Look - she's picking her nose

Doubtless by now you will have heard about the latest in Madeleine McCann's disappearance, when 48 hours after being officially declared as suspects, the parents jumped on a plane and came back to England. It's a spectacular piece of bad PR for the search efforts as despite claims that they want to get their other children home, it just looks like they've cut and run. Granted they will be made to go back soon for further investigation, but I don't think anyone's buying their insistence that they were already planning to come back when they've been there for months and only come back when the cops get frisky.

I'm not for a minute going to comment on the potential guilt or otherwise of the McCanns (although she has the dead eyes of a convict, and the way they deflect accusations from the press don't exactly convince you that they are offended about being accused), but I do want to pass several comments on the unbelievable level of coverage their return generated. Obviously it's a big step in the case due to the points I made above, but do we really need to see live footage of the plane landing at East Midlands, then 20 minutes of the other passengers being led off before they're finally allowed to get off? Sky even had the 'SkyCopter' on the scene, just in case a ground-level camera by the door of the plane wasn't sufficient. It was pure sensationalism and as I write, 6 hours after they arrived there are still 'Breaking News' tickers on the main news channels telling us they're back. Honestly, who gives that much of a shit?

At the end of the day, the case is far from over. If they'd been charged and then did one on a plane, fair enough, but this was simply a family returning from Portugal. Their village was crawling with press hours before they even got on the plane, and ridiculously, during coverage of further fatalities in Afghanistan, there was a live feed from the front door of their home to keep us up to speed. Fine, if this hadn't been 10am this morning.

It just goes to show that these 24-hour news channels have got bugger all to talk about, and see anything slightly above the ordinary as a chance to prove their existence. Everything that has gone on today could be quickly tied up in 3-4 sentences at the top of the bulletin, but instead they've got correspondents all over the shop (including at the airport they flew FROM , hours after they left). I simply cannot believe anyone would still be sitting in front of their telly waiting for further developments. All that's left to announce is what they had for their tea. I expect that to make the late bulletin though...