New Latest Rage: The Anti-Celebs

Kate and Gerry McCann; where would we be without them? Oh, how they can be reviled – aren’t we all so much better than parents who leave their children alone to be abducted.... or worse? Much easier to hate them, rather than look up to the people they’ve pushed off the front pages. Instead of having to be envious of the great and good, whose lifestyles, looks, houses, cars and clothes can barely being imagined, they are there to be torn apart, mannerisms mocked, appearance criticised, their ambition and their relatives derided. No longer any need to aspire to riches the Beckhams have got.... we're better off than even the most famous anti-celebs without even trying. Oh what joy!

You can’t have missed it. As well as in the comments in online newspapers, it’s all over the internet in forums like the Mirror's here and the many blogs that specialise in bringing you the latest hot info about their guilt.

If you haven’t been keeping up, it goes like this.... The ‘Tapas 9’ a group of coke-snorting swingers (or possibly even friends) have a Pact of Silence over Madeleine’s disappearance after she was left alone while they were drinking 14 bottles of wine in a restaurant. The whole thing would have been hushed up in the UK press due to a Government-led conspiracy thanks to Gerry’s involvement in a secret nuclear committee, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati and holding damning evidence about Gordon Brown’s extra-curricular activities on a rocking-horse. Meanwhile, investigations by the Portuguese Police (the PJ) are being thwarted by leaks of their incompetence being fed to the tabloids by their pink-shirted (say no more!) spokesman Clarence but have a killer piece of standalone evidence they have not yet revealed. Actually, it’s far more complicated than that..... It’s all an EU backed hoax to make us wear microchips. The Find Madeleine Fund (all pre-planned), is being used to pay the McCanns’ mortgage when Kate could easily sell her Rolex on Ebay or stop having her hair done and buying new tops. And it’s a fit-up by the Portuguese Government to save their tourist trade.

Not surprisingly, then, people are in a lather over it all. "I’m ashamed to be British!", says one.
"That’s nothing. I’m even more ashamed!", says another.
"You’re nowhere near ashamed enough... I’m ashamed to be on the same planet as Britain!", foams the third.
"Yes but I’ve been a nurse for 30 years and, believe me, I know what went on!"
"Ha! I’m a social worker and I’ve seen all this before. It stinks."
"I’m a trained psychologist and they’re all paedophiles, I tell you!".
"I’m a mother of 5 and I would never have left my kids like that!"

So it goes. Their words are studied for unintentional slips, their dress sense is analysed, they are labeled narcissists, sociopaths, working class oiks thrust into an incongruent profession. Their boxy house just goes to show how tasteless they are and their cries of innocence are proof that they are guilty. Every crackpot theory builds on the last until the teetering pile of evidence from the armchair sleuths is overwhelming for the nutcases and curtain twitchers who can’t get enough of it. Anyone who diverges from this view is dismissed as a supporter of child neglect. Any criticism of the PJ is met with chants of "xenophobia!" and "racism!".

Well, of course, at the end of all this, they may of course be guilty of a horrible crime and the most outrageous attempted coverup of all time. We just can’t know.

Meanwhile, move over Heather Mills. No wonder she’s complaining all over the daytime TV and radio. She’s last-year’s anti-celeb. Kate and Gerry are the new biggies and, man, don’t they shift papers. I must google who it was that said you can 'never lose money underestimating the good taste of the British people'. He couldn’t have known how right he was going to be proved.