, but it cuts across very firm Foreign Office protocols whereby as soon as a citizen steps onto foreign territory he/she is subject to the rule of the land in question and there is supposed to be strictly no interference in a foreign judicial process save to be sure that the British citizen isn’t treated unfairly compared with locals or subject to physical abuse.

3 According to Gonzalo Amoral Portuguese Police never took the Tannerman sighting seriously because of all the obvious contradictions and changes in Jane Tanner’s story.  They had not wished to make the sighting known to the public for this reason.  The sighting was only announced to the public after the personal intervention of Gordon Brown.

4 The rumours reaching Portugal after the Forensic material collected following the dog searches were sent to the British Government owned forensics lab in Birmingham FSS was that they would reveal that Maddie had most likely died in 5a.  There was therefore consternation when the final report came through and the headline was that the results were “inconclusive”.  This was quickly seized upon by Gerry McCann as implying that the McCanns had been absolved.  What it infact meant was that the evidence collected though very much consistent with being from Maddie could not be definitively assumed to be from her given the possibility that it had been collected from a number of individuals including family members.

5  Back in 2007, the most important project for the Portuguese Prime Minister was to get the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon signed before his 6 months in charge of the Presidency of the Council of Europe expired at the end of the  year.  It was a big deal for the Portuguese to get this critical piece of EU legislation signed in Portugal, not least as it would cement Portugal’s status as an integral part of the EU in people’s minds.  For Blair/Brown this was significant leverage over the Portuguese as they had been re-elected on a manifesto that promised a Referendum on the UK signing the Treaty.  Had this happened, it would have taken the signing into the Slovenian Presidency if it happened at all.  Of course, Brown could not EXPLICITLY negotiate letting the McCanns off the hook in return for stiffing his own electorate on the manifesto pledge, but in the typical manner of a skilled politician, he made it abundantly clear to the Portuguese that this was what he wanted whilst he was chewing over whether to hold a Referendum on the Treaty or not.  The Portuguese got the message, Amaral was removed from the case, the McCanns went back to the UK and the bemused Portuguese got their Treaty of Lisbon. All of this will of course always be impossible to prove.  Such machinations were beyond the majority of the British population – in short it was the perfect crime because technically no crime had been committed.  In my view morally speaking this was a crime at least from a moral perspective, but I suspect as seasoned politicians Blair and Brown just saw it as another example of Realpolitik.

6 On 12 September 2007 just 3 days after the McCanns returned to Rothley, Leicestershire Brown made a surprise visit to Beaumont Leys Police station 5 miles from the McCanns house and where the Leicestershire Police efforts to cover the McCann case would be coordinated.   Ostensibly the visit was a fact finding visit on the subject of “Community Policing” -  a topic for which Brown has shown little or no interest before or since.  Brown was under 3 months into his Premiership at this stage.  This type of visit if undertaken at all required only the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who on this occasion was towed sheepishly in the background as cover for Brown.  Even if Brown had had a burning desire to deep dive the complexities of Community policing the UK has a round 6000 police stations, why choose this one?  Any semi competent PR adviser would have advised AGINST this one, given its proximity to the McCanns and the strong suspicion that Brown had been pulling strings on their behalf.  What was said at that meeting and to who remains untold.  Even if nothing was said EXPLICITLY, the message would have been impossible for even the densest plod to miss.

 

So what explains all this pampering?  At first I thought maybe it was just Brown seeking the publicity from helping a photogenic “Brits Abroad” couple.  I imagined that as they realised Brown’s interest in the couple, sycophantic deputies may leap to their assistance to please the new Power That Be.  Since then some have suggested that Gerry had some remote family connection with Brown.  Those with a less forgiving mindset have suggested that Brown may be trying to cover up some large scale paedo related group among the British Establishment.

After careful consideration, I don’t think any of these explanations is consistent with Brown’s observed behaviour.  His help for the McCanns goes way beyond the level that might be credible for a PR Op or favour for a friend.  However, he might have seen it, Brown was straying into criminal territory with the extent to which he was perverting the course of justice.  We now know that the British Ambassador was explicitly warning the Government that it was getting way to close to the McCanns especially in light of the dogs/forensic matter. The Ambassador didn’t officially make it a resigning matter but in my view his leaving the Diplomatic Service just a month later was no accident and this was for him a resigning matter.

Though to some it may seem far fetched, I can think of only one explanation for this behaviour which is plausible in the context of the known facts.  In my view things point towards Gerry McCann having a close relationship with the British Secret Service.  Ie he was an MI5/MI6 asset of some sort.  To many this will doubtless sound like preposterous conspiracy theory mongering, but besides the behaviour of the Establishment, there is other circumstantial evidence pointing in the same direction.

