KEY POINTS:
When this year's Booker Prize winner Annie Enright wrote recently about her dislike of Gerry and Kate McCann, she was saying what many of us have been thinking.
When their daughter Madeleine disappeared the McCanns immediately used the media to draw worldwide attention to their plight. That strategy
backfired badly when suspicions were raised about their own involvement in Maddy's disappearance.
The spectacle of the grief-stricken parents instantly commanded an audience of millions. An audience that quickly developed an insatiable taste for the lurid twists in their story. The rental Renault. The sniffer dogs. The DNA.
Now, as we stand by, breathless, to see what will happen next, when they step in front of the cameras Madeleine's parents are on trial as much as they are on show.
Gerry McCann has had his every word analysed extensively, but it is the mother Kate who is the real star.
Everything about her, from her parenting skills to her taste in clothes has come in for a bashing. Extracts from her diary have been published so we can pore over her innermost thoughts.
So we can judge her.
Like the smiling image of her missing daughter she has become public property.
And if, not when, but if, she and her husband are ever found guilty of any wrongdoing, it is Kate McCann who will bear the lion's share of public opprobrium.
The idea of any parent harming their offspring is appalling, but society reserves a special sort of revulsion for mothers who kill their children. What makes a woman a woman? Soft skin? Pretty hair? The inability to read maps or get ready in less than two hours? Bosoms?
All of the above, and none, depending on who you're talking to, and when.
Definitions of femininity vary hugely from place to place and from time to time, but the maternal impulse has always been considered an innate and sacred part of being a woman. We base our society around the bond between mother and child. Maternal love is venerated as unstinting unconditional and timeless. The idea that any mother could ever consider killing her baby is a transgression almost too shocking to contemplate.
But not quite. From Medea to Lady Macbeth, the figure of the murderous mother haunts society throughout the centuries, providing us with some of the most powerful and unsettling characters in drama and literature. They fascinate us even as we recoil from them because we wonder, what sort of woman can kill her child?
Those questions hover over the footage of Kate McCann that has filled our screens for months. Even the merest hint of suspicion that a mother might possibly be involved in the disappearance of her little girl has been enough to turn her, in the eyes of the world, from a distraught parent into a dissembling monster.
But she has not been charged with any crime and so she hangs in limbo, with her tears and her pleas and her daughter's Cuddle Cat, an image veering constantly between pathos and monstrosity. Which makes Heather Mills' comparison of herself with McCann this week quite bewildering.
On Wednesday, Mills chose Kate McCann, alongside Princess Diana, as one of two tragic women with whom she identifies. This in the body of a fabulously entertaining sermon on The Evils of the Media and the Pain of Being Misunderstood. A brilliant rambling monologue delivered by a barking mad guest to a completely unprepared host as a cast of thousands looks on at home in glee. That's what I call Breakfast TV. Sunrise, please take note.
In fairness Mills might be excused for feeling put upon. Since the announcement of her divorce from Sir Paul McCartney she has generated a rainforest of bad press.
More than 4400 newspaper articles if anyone is counting, and Heather is. She's fallen foul of the British tabloids, a section of the media that has never been slow to call a spade a shovel. Or in this case to call the estranged wife of a beloved Beatle a money-grubbing, fame-hungry, filthy lying media-whore. Trying times for Heather certainly, but you cannot court that bitch-goddess Fame and then act surprised when she bites you. This, after all, is a woman who last week was asking Reese Witherspoon to play her in Heather Mills: The Movie.
Mills is like Diana, but not in the way she thinks.
Two high-profile women, both courting media attention. The only difference is that Diana was smarter at using it.
It is not surprising Mills sees Diana as a tragic hounded figure and ignores the complicated relationship she had with the papers when she's doing exactly the same thing herself, but the comparison with Kate McCann is shockingly arrogant.
One wonders exactly how self-obsessed this woman is, that she conflates her own messy divorce and bad press with the agony of losing your daughter and having the world think you killed her.
In identifying herself with Madeleine's mother, Heather Mills is confusing the tragic with the merely absurd.
