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Cleveland kidnap case is proof Kate McCann is right never to give up hope of finding Madeleine

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Yesterday morning's news that three girls who were abducted almost a decade ago have been found alive in America will surely have given Kate McCann new hope that her daughter Madeleine is still alive

On Monday, Kate McCann flew to Portugal. She’ll spend a few days alone there because it’s where she feels closest to her daughter Madeleine, who was snatched from the resort of Praia da Luz six years ago. 

Grief is etched permanently on to Kate’s familiar, angular face. But she’s never given up hope of finding Madeleine, convinced as only a mother can be that her daughter is still alive.

Even some of those closest to her will, from time to time, have privately asked themselves why she hasn’t given up. One or two may have gently suggested that, for her own sake and that of her other two children, eight-year-old twins Sean and Amelie, she should ‘move on’.

There have been times, no doubt, when Kate herself has wondered if she’s foolish to keep stoking the fire of her fierce maternal conviction.

But yesterday morning’s astonishing news that three girls who were abducted almost a decade ago have been found alive in America will surely have fanned the flames of her hope ever brighter.

None of us can know how we would react should the unthinkable happen and one of our children disappears. We’ve all known that heart-stopping moment when you turn back in the supermarket or on a crowded beach and suddenly they’re not there; the throat-constricting panic as you frantically search — and the sweet flood of weak-kneed relief when they turn up again.

To have to live with that dread and fear day after numbing day, year after miserable year, is almost unthinkable. Yet that’s what so many mothers do.

It’s 22 years since toddler Ben Needham disappeared while playing in fields outside a farmhouse his grandfather was renovating on the Greek island of Kos, yet his mother Kerry’s advice to Kate McCann when they met was: ‘Never stop searching and never give up — I haven’t and I won’t.’

  More... Pictured: The three brothers 'who kidnapped three girls and kept them captive for 10 years' as it emerges the victims 'gave birth to at least FIVE babies in the home' 'She died of broken heart': Mother who relentlessly searched for kidnapping victim Amanda Berry passed away before learning daughter was alive 'I knew something was wrong when a pretty little white girl ran into a black man's arms': Hero neighbor who freed kidnapped Ohio women becomes instant internet celebrity

Three years before Madeleine was abducted from the holiday apartment where she was sleeping, Gina DeJesus disappeared while walking home from school in Cleveland, Ohio. She was 14 and less than a mile from home. That was April 2, 2004, and as her mother Nancy Ruiz said just last year, on the eighth anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance: ‘It gets worse as the days go by, as the years go by.’

On that day, Nancy was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt emblazoned with Gina’s photograph and the slogan Have You Seen Me? ‘Wearing the shirt keeps me going,’ she said. And now, in what must seem to Nancy nothing less than a miracle, her faith has at last been rewarded.

Amanda Berry, right, was 16 when she went missing in 2003, while Gina DeJesus, left, was just 14 when she vanished in 2004. Both women were found on Monday after a decade-long search

Gina DeJesus — together with two other girls, Amanda Berry and Michele Knight — has been found alive.

Amanda Berry’s mother, Louwana Miller, never gave up hope her daughter would be found, but died ‘of a broken heart’ three years after she disappeared. 

By contrast, Michele Knight’s mother, Barbara, has moved to Florida and seems to have believed her daughter had simply run away. If true, this is an agonising betrayal for her traumatised daughter to have to bear — a heartache made all the more bitter in contrast to the unwavering belief shown by Gina’s mother and Amanda’s sister, Beth.

Of course, fathers keep fighting, too. Gerry McCann has been unceasing in his battle to keep Madeleine’s name in the public eye. Determined to be the rock on whom his wife and other two children can depend, he projects an unbreakable quality that must have been tested repeatedly over the years.

A father's fight: Gerry McCann has been unceasing in his battle to keep Madeleine's name in the public eye. He projects an unbreakable quality that must have been tested repeatedly over the years

But it’s Kate who’s kept Madeleine’s bedroom just as it was when the McCanns (‘a boring, ordinary family’ as Kate described them in her book two years ago) left their home in Leicestershire to go on holiday — and Kate who still goes in there to open and close the curtains twice a day.

It’s Kate whose face crumpled at a prayer service last week to mark the sixth anniversary of her daughter’s disappearance, and Kate who still fills Christmas stockings for three: ‘There is part of me that has to do it.’

Like Ben Needham’s mother — indeed, like every mother of the estimated 200,000-plus children and teenagers who go missing in Britain every year — she is sure her child is out there somewhere. Most are found within a few hours, but some remain missing for years.

Kate says that every time she sees a car with a Madeleine sticker go past, every time someone asks for a poster to display, she feels a little bit more hopeful: ‘You feel you aren’t on your own any more. To know people care is a huge help.’

