Madeleine McCann’s father has accused sections of the UK media of “monstering” his family in a call for greater scrutiny of the press.
Gerry McCann told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the media “repeatedly interfered” with the investigation into his daughter’s disappearance in 2007, which he believes hindered the search for her.
Mr McCann said in the rare interview that more than a year on from Labour coming into power, “press regulation is no longer a priority” and he was “extremely disappointed” in the government for not implementing certain recommendations made in the first part of the Leveson Inquiry, which they had committed to in the run-up to the election.
After his three-year-old daughter disappeared on a family holiday in Portugal, never to be found again, he said his family had “journalists coming to the house, photographers literally ramming their cameras against our car window when we had two-year-old twins in the back who were terrified”.
“We are lucky we survived. We had tremendous support – but I can promise you, there were times where I felt like I was drowning. And it was the media, primarily,” he told the BBC, as he reflected on what he called 15 months worth of “sustained interest and misleading headlines”.
“It was what was happening and the way things were being portrayed, where you were being suffocated and buried, and it felt like there wasn’t a way out.”
He has called for the second phase of the Lord Leveson inquiry, examining unlawful action by the media and journalists’ relationships with politicians and police, to resume. The second phase was scrapped by the Tories in 2018 as they claimed the “world had changed” since Leveson’s 2012 report.
The McCann family are among over 30 people who have signed a letter to the prime minister calling for him to resume the second phase of the Leveson Inquiry, alongside the mother of television presenter Caroline Flack and the families of the Hillsborough victims.
Mr McCann expressed his disappointment that the Labour government hadn’t stood by their commitment to implement some of Leveson’s recommendations after a year in power.
“We’re over a year into the government, and there haven’t been any changes,” he said. “It’s not acceptable to me now, more than a year on, that Leveson and press regulation is no longer a priority.”
Culture secretary Lisa Nandy said a second phase of the inquiry had been “ruled out” and that the media landscape was now very different. She told BBC Breakfast: “It’s a really difficult thing to get right, because we’ve got to balance the rights and needs of victims and survivors with the need for a free press.
“But I do recognise that action is needed in this area, and I’d be really happy to meet Mr McCann to discuss it.”
