The novelist Anne Enright must have thought that all her dreams had come true last Tuesday night when Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Booker prize judges, announced that she had won the prestigious literary award – and the £50,000 that comes with it.

Guests at London’s Guildhall were touched at how thrilled Enright was, being more used to seasoned nominees who took the prospect of the prize in their stride. But it wasn’t long before the gloss was taken off her sudden success.

Attention turned from her “exhilaratingly bleak” novel, The Gathering, to an equally bleak and somewhat mean-spirited piece she wrote earlier this month – when hardly anybody had heard of her – in the London Review of Books, about her ambivalence towards Kate and Gerry McCann. In the article, she talked of how disliking the McCanns had become “an international sport”.

“Distancing yourself from the McCanns is a recent but potent form of magic,” she wrote. “You might think the comments on the internet are filled with hatred, but hate pulls the object close; what I see instead is dislike – an uneasy, unsettled, relentlessly petty emotion.”

She went on, saying “we do not forgive them the stupid stuff, like wearing ribbons, or going jogging the next day, or holding hands on the way into mass”. She also criticised Gerry McCann for using language “more appropriate to a corporate executive than to a desperate father”.

Instantly, Enright found herself on all the front pages for all the wrong reasons. Newspapers frantically outbid one another for the rights to reprint her piece – all were flatly refused. “She’s horrified and doesn’t want to become known as ‘evil Anne’,” said a friend. But by then it was already too late. ENRIGHT had given literary and intellectual weight to the heartless abuse that has rained down on the McCanns on the internet ever since their daughter Madeleine disappeared from their Portuguese holiday apartment on May 3. Her piece would have struck a chord with all those who had felt a twinge of guilty agreement as they came across message boards criticising the couple for their composure, their supposed arrogance, and particularly Kate for her careful grooming and “endless supply of summer tops”.

In an interview with the Liver-pool Echo last week, Susan Healy, Kate McCann’s mother, told how her daughter had been berated in the street by strangers for being “out and about” when Madeleine went missing and how Kate felt persecuted for not looking like the ideal mother.

“If I weighed another two stone, had a bigger bosom and looked more maternal, people would be more sympathetic,” she had told her mother, who spoke loudly in her daughter’s defence.

“She feels she’s being attacked because she isn’t crying every time she is pictured,” said Healy. “She’s being targeted because she manages to put on a brave face. People say she has a stern look but inside she’s a wreck.”

The paradox for Kate McCann is that ever since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, we have been branded a crybaby nation, and told that the stiff upper lip, that key part of the British character, has been destroyed. But in an age of “misery memoirs” and reality TV, if you do show stoicism and coolness in the face of trauma, you are despised for it.

Kate, 39, has never cried in public, which may be for a number of admirable reasons: that she was told not to show emotion by advisers as her daughter’s kidnapper might delight in her distress; that part of being a doctor entails being able to face traumatic situations without showing distress; or because she knows just how much a picture of her crying would be worth and is bloody-minded enough not to let anybody get it.

But if she thinks people don’t like her because she does not appear sufficiently maternal, she’s way off beam. This is the age of the yummy mummy and in those stakes McCann, who looks as though she could be Sienna Miller’s older sister, is queen. It is her coolness of her manner that repels, not her skinniness, nor her careful choice of jewellery.

Most people would dismiss as ludicrous some of the rumours that have surfaced in the Portuguese press in recent weeks. The McCanns have variously been accused of engaging in wife-swapping, of sedating their children so they would sleep while they were out, of having “the scent of death” found on Kate by cadaver dogs. But still some spiteful undercurrent relishes seeing their perfect world punctured.

“I suppose it shows the ugly side of human nature. We are intrigued by disaster and horror stories,” said the novelist Rose Tremain.

“There is an element of schadenfreude about it: there seems to come a point with nearly every type of ‘celebrity’ where something triggers a turnaround.

“People seem to be presuming that the McCanns’ lack of emotion points to their guilt. It seems absurd as, at first, the public admired their bravery in the face of such a horrifying situation. They may not cry in public, but you can read the agony on their faces.”

The film-maker Roger Graef, who recently took a group of experts to Portugal to investigate the case, believes that the mystery at the heart of the case – how did Madeleine vanish into thin air? – has exacerbated our reaction to the McCanns.

“What we all have trouble with is the uncertainty and the reality that this has been done by somebody we’ll probably never find,” he said.

“To judge the McCanns when they’ve had to endure months of that uncertainty is gratuitously cruel. They’re being used as an emotional dartboard.”