1   1 We now know that the British Government had a vital covert operation that had/was going on just a few miles down the coast from Luz. It all involved the continued success of perhaps the most important diplomatic success of the New labour years, the Good Friday Agreement which substantially brought peace to Northern Ireland after a long and bloody terrorist campaign against the British state.  Though the GFA signed in 1998 brought an end to most hostilities, several groups had split from the IRA seeing the agreement as a sell out of the Republican cause and setting up various splinter groups such as The Real IRA.  By 2007 the Real IRA were a continuing menace to peace in the UK with an ongoing campaign of bombings and shootings.  In 2009 3 Irishmen were arrested and in the subsequent 2010 trial it was revealed that they had been involved in a surveillance and sting operation in 2005 and 2006 that MI5/MI6 had carried out in Alvor, Portugal, the neighbouring town along the coast to Luz.  The fact that they were only arrested in 2009 suggests that the British had these men under surveillance after that possibly into 2007 and 2008 hoping to either build up the case against them or bring more people into the trap.  It is therefore ENTIRELY POSSIBLE that there was an ongoing MI5/MI6 operation against the RIRA at the time of Maddie’s disappearance in May 2007 in Alvor just a few miles from Luz.

222 Though Gerry McCann was born in Glasgow, his family had infact only recently moved there at the time of his birth.  The family’s roots were infact in St Johnston, Donegal, Republic of Ireland just a few miles from the border with Northern Ireland.

3 3 One of the most prominent former policemen to take an interest in the McCann case was Jim Gamble head of CEOP the Child Exploitation and Online Protection command.  Gamble had previously been in charge of Operation Ore the controversial 1999 police operation that had examined records supplied by the US in connection to credit card payments relating to a child porn site.  Orr resulted in 3744 arrests, 1848 charges, 1451 convictions  and 33 suicides.  The Sunday Times reported that the list included at least twenty senior executives, a senior teacher at a girls' public school, personnel from military bases, GPs, university academics and civil servants, a famous newspaper columnist, a songwriter for a pop band, a member of a chart-topping 1980s cult pop group, and an official with the Church of England.  To the naïve it might have seen odd  that of all the senior police officers around the UK, the authorities would select Jim Gamble for this particular role as his experience would not seem prima facie appropriate for such a role. Most of Gambles career had infact been in the Royal Ulster Constabulary – ie the Northern Irish police force.  In particular he had risen within RUC Special Branch to become Head of its Belfast Operations. Ie he had an absolutely central senior position in British Counter Terrorist operations at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Now one of the central tasks of such a counterterrorism was to build up a network of assets either working directly for the IRA or sufficiently trusted to have access to useful intelligence information.  How do you persuade someone to take on the very dangerous role of being a  British Asset in relation to Northern Ireland? Well one way that was used was sexual blackmail.  Find some embarrassing information which you then agreed to keep secret if the asset cooperated.  The case of Dennis Donaldson who was shot dead (by the IRA) in 2006 having been revealed to be a long time spy for the British in 2002. Donaldson never officially revealed  how he had been recruited by the British except saying that it was as a result of a personal indiscretion.  Donaldson was a notorious womaniser so it is impossible that this something akin to a regular romantic entanglement and something involving minors seems by far the likeliest explanation.

 

4   4 There have been persistent rumours that Gerry McCann along with several others in this story such as David Payne, Robert Murat and Sergey Malinka also had some interest or involvement with child pornography.  None of this has ever been proven.  At this stage it is just rumours.

 

Summary

It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Maddie must have died in 5a in which case their parents must have been involved in hiding the body and developing the abduction narrative.  The fact that this narrative has had any traction at all is mainly dependent on key interventions by important members of the British Government combined with a sycophantic press coverage led by the Murdock titles.  There is little DIRECT evidence as to why Brown & Co intervened so egregiously, but the nature and scope of the intervention is a big clue in itself. IMHO the interventions were way too extensive and risky to be the result of a desire to court publicity or do a favour for a friend.  Gordon Brown had been waiting for his time in the sun for at least 10 years.  He behaved as though the Case had the potential to either take down his premiership or at the least make it extremely uncomfortable.  Some have suggested that this may imply that Brown and Blair were at the centre of or complicit with a major paedo sex ring or such like.  IMHO this is also very unlikely.  Love them or loath them, there is no credible evidence that Blair and Brown have any predilection for kids, moreover such a motivation would  have made it very difficult to get others to play along over the years including successive Heads of the Met, Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries.  The theory that Gerry McCann has some connection to British Secret Service on the other hand ticks most of the boxes.  We know that there was likely an important MI5/MI6 operation going on in the area at the time.  This would provide a National Security rational for the intervention for those who needed to know.  My inclination is that we are not JUST talking about a national Security issue though but something that had the potential to be a cataclysmic PR disaster for the Government as well.  This is why I suspect that Paedophilia may be part of the story as well.  At its most egregious this might mean that Maddie herself was playing some role in all this.  Though conceivable, I think this probably unlikely.  More plausibly the reason that Gerry had signed on to helping the Secret Service in the  first place may  have been blackmail by Jim Gamble or someone  of his ilk to play along in order for some Kiddie Porn related indiscretion on Gerry’s behalf to be airbrushed from the public record.  Were such a story to emerge as part of some criminal inquest in relation to a photogenic 3 year old it is  all too easy to imagine that Brown would  see it as a major threat to the very survival of his Premiership and therefore something that he  had to pull out all the  cards to stop.