April Jones: Kay Burley makes them weep as troll-faced Amanda Platell spots paedos everywhere
APRIL Jones: The five-year-old went missing from the Bryn Y Gog estate in Machynlleth, Wales. The news round-up:
Daily Mail (front page): “April’s family release poignant new photos as hope for her fades”
Daily Mirror (front page): I saw April driven off”
“Witness says he was the last to see her alive”
Armchair detectives know that the last person to see anyone live is a suspect in that person’s unexplained demise. But April Jones might be alive. We don’t know.
AN OAP saw a car speed away from the spot where April Jones vanished. The distraught 70-year-old said moments earlier he had seen her playing with pals but she suddenly disappeared. As the hunt for April, five, became a murder inquiry yesterday, he added: “I’m kicking myself that I did not raise the alarm.”
Reports are that April Jones got willingly into a car. Why would any alarm be raised?
The man said: “I was home on Monday night as usual and saw little April playing outside with her friends…A driver kept cruising up and down the road where the kids were playing…I noticed the car parked up next to the garages which was strange because no one would park there usually…But suddenly they weren’t there and I noticed the car drive briskly down the road towards the town centre.”
The i (front page): “Search for April becomes hunt for body”
The Times (front pages): “April was almost certainly murdered, parents are told”
Daily Star (front page): “Tragic April: Now it’s murder”
SKY News TV host Kay Burley was slated yesterday after she told volunteers live on screen that police now assume April Jones was murdered. Burley, 51, then asked them: “How do you feel about that?” as the pair, who had been searching for April, collapsed in tears.
They did not collapse. There is no need for the Star to exaggerate the hideousness. You can see it here.
The Express has news on Mark Bridger:
Two of his children, Sophie, nine, and Connor, 13, live in the street and their step-sister Erin, four, was one of April’s best friends. Relatives confirmed former lifeguard Bridger took Sophie and Connor crabbing. Her parents Coral and Paul let April go with her friends. The family’s spokeswoman said: “This summer Mark took his kids on a crabbing trip to the coast north of Machynlleth and April went with them in the LandRover. He was taking Sophie and Connor so Erin and April went along too. Nobody in the family thought anything of it at the time.”
Bridger’s ex-girlfriend Elaine Dafydd, who is Sophie and Connor’s mother, is also a close friend of April’s family.
The Telegraph has news of why April Jones was playing outside:
The five-year-old would not normally have been outside as late as 7pm, when dusk was falling in her home of Machynlleth, Powys, but her mother and father wanted to reward her for working so hard at school.
Over in the Daily Mail, Amanda Platell is revolting:
Two words to haunt any mum: ‘If only . . . There can be no mother in Britain more moved by the plight of little April Jones than Kate McCann.
It’s a competition? For Platell, Our Maddie as the benchmark of all missing children. This is Platell, who once opined:
I hesitate to use such a phrase, but it seems, at times, as if we are witnessing “competitive grieving”, with the McCanns? private agony becoming a public sport… the real problem now for the McCanns is that the public at large will grow weary of these orchestrated photo opportunities…
Today, Platell notes:
Like April’s mother, Coral, Kate knows the searing pain of losing a young daughter she thought was safe. And she knows the torment of that constant nagging thought, ‘If only…’
If only she hadn’t left her outside. If only she’d been with her family.
April Jones was not “left” outside. She was allowed outside to play with her mates by her family home on a quite road in a quite village. Her parents were in the family house close by.
When Madeleine McCann went missing five years ago, the beautiful little girl was almost four years old — a year younger than April. Over the ensuing weeks, Gerry and Kate suffered the cruel vilification of strangers who accused them of parental neglect.
Looks matter?
How could any loving parents leave Maddie and their young twins alone in an apartment in an Algarve resort while they and their friends wined and dined nearby, the critics asked.
Indeed. Get this from Platell on 25 July 2008:
It wasn’t just their precious daughter that was missing at Monday’s press conference, but also any reference to their own behaviour on that dreadful night when they went out wining and dining and left their beloved children untended in an unlocked holiday flat…If the couple were now to spend as much time campaigning against the dangers of parents leaving children alone as they are apparently spending trying to seek financial recompense, then the nightmare of Madeleine’s disappearance might have one positive legacy.
Platell now says:
Mercifully, Coral Jones has not been subjected to similar accusations. Yet.
April Jones is missing. A man is in police custody, arrested for her alleged kidnap and murder. The man is Mark Bridger. No-one has ever been arrested in connection with the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Some, like the McCanns and Robert Murat, have been libelled. We do not know what happened to the child. The police do have a pretty good idea what happened to April Jones.
Platell:
For what parent does not have a tale of the moment they thought they had lost their child — whether in a supermarket, on holiday, or in the park.
Is she really equating the disappearance of a child – the thought that a young girl has been murdered – with getting separated for a few moments? April Jones was not “lost”. The police believe she was kidnapped.
The terrible truth is that no child is ultimately safe away from their parents, whether it be a luxury resort in Portugal or a rural idyll in Wales.
Two rare events. And Amanda Platell is here to spread the fear. Only parents can keep a child safe, says Platell. Parents never do any wrong to their children, says Platell. Strangers must be feared, says she. Strangers are all potential paedos, says Platell. She needs to get out more.
But before the trolls take to the internet, let nobody doubt that whatever unfolds in the days ahead, April’s parents will be their own harshest critics…
Only a nutter would think April Jones’s parents have done anything wrong. Only an opportunistic troll with a column to fill would put that idea of paper.
