Why do the McCanns choose spin
doctors not lawyers? And why
so many?
gibby zobel reports |
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This morning Clarence Mitchell will stand on the church steps in Rothley, Leicestershire, with Kate and Gerry McCann as their new official spokesman. He is the former Foreign Office spin doctor who helped the couple before and yesterday announced he was giving up his government job to act as their full-time advisor.
PR experts - whether privately funded or government-funded - have shadowed the McCann story since the moment Madeleine went missing in Praia da Luz on May 3. That is why everyone from David Beckham to Pope Benedict XVI, from Gordon Brown to Laura Bush, has been tapped up for support and influence. But how did it happen?
The couple's media campaign started by chance. One of the best crisis management PRs in the business, Alex Woolfall of Bell Pottinger, happened to be on hand from day one. He was employed by the Mark Warner |
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PR experts have shadowed the McCann story since the moment Madeleine went missing in Praia da Luz on May 3
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organisation which runs the Ocean Club resort where the McCanns were staying.
It was Woolfall who acted as a bridge between the distraught McCanns and the arriving media hordes. Two weeks later, Woolfall stood down and the Foreign Office stepped in.
First to arrive in Portugal was a former Mirror journalist and long-term government spokesperson called Sheree Dodd. But Dodd was swiftly replaced by the more senior and bombastic figure of Clarence Mitchell, who took a pro-active role, orchestrating a visit to meet the Pope and a tour which took in Spain, Germany and Morocco.
But what was the hand of government doing meddling in the case? Mitchell was director of Whitehall's Media Monitoring Unit, a little-known department which scours the foreign media, collecting information that might be of interest to the government. Why did the McCanns need such a man to represent them? And anyway, why a spin-doctor rather than a good lawyer?
These are questions the Spanish daily  |
Madeleine: Mitchell of the FO joins the team
