hopelessly demoralised by doles, old-age pensions, free education, etc. … is still widely held; it has merely been a little shaken perhaps, by the recent recognition that unemployment does exist.
—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Why does the life of one child matter more than another’s? On the face of it, the disappearances of Madeleine McCann in May 2007 and of Shannon Matthews in February 2008 bore striking similarities. Both victims were defenceless little girls. Both vanished without a trace: Madeleine from her bedroom while she slept, Shannon on the way home from a swimming class. Both cases featured tearful televised appeals from the devastated mothers clutching the favourite toys of their beloved daughters, begging for their safe return. It is true that while Madeleine disappeared in an upmarket holiday resort in the Portuguese Algarve, Shannon vanished from the streets of Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. And yet, in both cases, the public was faced with the same incomparable anguish of a mother who had lost her child.
But there were more than nine months and a few hundred miles separating the two cases. After a fortnight, British journalists had penned 1,148 stories devoted to Madeleine McCann. The stunning sum of £2.6 million had been offered as a reward to have her returned to her parents. Prominent donors included the News of the World and the Sun newspapers, Sir Richard Branson, Simon Cowell and J. K. Rowling. The missing infant quickly became a household name.
The McCann disappearance was no ordinary media circus. The case became a national trauma. Like some sort of macabre reality TV show, every little detail was beamed into the living rooms of a transfixed British public. News broadcasters sent their most celebrated anchors to report live from the Algarve. Posters with close-ups of her distinctive right eye went up in shop windows across the country, as though somehow the bewildered three-year-old would be found wandering the streets of Dundee or Aberystwyth. Members of Parliament wore yellow ribbons in solidarity. Multinational companies advertised the ‘help find Madeleine’ messages on their websites. The disappearance of one little girl had provoked the most extraordinary outpouring of media interest over such a case in modern times. The result was something approaching mass hysteria.
What a contrast with the pitiful response to Shannon Matthews’s disappearance. After two weeks, the case had received a third of the media coverage given to McCann in the same period. There was no rolling news team from Dewsbury; no politicians wearing coloured ribbons; no ‘help find Shannon’ messages flashing up on company websites. The relatively paltry sum of £25,500 (though this later rose to £50,000) had been offered for her discovery, nearly all of which had been put up by the Sun. If money was anything to go by, the life of Madeleine McCann had been deemed fifty times more valuable than that of Shannon Matthews.
Why Madeleine? Some commentators were remarkably honest about why, of all the injustices in the world, it was the tragedy of this one little girl that provoked such anguish. ‘This kind of thing doesn’t usually happen to people like us,’ lamented Allison Pearson in the Daily Mail.1 What Pearson meant by people like her was people from comfortable, middle-class backgrounds. Kidnappings, stabbings, murders; those are things you almost expected to happen to people living in Peckham or Glasgow. This sort of tragedy was not supposed to happen to folks you might bump into doing the weekly shop at Waitrose.
Pearson’s distress at Madeleine’s plight was matched only by her lack of sympathy for the case of Shannon Matthews. And it was for the same reason: the little girl’s background. Even as police were losing hope of finding Shannon alive, Allison Pearson launched into a smug broadside about her family circumstances. ‘Like too many of today’s kids, Shannon Matthews was already a victim of a chaotic domestic situation, inflicted by parents on their innocent children, long before she vanished into the chilly February night.’2 It was Pearson’s only foray into the case. But when the McCanns came under fire for leaving their small children alone in the holiday flat from which Madeleine was abducted, she was one of their strongest defenders. ‘The truth is that the McCanns were not negligent,’ she said decisively. ‘None of us should presume to judge them, for they will judge themselves horribly for the rest of their lives.’3
This middle-class solidarity was shared by India Knight at the more upmarket Times. ‘The resort the McCanns went to belongs to the Mark Warner holiday group, which specialises in providing family-friendly holidays to the middle classes,’ she confided. The joy of such a resort was that they ‘were populated by recognisable types’ where you could sigh in relief and think, ‘Everyone is like us’. They were not places you would expect to meet ‘the kind of people who wallop their weeping kids in Sainsbury’s.’4 These are revealing confessions. These columnists’ undoubtedly sincere grief was not simply caused by the kidnapping of a little girl. They were distressed, basically, because she was middle class.
It’s easy to see why the McCann family were so appealing to middle-class journalists. The parents were medical professionals from a smart suburb in Leicestershire. They were regular churchgoers. As a couple they were photogenic, well groomed and bursting with health. When pictured lovingly tending to their twin babies, they represented an almost idealized portrait of middle-class family life. Empathy for their plight came naturally to those like Allison Pearson and India Knight, because the McCanns’ lives were similar to their own.
The contrast with the Matthews family could not have been greater. Shannon grew up on an impoverished estate in an old industrial northern town. Her mother, Karen, had seven children from relationships with five different men. She did not work, while her partner, Craig Meehan, was a supermarket fishmonger. Ms Matthews appeared to the world in unfashionable clothing, her hair pulled back, her face dour, without make-up and looking strikingly older than her thirty-two years. A slouching Mr Meehan stood next to her in a baseball cap, sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms. They were definitely not ‘people like us’.
The case simply could not provoke the same response among predominantly middle-class journalists. And it did not. Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the Daily Mirror, had no doubts about the dearth of media coverage: ‘Overarching everything is social class.’5 Was this unfair? It’s difficult to explain why else, even in the first week of the Matthews disappearance, newspapers were still opting to give frontpage coverage to possible sightings of Madeleine nine months after she had vanished.
Shannon’s background was just too far removed from the experience of journalists who covered such stories. You don’t need to indulge in psychobabble to understand why those who write and broadcast our news were so fixated with ‘Maddie’ while displaying scant interest in a missing girl from a northern backwater. ‘Dewsbury Moor is no Home Counties idyll, nor is it a Portuguese holiday resort,’ commented one journalist at The Times in an effort to explain why there was no media frenzy over Shannon. ‘It is “up North”, it is a bleak mix of pebbledash council blocks and neglected wasteland, and it is populated by some people capable of confirming the worst stereotype and prejudice of the white underclass.’ He could hardly overlook the distress of some neighbours, but felt that others ‘seemed only too ready to treat the drama of a missing child as a sort of exciting game that has relieved the monotony of life on the poverty line.’6
Such comments open a window into the minds of educated, middle-class hacks. They had stumbled into strange, unfamiliar territory. After all, they knew nobody who had grown up in these circumstances. It’s no surprise that they found it difficult to empathize with them. ‘I suspect in general a lot of national journalists, the people who will have gone up north to cover it, would have been entering an alien world,’ says senior Mirror journalist Kevin Maguire. ‘It’ll have been as alien to them as Kandahar or Timbuktu. They just wouldn’t know that Britain … Because it’s not their Britain, it’s not the bit they live in, they come from.’
This is not baseless speculation. The occasional journalist even confessed as much. Melanie Reid in The Times argued passionately that ‘us douce middle classes’ simply did not understand the case ‘because we are as removed from that kind of poverty as we are from events in Afghanistan. For life among the white working class of Dewsbury looks like a foreign country.’7
The working-class residents of Dewsbury Moor were certainly