Crisis of conscience
for our politicians?

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

For example, the view really is that while Catholics - or indeed anyone who opposes abortion - are entitled to hold their opinion, they are not in fact entitled to give it.

As it turned out, the cardinal was advising those Catholics who are also law-makers - especially in the new Scottish parliament - that they need to examine their consciences if they are engaging in legislation which runs contrary to the teachings of the very Church they would claim to belong to. He suggested they might be moved to refrain from Holy Communion, for example.

Cue a landslide of grotesque retorts from commentators who found such attention to detail both cumbersome and offensive to their own extremely flexible principles.

The Catholic Church has strongly-held views on abortion, views not shared by many. But you would think, wouldn't you, that a Church has every right to legislate for its own beliefs and for those who would wish to be regarded as members of it, whether they are politicians or not?

The answer is no, of course. Everyone should be entitled to contradict everything they say they believe in and still be allowed to maintain the fiction of being consistent and devout. Especially if they're politicians.

Perfect. And this is, of course, the behaviour which has characterised so much of liberal England's politics over the last 30 years.

But what really lurks beneath much of the attack on Cardinal O'Brien is the very old anti-Catholic paranoia of the British intelligentsia. Why do you think Tony Blair has had to be so circumspect about his own religious tendencies, which have been tilting towards Rome for the best part of a decade? Look at the rough treatment Ruth Kelly received when it was mooted she was a member of Opus Dei.

Bad enough being a Catholic, darling, without being wrapped up in some supercharged version. Good Lord, the risks are almost, er, masonic.

The idea has always been that you can't have Catholics in high office because they'll end up peddling their wacky, anti-English, anti-Reformation opinions right inside the heart of the Greatest Democracy in the World.

Nowadays, it's extended to include anybody with any kind of religious faith.

And Cardinal O'Brien epitomises the fear that electing a Christian will be giving power to unelected churchmen. You might even end up with a politician who believes in private what they practice in public.

Maddy backlash

The questions her parents may yet face

Gerry and Kate McCann, whose daughter went missing in Portugal over a month ago, must have known that their publicity campaign to get her back was loaded with potential pitfalls.

And even if they themselves were initially too crazed with grief to think through the full implications, the couple have had a team of top lawyers and PR advisers to do that thinking for them.

Now, we are seeing an inevitable backlash in some quarters as the media machine begins its 'second look' at the case. As well as an uncomfortable assessment of its own behaviour. Some papers, perhaps feeling they have been too emotional, are now drawing back.

So long as the little girl remains missing, and the case unsolved, you could set your clock by this sort of stuff.

Having cast Robert Murat as villain, he is now revisited as 'suspect or scapecoat?'

Two weeks ago the British Press was too wary of Portuguese law to print an interview with him. Now, he protests his innocence across a two page spread. As for the McCanns? In the cruellest way, they have gained a kind of celebrity, yet for some that also increasingly jars.

As the Madeleine Fund total rises, there is carping that a well-off middle class couple should benefit from such public generosity.

And in some perplexing way, there's the danger that Gerry and Kate are becoming the story as opposed to their missing daughter.

News reports seem more focused on their stoicism than on where Madeleine might be. Of course, that's not what the McCanns want, but media campaigns like theirs are notoriously tricky, especially when there is a vacuum created by no developments.

Presumably that's also why the McCanns are giving more interviews. But one of the pitfalls of giving interviews is that you get asked questions. As more details emerge, and the parents' reasoning emerges - for example, as to why they left their children alone in their apartment - people will make up their own minds.

Consequently, commentators, too, have begun to raise their heads above the parapet and question the couple's actions.

One paper stuck its chin out by demanding to know, as regards the Vatican visit and proposed European tour: 'Are the McCanns playing it right?'

Another writer suggested the couple might be best advised to face up to the fact that Madeleine is, in all depressing likelihood, not coming back. And so they should think of their other two children, return to Britain and rebuild their lives.

Madeleine's story has been one of the most extraordinary we have witnessed. A child disappears as if into mid-air, and the case becomes the most high-profile child abduction in history, rivaling the Lindbergh kidnap in the 1930s.

Yet, for all the talk of prime suspects, international paedophile rings and highly organised child traffickers, we seem to be little further on in the hunt to find her.

And for all the Press coverage, gaps remain. Maybe I missed it, but I still could not tell you who the other people were in the McCanns' holiday party that week. Or who the witness was who gave the sensational description of a man leaving the apartments with what looked like a blonde-haired child?

Or, in fact, what the inside of the McCanns' apartment looks like?

Events like this make amateur detectives of us all. But not by choice. All of us - in the media, as well - are drip fed details which we want to connect and understand. But they don't and we can't.

Without the happy ending, perhaps we are all starting to feel increasingly voyeuristic in our following of this story.

And since that's not a nice feeling we cast around for someone to blame.

Who got us so involved in the first place?

Now, many of the TV reporters who fed us so many long live links in those first weeks from Praia da Luz are back home. It's been sometime since we've been given pictures of the hastily assembled shrine in the McCanns' home village of Rothley. The story is shrinking from the front pages further back into the papers. One day, soon, it'll not be there at all in some of them.

So, understandably, ever more desperate to keep up newspaper coverage, the McCanns did another round of interviews at the weekend. But they are not skilled interviewees.

When Gerry tells the papers, as he did on Sunday, that he and his wife have never consciously nor subconsciously thought of blaming each other, many people might consciously or subconsciously disagree.

In its full context, it is a statement from a man trying to see a way through the appalling events that have engulfed his family, and in many ways he is right - if Madeleine was abducted then the blame lies with whoever took her.

But are the parents blameless? Not everyone would agree with Gerry.

Much has been made of the McCanns' strength; of their dignity under pressure.

Let's hope they can hold the line because if they continue with such a high-risk, high-pressure publicity campaign they are going to face some pretty tough questions indeed. It's been harsh already, but unfortunately there could be worse to come.

A school wake up call does the trick for mums

Anyone who thought that the phenomenon of the pyjama wearing mum going to the shops was some kind of urban Belfast myth or, worse, a slur on decent working class women, are in for a shock.

Every morning until recently you could have headed over to St Matthew's PS in Short Strand and witnessed scores of pyjama wearing mothers leaving their children off at school.

The headmaster, Joe McGuinness, decided to act when he noticed an alarming rise in the numbers from about 15-20 mums to 50 - he sent a stern letter home with the children, describing the PJs and slipper ensemble as " slovenly and rude".

Usually children are sent home to their parents with letters about their own behaviour and slipping uniform standards.

But in how many homes was the drama enacted of a child sadly propping the letter against the cornflakes packet and intoning: "You've let me down. See that this doesn't happen again. If I get another letter from the head about this sort of carry-on, you're grounded."

At any rate, the letter worked.

Still, it could have been worse. As Mr McGuinness notes, they were all mums. He mightn't have been so quick with his word processor if there had been 50 stout Belfast dads coming towards him in sky blue Y-fronts and Lenny the Lion T-shirts.

Boris must be bonkers

Tory media fave Boris Johnson has admitted in an interview for a men's magazine that he dabbled with cocaine and smoked the odd joint of cannabis while at university.

He also admits that he finds Cherie Blair sexually attractive.

Boris, are you actually sure you've stopped the squiffs?

Because, to be quite frank, you sound off your face.

Beck to basics?

David Beckham has been recalled to the England team. I'm not surprised. After all, we all know that fashion comes in cycles. So, expect a surprise defeat tomorrow night. The little black dress of England scorelines - classical, elegant and timeless.