Just when we might have hoped that the gossip surrounding the Madeleine McCann case could sink no lower, the world media managed it, by effectively conspiring to accuse a Moroccan olive farmer’s family of kidnapping her.

Why? Well, a tourist had taken a grainy snap of a fair-haired girl in the Moroccan countryside, with some North African Muslims. What more evidence do you need? Never mind the useless police, splash that picture across the globe at once with inquisitory headlines such as “Is this Maddie?”!

When we quickly learnt the answer – “No, of course not, it’s the farmer’s daughter” – many people echoed the McCanns’ spokesman who said it was “very disappointing, a terrible blow” that the people in the picture turned out to be an innocent family. Some, however, might already have suspected that the impoverished father shown pushing a wheelbarrow piled with suitcases along a dusty road, while his gaudily clad wife ambles behind with child on back in the local style, was an unlikely head of an international child-smuggling ring.

This farcical episode has highlighted the widening gap between the plodding police case in Portugal, bogged down in rows about scientific evidence and witness statements, and the ever-expanding global publicity circus. The line between investigation and emotive entertainment has disappeared. There must be plenty more little blonde girls in far-flung corners of the world to feed this voyeuristic obsession – but to whose benefit?

The only unusual thing about the Moroccan family (from a Berber region where fair-headed children are normal) turned out to be that, since they have no access to television or newspapers, they had never heard of Madeleine McCann. Now that is shocking news.

As the Burmese protests grew last Friday, the cry “Release San Suu Kyi!” went up at, of all places, Romford dogs. We were shouting for a greyhound owned by friends of mine who named her in honour of Burma’s detained opposition leader. When “released” from the traps, she got held back but finally pushed past her opponents to win. Now, I am not one to draw lessons for life from mere dog racing. But as the beleaguered Burmese monks and their peaceful supporters faced the junta’s armed forces, the thought occurred that, to triumph in adverse circumstances, you do have to fight back, and hard.

Gordon Brown is revealed to have “rehashed” phrases in his big conference speech from ones used by US presidential candidates. Yet in the Brown-nosing after his grim address, few seemed to notice another phrase apparently borrowed from a dubious source. The Prime Minister’s use of the slogan “British jobs for British workers” did, however, ring a few bells among my old friends on the Left. As one e-mailed me straightaway: “I’m sure I have a copy of a paper with that headline – National Front News, circa 1979”.

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