We all cared a lot in the days after she was found, when the blame for the disappearance of Shannon Matthews moved ever closer to her own family’s front door.

It was a rather different story during most of the 24 days when she was missing.

In February, when Shannon was snatched on her way home from school, the search for Madeleine McCann had been under way for more than nine months.

If a butterfly fluttered its wings in the Portuguese holiday complex from which Madeleine was taken, the incident was still being reported with breathless urgency.

She was a photogenic little girl, approaching her fourth birthday, who vanished on holiday with her articulate, middle-class parents.

Shannon, also quite cute on camera, was from a sink estate in a troubled northern mill town that had seen far happier days. There was no eloquent spokesman to appear on her behalf.

West Yorkshire Police threw unprecedented resources into finding the missing child. The residents of Dewsbury Moor did their best to assist the search.

Yet the nation’s concern appeared short-lived. The story ran for a couple of days, then interest dwindled. With the exception of the regional media and a few tabloids, attention moved elsewhere.

We wanted a Miss Marple mystery. We got Shameless without the humour. After a fortnight, the hunt for Shannon was already deemed less newsworthy than the most tenuous development in Praia da Luz.

Madeleine joined a list of missing girls whose fate gripped the country and whose names resound sadly to this day. It includes Sarah Payne, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman.

Not so Shannon. It was not her fault, but the nine-year-old came from the wrong sort of family. She also broke the rules of such narratives by being found alive.

And here the tale did become interesting. If what was lacking before then was the sympathy born of a sense of identification with the main characters, now came a gleeful injection of condemnation.

Those same players who proved incapable of tugging sufficient heartstrings turned out to be the very ones responsible for Shannon’s disappearance.

As grief-stricken parents, they had been a letdown. Recast as monstrous villains, they fitted the bill perfectly.

There is no small irony in the police’s belief that it was probably saturation coverage of the McCann story that first inspired Karen Matthews to plan her own daughter’s abduction.

The Find Madeleine Fund raised more than £1 million in public donations. Reward money offered for her safe return totalled £2.5 million.

If Shannon’s mother thought her daughter might be worth a similar amount, she was mistaken.

But a newspaper did eventually offer a £50,000 reward. For someone who placed such a small price on her daughter’s welfare and security, that must have seemed like a prince’s ransom.

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