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What McCann spokesman Clarence Mitchell really thinks happened to Madeleine
When Clarence Mitchell picked up the phone at work one morning, he expected yet another routine conversation.
But it was a phone call that plucked him from the mundane life of a civil service job and dropped him right in the heart of one of the biggest missing children’s cases the world has ever seen.
An ex BBC reporter, Mitchell was by then working in a government-led arm on media monitoring, but had asked ex-colleagues to keep him in mind for any big stories that broke. “I thought it might be something like bird flu, or foot and mouth. A general crisis that flares up from time to time,” explains Mitchell.
But this was May 2007, and a three-year-old Madeleine McCann had just been snatched from her hotel room in Praia du Luz, Portugal, taken from her bed while her parents dined in a nearby restaurant.
“The ambassador [to Portugal] had sent a couple of press officers down there, but they were overwhelmed by the media response. He asked for some extra help from London,” Mitchell recalls.
“I was sent out and told it would just be a fortnight or so." But almost 12 years on, Mitchell is still helping the family. Fascination with Madeleine's case has never abated - a new Netflix series, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, was released two weeks ago - and Mitchell has been handling Gerry and Kate's media dealings ever since.
What McCann spokesman Clarence Mitchell really thinks happened to Madeleine
When Clarence Mitchell picked up the phone at work one morning, he expected yet another routine conversation.
But it was a phone call that plucked him from the mundane life of a civil service job and dropped him right in the heart of one of the biggest missing children’s cases the world has ever seen.
An ex BBC reporter, Mitchell was by then working in a government-led arm on media monitoring, but had asked ex-colleagues to keep him in mind for any big stories that broke. “I thought it might be something like bird flu, or foot and mouth. A general crisis that flares up from time to time,” explains Mitchell.
But this was May 2007, and a three-year-old Madeleine McCann had just been snatched from her hotel room in Praia du Luz, Portugal, taken from her bed while her parents dined in a nearby restaurant.
“The ambassador [to Portugal] had sent a couple of press officers down there, but they were overwhelmed by the media response. He asked for some extra help from London,” Mitchell recalls.
“I was sent out and told it would just be a fortnight or so." But almost 12 years on, Mitchell is still helping the family. Fascination with Madeleine's case has never abated - a new Netflix series, The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann, was released two weeks ago - and Mitchell has been handling Gerry and Kate's media dealings ever since.
What McCann spokesman Clarence Mitchell really thinks happened to Madeleine