Watch the interview here

The parents of Madeleine McCann spoke last night of their guilt at not being at home when their daughter, now aged 4, disappeared from their Portuguese holiday complex on the Algarve.

In their first television interviews since Madeleine vanished as her parents dined at a tapas bar only 50 metres away, Gerry and Kate McCann faced their latest ordeal with calm, control and little outward sign of simmering emotion on their faces.

Criminal profilers had advised them to display no overt emotion in case an abductor “got off” on the sight of parents in obvious distress.

Shortly after the interviews were conducted it emerged that a friend of Kate and Gerry McCann may have seen the child being carried away on the night she vanished.

Police, who released a description of the suspect last night, are believed to have known about the sighting for almost three weeks but only released their most striking description so far after Madeleine’s parents threatened legal action.

Mr McCann, a 38-year old cardiologist in a white open-necked T-shirt, appeared the more composed of the two during the interviews, refusing to abandon the search for the couple’s daughter and maintaining an optimistic front that she would be found.

His wife, in a pink dress with white spots, cradled a fluffy cat, Madeleine’s favourite comfort toy, in her lap throughout the interviews. She spoke evenly and without hesitation, but somewhere behind her steady expression, her eyes betrayed a terrible hurt.

They confronted their interviewers as they raised the subject, which has coloured public debate on the case, as to why they left their children alone in the first place, dining at a nearby tapas bar.

“I think it’s fair to say that the guilt that we feel, having not been there at that moment, irrespective of whether we had been in the other bedroom or not, will never leave us,” Mr McCann said.

“Certainly the first few days the guilt was very difficult,” his wife added. “Looking at it from where we are now,” she said, “I don’t feel we were irresponsible. I feel we are very responsible parents, you can’t help but have emotions like that.”

Mr McCann said: “For us, it wasn’t very much different to having dinner in your garden, in the proximity of the location. We’re in a very safe resort. If you think about the millions and millions of British families who go to the Mediterranean every year, the chances of this happening are in the order of a hundred million to one.”

Mr McCann added: “Any criticism of us at this time is hard to take. But so many people have done the same thing in such a safe resort. Had we been in the bedroom next door we would still have felt guilty.” Mrs McCann seemed momentarily to falter, her voice falling to a whisper when she told how panic had set in the moment they discovered Madeleine was missing. But she quickly recovered: “I think at worst we were naive. I mean we’re very responsible parents. We love our children very much.”

The couple refused to criticise the Portuguese police, although Mr McCann admitted that in the early days “the information void was the hardest thing to deal with”.

Both declined to offer any detail on the circumstances of the disappearance, or whether they had noticed anything suspicious beforehand. “We didn’t,” Mrs McCann said flatly. Mr McCann almost managed a laugh when he chimed in: “If we did we wouldn’t tell you, because it may be important information, but we didn’t.”

In a holiday apartment close the one they had at the time of the disappearance, the couple talked of their other children, twins Sean and Amelie.

Mr McCann said: “Many people have said to us that this is a parent’s worst nightmare and it is, truly is, and it’s as bad as you can possibly imagine but, you know, if all three of the children had been taken it could have been even worse, and we’ve got to be strong for them.”

Both parents insisted that they had no plans to return home without Madeleine.

“We have grieved. We need to grieve. But we have to be controlled,” he said, adding his belief that, if the worst had happened to Madeleine, they would have known by now.

The Sky News interviewer put it to them: “That was a period after a week or so where you looked as if you were almost broken, and who could not understand that? And then there seemed to be a sort of strength come from somewhere.”

Mrs McCann looked at her husband and sighed. “I think that’s definitely true, isn’t it?”

Mr McCann drew the simile of a student having an overdraft, but then getting gradually back into the black. The couple’s emotional bank account was briefly frozen for the cameras yesterday; only they know how much is left in it.

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