Keep the faith: Let's refocus on the image of Madeleine and keep it fresh in our minds. Let's put up more stickers and posters. And let's pray that one day soon her mother's unerring faith will be rewarded

This Sunday will be Madeleine’s tenth birthday. Her family will buy her presents as they do every year, and this week her mother will light candles for her in the tiny church in Praia da Luz as she battles to keep her daughter’s name alive.

‘I don’t think we’ll ever reach a point where we feel we’ve done everything we can,’ she says. ‘If Madeleine’s still missing then we haven’t done enough.’

Nor have we. Let’s refocus on the image of Madeleine and keep it fresh in our minds. Let’s put up more stickers and posters. And let’s pray that one day soon, like the families of Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, her mother’s unerring faith will be rewarded.

  Time to be thankfulThe terrible tragedy that befell the Milligan family on a sunny  Bank Holiday Sunday speedboat trip is an awful reminder that nothing is ever certain. 

You wake up one morning looking forward to a perfect day and find your life irrevocably changed before nightfall. 

And it’s a lesson to all of us that the time to be grateful for what we have is not tomorrow, next week or next year, but today, right now.

  The news that high-waisted jeans are back - as worn by Posh, who else? - should be a cause for great rejoicing among women everywhere

I’ve spent the past ten years getting to grips with low-rise jeans and have finally conceded defeat. Unless you’re 17, a supermodel or control freak content to deny yourself cake for ever, they result in an unattractive roll of flesh — a muffin top — spilling over the waistband.

So the news that high-waisted jeans are back — as worn by Posh, who else? — should be a cause  for great rejoicing among women everywhere.

Our today will come Charles Moore, whose newly published biography of Margaret Thatcher has been widely hailed as a masterpiece, says that when the great John Humphrys retires, the Today programme should replace not just him but all its male presenters with women.

Too right. You’ve  only to listen to Woman’s Hour to understand how female presenters  can be tough without being self-servingly confrontational. As Moore says: ‘The point is that we men love to show how clever we are and how we catch people out, rather than whether we have elicited any truth.’

An all-women team of Today presenters — led by the excellent World At One’s Martha Kearney and featuring Jenni Murray, Libby Purves and Victoria Derbyshire — would be not just a revolution, but a revelation.

Jamie Oliver says he’d love his wife Jools to go away with him without their four children, but she won’t because their youngest is only two. This is a mistake and I’d urge her to rethink. The best thing a couple can do for their children’s happiness is to ensure their own.

Those photographs of Cara Delevingne awkwardly trying to cover with her foot a plastic bag containing white powder must have filled her mother Pandora, a former drug addict, with foreboding. Cara is the model of the moment, but she’s already notorious, aged just 20, for partying too hard and behaving too oddly. Time her mother intervened. In their case, it seems far better to avoid that old adage ‘like mother, like daughter’.

New research shows that a compound in champagne improves short-term memory and scientists recommend that once we’re over 40 we should all be drinking three glasses a week. I shall be obeying this advice forthwith. At 51, I’m assuming I have a lot of catching up to do — so I’ve decided I’d better have a glass every day. Just to be on the safe side.

Madonna is constantly reinventing herself, but is she aware that her latest new image, supposedly a homage to punk, with glossy dark hair and scarlet lips, makes her look scarily like Hilary Devey — another twice-divorced, single mother who, like Madge, is a fearless innovator with homes around the world and millions in the bank and a rather questionable taste in fashion. At least you’d never find Hilary trotting up the red carpet in a ripped fishnet body stocking.

Madonna is constantly reinventing herself, but is she aware that her latest new image, supposedly a homage to punk, with glossy dark hair and scarlet lips, makes her look scarily like Hilary Devey (right)?

  Straight A students need lessons in life

Professor Robert Winston says he deliberately won’t employ any graduate with a first-class honours degree ‘because, actually, I’d rather have young people around me who developed other interests at university and didn’t just focus entirely on getting that First’.

And focus they do. From the age of about 13, children are left in no doubt that they have to get straight As and A*s if they’re to have any hope of getting into a competitive career, with the result that they turn into little study machines, hollow-eyed and worn out with stress.

As the headmaster of  a hugely academic school told one mother I  know: ‘Let’s face it — a B is a fail.’

Actually it’s not. At the weekend, a friend dug out her old school magazine where we discovered that out of 127 A-level passes in her year in 1983, only 15 were at A grade. 

That’s because, in those days, only serious brainboxes got As. 

My friend got three Bs and is today one of the best doctors I know — as warm and reassuring as she is clinically brilliant. 

But she wouldn’t be allowed through the door of a medical school today, because three As at A-level is a basic minimum.

It’s high time that we started valuing emotional intelligence as much as the intellectual kind. 

As Lord Winston says  of his strategy: ‘It has produced a lot of useful science, because we’ve worked as a group of friends, as a team.’

If he can convince other employers to follow his lead, he’ll have started a revolution every bit as radical as the IVF treatment he’s pioneered.








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