THE father of Madeleine McCann, the missing four-year-old, has said the ceaseless media campaign to find his daughter would be scaled down.

Gerry McCann added that, while there would be no let-up in the family’s efforts to find Madeleine, he and his wife Kate had to consider trying to return to work and family life in Britain.

The move might prove particularly helpful for the couple’s two other children, added McCann, who had flown to Edinburgh for the day to speak at the television festival.

“I do not feel that it is necessary to have her [Madeleine’s] image on the news constantly,” said McCann. “We cannot sustain that level of interest and Kate and I want to withdraw from the campaign.”

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Madeleine disappeared from her room in the resort of Praia da Luz in Portugal on May 3 as her parents were dining nearby.

Despite an international search and a high-profile publicity campaign orchestrated by her parents, there has been no sign of her since.

McCann continued: “There is no final decision about when to come home . . . Part of it may be that staying in Portugal might have become counterproductive. But the very real difficulty is the emotion of leaving Portugal as a family of four when we went there as a family of five.”

McCann, a consultant cardiologist at Glenfield hospital, Leicester, also said he had started to think about working again.

At the moment he is on unpaid leave to search for his daughter. “You cannot be an emotional wreck 24 hours a day . . . I have spent a lot of time training to gain my specialist skills,” he said.

In his address McCann compared Madeleine’s disappearance to last week’s murder of Rhys Jones, 11, who was shot in Liverpool by a youth on a BMX bike. Photographs of both children show them wearing the shirts of Everton, their favourite football team.

“Kate and I were incredibly shocked to hear of the news [of Rhys Jones]. It is a terrible waste of a young life. They, of course, have our sympathy,” he said.

He added that he hoped Rhys’s parents were given time to grieve. But he revealed some of his own torment in a direct comparison between the McCann and the Jones families.

“Both sets of parents are in the middle of terrible traumas. They, however, will have closure. We don’t,” he said.

McCann said the couple had been unprepared for the reaction to Madeleine’s disappearance. He compared the coverage to a “tidal wave”.

The couple have been hurt by speculation in the Portuguese press that they or friends might have been involved in the disappearance.

“In the early days the campaign to find Madeleine and the news agenda were as one,” he said. “Now they are very different.”

McCann said the Portuguese media often ran with a rumour that was then picked up by the British press. The next day the Portuguese would present the rumour as validated because it had appeared in the UK.

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