Gerry now turned his mind to the involvement of Alex Woolfall in those heady early days. He had to admit that he had been a puzzle, he reflected. The press had billed him as ‘Mark Warners’ expert in crisis management’, but in fact he was the Head of Issues and Crisis Management for the entire Bell Pottinger group. He had in fact been seconded to Mark Warners by Bell Pottinger, the PR firm headed by Lord Bell, Lady Thatcher’s former PR guru.

His expertise appeared to be more about rescuing the reputations of companies and individuals who were in a tight spot than in helping the search for an abducted child. His CV had included: ‘helping companies in multiple sectors prepare for and respond to difficult or controversial issues’, and ‘managing actual crises’. His portfolio included cases of deliberate sabotage and accidental contamination of products, injuries and death in the workplace, allegations of corporate manslaughter; corporate fraud and theft; the alleged the use of illegal child labour in the workplace workplace; corporate fraud and theft; breaches of regulations, and ‘terrorist related activities’. He had had to admit at the time that it was an impressive CV. But would he be able to help in the effort to find Madeleine?

Another puzzle about Alex Woolfall, recalled Gerry, was why he told ‘The Times’ that he had flown out to Praia da Luz on Saturday 5th May when, in fact, he had flown out on Friday 4th May, the day after Madeleine had disappeared.

In order for Woolfall to arrive on the Friday, the management team at Mark Warners in Praia da Luz – and presumably their headquarters – would have had to demand Woofall’s presence in Praia da Luz almost immediately. Gerry wondered why there had been such a rush to fly Woolfall out. Was it because Mark Warners feared the consequences of it being confirmed that a young child had been abducted from their complex? Gerry recalled that initially, in the first hours after Madeleine had disappeared, John Hill, Mark Warners’ manager at Praia da Luz, had cast doubt as to whether any abduction had actually taken place. He had soon changed his mind, thank goodness.

It had been at 10.00pm on Friday 4th May – exactly 24 hours’ after Madeleine had been reported missing – when Gerry had so courageously spoken to the press. This was how Woolfall had described it in his article in ‘The Times’ on 6th October 2007:

“I met the couple for the first time at their new apartment. [The McCanns] were behaving exactly as I thought someone in that situation would be behaving. They had not slept. They were exhausted and despairing but thinking, ‘Should we go outside and say something that might get her back?’ They said they wanted to head downstairs and talk to the media. They were very tired, but that was one thing they were determined to do. So I went out to alert journalists and returned to the McCanns. They wrote down what they wanted to say and went out and gave a short statement. After that, they were completely spent. You could tell there was nothing left”.

Gerry himself had described the occasion in a Vanity Fair article published on 10 January 2008: “The day after Madeleine was abducted, as Kate and I left the police station, there were 150 journalists in front of it. Alex Woolfall explained to me that either I interact with the media or we would be hounded by the press”.

He momentarily noted that he and Alex Woolfall were not quite singing from the same hymn sheet on this issue. Woolfall had said it was him and Kate who were wanting to make a statement, he realised, whereas Gerry had maintained that it was Woolfall who had pushed him into making a statement.

He let out a momentary sigh.

But, as always, he had told the truth. It was indeed Woolfall who had persuaded them into making that statement to the press. So Woolfall had got it wrong by claiming that he and Kate had been pushing to make a statement.

And, strangely, Woolfall had also got it wrong in stating, as he had done more than once, that he had flown out to Praia da Luz ‘36 hours’ after Madeleine disappeared, on 5th May. Well, he was an old man. In his fifties, anyway. Perhaps his memory was beginning to go.

And there was a third thing that had puzzled him about Woolfall’s pronouncements. In the article in ‘The Times’, Woolfall had claimed that ‘during the first two weeks, the McCanns were not considering abduction and only started to consider this as an option as I was leaving two weeks later’. He’d added: “They gave no indication that they thought she had been snatched, let alone by a paedophile. Their early assumption was that she had wandered off and had an accident or been taken in by a well-meaning stranger. Certainly I did not hear any discussion that this could be a paedophile or an aggravated robbery. All the time I was around, it was whether she could have wandered off or somebody had actually taken her in, perhaps not with ill-intent”.

He’d even added: “During the first 48 hours, the word being used was ‘missing’ rather than ‘abducted’ or any link with a paedophile or any sort of crime. Towards the end of the second week I detected a shift towards there being a consciousness that she had probably been taken rather than wandered off, just on the assumption that anybody would have found her by now”.

Gerry’s recollection again differed greatly from Woolfall’s.

by ‘Montmorillonite’ – COPYRIGHT