Posted: 6th, October 2012 | In: Key Posts, Madeleine McCann, News Comments (10) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink
October 11th, 2012 at 10:02 pm
The abduction of this lovely little girl is not the parents fault and why some people are so quick to blame the parents instead of blaming the abductor beggar’s belief? It’s a totally different scenario Madelaine and the Mccans. The Police have evidence of an abduction in April’s case.
October 9th, 2012 at 9:22 am
“Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and author of several publications including ‘Paranoid Parenting’, has examined many worldwide studies in his research and has concluded that parental anxieties about issues such as abduction tend to be significantly out of proportion to many real risks. He believes the impact of this ‘culture of fear’ on our children has been incredibly damaging, restricting children’s opportunities for creative play, and leading to health problems such as poor fitness and obesity”
October 8th, 2012 at 3:25 pm
The Guardian has a report today on stranger abduction. Around 6 children a year are abducted and murdered by strangers. It has been at around this rate forever (there has been no change since the 1960s despite a rise in population). Now 6 children per year is still horrible but two children per week are killed in the home.
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The child was playing yards from her house with a group of friends. There is nothing wrong in this. Moreover, IF (and at this stage it is a big IF) the police have the right guy, it appears the suspect was anything but a stranger – a very close associate in fact.
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To say ‘sickos are everywhere’ is hysterical nonsense.
October 8th, 2012 at 2:58 pm
“5 tracey says:
October 8th, 2012 at 11:09 am
no-one has the right to tell a mother she deserves what she got for not supervising her child but as a mother of a 5 year old girl no child of that age should be out any time of day or night without adult supervision because these sickos are everywhere even in a quiet little village in wales”
……No! There are not ‘sickos everywhere,’ No more children are abducted by strangers than at any time in the last 100 years. The only difference is that we have never had as much 24 hour media with time to fill to tell us about those very, very few kids who are abducted. Few people would be able to name the last child abducted and murdered. Many, many more children are at risk from the ‘sickos’ in their own home. Keeping young children cooped up in front of the DVD, TV, Game-station will, in the long term, do far more harm to the majority. We are already seeing the product of sedantary children in the young adults that turn up for work interviews and cannot interact with strangers, totally lack inter-personal skills, know nothing of sharing or of team-work. Most think conflict resolution consists of slamming the bedroom door and sulking – and I am talking about 20 year somethings!
Parents need to get a grip, calm down and stop molly-coddling their precious children. 99.999999999999999999999% WILL NOT be abducted by a stranger but will live more fulfilling lives
October 8th, 2012 at 2:17 pm
there are no more “sickos” around these days than there were 30 years ago – it’s just that what they do is better publicised. She wasn’t out on her own, she was playing with friends a very short distance from her home, having recently returned from a Parent’s evening at her school and had obviously asked her mum if she could just go out to play with her friends for a while. I don’t see anything untoward or “lazy” about that. If it was this man who took her, he was known to the child – she didn’t go off with a stranger. When I was a child, we were outside playing away from the house for most of the day, with a remit to be home in time for meals and I know for a fact that that was the case for the majority of people my age. However, with the advent of 24/7 media coverage and idiotic commentary from the likes of Kay Burley, those days are long gone and kids are being wrapped up in cotton wool – stifled even. Perhaps you would prefer for kids these days to be incarcerated in their homes with just a computer for company…? More of a danger there, I would have thought….
Of course there are perverts around, but if we all restricted our movements to compensate for every potential danger lurking as soon as we stepped outside our front doors, nobody would do anything at all. If this child had gone missing in an inner city, there would be nothing like the amount of shock and sadness exhibited by this community. But is it exactly because it happened in somewhere like Machynlleth, one of the sleepiest market towns in mid Wales, where people feel relaxed and safe (until now), that has taken everyone by surprise and shattered their faith in human nature.
Maybe it is something alien to you, but there are still communities in this country where even today, they do not lock their doors.
October 8th, 2012 at 11:09 am
no-one has the right to tell a mother she deserves what she got for not supervising her child but as a mother of a 5 year old girl no child of that age should be out any time of day or night without adult supervision because these sickos are everywhere even in a quiet little village in wales
October 8th, 2012 at 10:21 am
I am getting really sick of these sanctimonious jibes about parenting by people who know little or nothing about the area or the family involved. Very easy to stick the boot in, isn’t it, from behind a computer screen, but I am damned sure that you wouldn’t have the guts to stand in front of that devastated mother and tell her to her face that it serves her right because she’s a lazy parent…?????
you disgust me, Anna – you and all your nasty little troll mates…
October 7th, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Amanda is merely making the point that April’s parents should have been supervising her given that it WAS after 7pm and whether a child has been good or not, that’s no excuse for lazy parenting
October 6th, 2012 at 11:25 am
People like Amanda Platell specialise in spreading fear, and from fear grows collective paranoia, which means that any single bloke, standing within a few hundred metres of a school?nursery etc is regarded as suspicious. the other day I sat down in the childrens books section of the local library to tie a shoelace, no seats in the adult area at the time…from the reaction of library staff you would have thought I was Ian Huntley mark two
October 6th, 2012 at 10:41 am
Hi I don’t write in often because I was targeted in the early days of “Anorka”, but thank you for this insightful report on Amanda Platell and her twisted thinking.
This comparison she draws to Madeleine McCann and her parents is revolting and it is she who is also responsible for the “orchestrated, competitive grieving” with her innuendo, jibes, and biased reporting.
Is Amanda Platell just one person or a composite of many and I am glad its not just me that thinks she is a psycho.