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could do that to a precious little girl
    its just not right madeleine mccann deserves to have a life
    with her family where she should be
    if youve got her give her back im beggin you please
    stop putting her family through all this grief
    its her birthday tomorrow what better present could there be
    than setting her free
    just let her be
    The voice sounded like the voice of a child. Clicking on the singer’s Profile, though, brought up the picture of a balding man in his late twenties sitting in what looked like a bedsit with a cheap boxwood guitar.
    Given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, wrote J. G. Ballard, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim.
    There is a view of photography as being something ‘that seizes a moment in life and is its death’, and the photo gallery on the Madeleine site could be offered as proof of that. Some took the view that the sheer volume of pictures in existence showed that the parents hadn’t wanted to experience their daughter as a person so much as record her having the experiences they were fortunate enough to be able to buy.
    But could it be that the McCanns wanted their daughter to become as familiar to strangers through her image as she was to them, so that they, too, would wake in the morning and – before they could locate it – might feel that there was now a tragic absence in their own lives; something catastrophic that in their first moments of waking they were having trouble remembering?
    The media of real life. The murder leisure industry.
    Privacy is so last century, the headline read, but we need help to adjust.

Chapter Three
    Myrobella, the Blairs’ constituency home at Trimdon Colliery, was once the big house of the village, occupied by the doctor’s family, solid and detached among all the encroaching narrow terraces of pitmen’s houses. It stands in full view, but it isn’t easy to find.
    From near the top of the hill that leads from one of the Trimdons to another – Trimdon Colliery up to Trimdon Grange, which eventually connects to a third Trimdon, the Village where the church that provided the setting for Blair’s coming-of-age ‘people’s princess’ speech can be found and, only a little way up the hill from there, Trimdon Labour Club, the place where he launched his campaign to become leader of the Party in 1994 and announced his intention of standing down as prime minister thirteen years later, a modest, modern building he thinks of as his ‘spiritual home’ – gazing back across the scrub meadows with their punctuation points of brown shaggy-backed horses indolently cropping, and irregular grassed-over depressions where the coal seams once ran, is a dense copse with a mossy Victorian slate roof poking outof the top of it. This is Myrobella, the house the Blairs bought in 1984, the year after he was elected MP for Sedgefield in County Durham.
    But the closer you get to it, coming down the hill past the miners’ welfare cottages with their barbered lawns and recently constructed cubistic, architecturally adventurous hard-edged glass porches, past the terraces with their uniform vertical swivel-blinds and elderly men gardening in their vests, hard muscle turned soft, the harder the Blair house is to see.
    When the pits were working, Trimdon Colliery, like all the neighbouring colliery villages, would have been a dirty place. The original owners of Myrobella (stove-hatted Myron, pin-curled and pinafored Bella?) would have looked out over a landscape of pit-heads and winding gear permanently slaked with the heavy industrial fallout of soot and ferrous pollutants and dust. The bricks of the original terraces are still nearly as black as muck.
    The modern world – the post-Thatcher world – has announced its arrival with a lot of white. The timber of the old front doors has been stripped out and replaced with waxy white PVC; the windows are white