In an effort to prove their innocence, the McCanns have compiled a huge file rebutting every allegation against them, from the idea that Gerry McCann is not Madeleine’s natural father to the DNA evidence that seemed to suggest her body had been transported in the back of their hire car.

Last week it emerged that they have gone so far as to have their two-year-old twins, Sean and Amelie, drug-tested to show that they have never been given sedatives.

And all the while the days tick by: it is now almost six months since Madeleine disappeared. They must, by now, have resigned themselves to her being dead.

Yet for all they have suffered – think how appalling being interrogated by the police must have been – some of us still can’t sympathise.

The psychologist Linda Papa-dopoulos thinks Kate’s looks may play some part in this. “Looks play a huge role in our expectations of people. We can see it in things like fairy tales, where the ugly outsider meets a nasty end. Beauty is taken to mean goodness. We tend to believe attractive people in the witness box more than unattractive people.

“But on the flip side of this, it is much easier to hate attractive people. There is a need for people to believe that an attractive person is not completely perfect.

“A woman I spoke to last week was appalled that Kate McCann was able to choose which earrings to wear in the morning. She took it to mean that if she has the strength to put on earrings she is not distressed enough.”

So is there a right way to grieve? Would people like Kate McCann more if she collapsed in tears?

“People are very judgmental when you suffer a bereavement. As a widow myself, I know that people have very strong views on how you should or shouldn’t express emotion,” said the broadcaster and writer Esther Rantzen.

“Kate looks anguished to me. They look like people in the midst of a nightmare.”

Some think it is a class issue. The broadcaster and columnist Kelvin MacKenzie says that when he wrote in defence of the McCanns shortly after Madeleine disappeared he got his biggest mailbag ever “and hundreds of e-mails full of bile aimed not just at the McCanns but also at me”.

“I was told that I wouldn’t have said anything of the sort had the McCanns been an unmarried, unemployed black couple and that the whole furore about Maddy came down to class bias,” he said.

“Initially I didn’t believe this to be the case, but now I have to agree. The massive media and public interest stems from the fact that they are a professional, upwardly mobile, white family and this sort of thing shouldn’t happen to people like them.

“Rhys Jones’s parents [whose 11-year-old son was shot dead on Merseyside in August] displayed a combination of tears and raw emotion with a basic intellect that came through in their interviews. This raw emotion has been lacking with the McCanns.”

And so the doubts linger. “Guilt and denial are the emotions we smell off Gerry and Kate McCann, and they madden us,” noted Enright. A friend of the family said Gerry McCann “snorted in disgust” when the piece was read to him last week.

Perhaps the McCanns’ central problem is that they don’t seem real to us. Simon Hamp-ton, a lecturer in psychosocial studies at the University of East Anglia, said the McCann tragedy encapsulates modern reactions to the media and morality.

“There is no sympathy because it is like a movie,” he said. “We are examining their clothes, their expressions, their body language much more closely than we would if we knew them.

“We rarely look at the faces of our families and friends from a distance of four inches, but that is how close television brings us to the McCanns’ faces. The narrative needs a villain and in the absence of any other, Kate McCann is cast as the murderer. It sort of has to be a woman because that is a better story.”

For those of us on the outside, it can appear to be just a story. But for the McCanns the pain is very real and, in all probability, never ending.

Maybe we should all just stop obsessing about them. A letter in response to Enright’s piece in the London Review of Books most neatly summed up our ambivalent relationship with the couple: “I disliked Anne Enright almost as much as the McCanns after reading her article, almost as much as I dislike myself for disliking the McCanns, for disliking Anne Enright, you for publishing Anne Enright’s article, and me for reading it (I didn’t have to do that). Where will it all end?”

Additional reporting: Jessica Jonzen and Lois Rogers

McCanns’ plea over 25 witnesses

THE PARENTS of Madeleine McCann have given Portuguese prosecutors a list of 25 witnesses they believe should be interviewed to try to clear their names and refocus police attention on the search for their daughter, writes John Follain.

The witnesses, some never questioned by police before, include relatives, friends and staff of the Ocean club in Praia da Luz, where Madeleine went missing on May 3.

The request will create controversy in Portugal, where it is almost unheard of for suspects to try to influence an investigation. There was criticism last week after it emerged that prime minister Gordon Brown had discussed the case with his Portuguese counterpart at the European summit in Lisbon.

The McCanns’ legal team hope that a thorough reconstruction of the night Madeleine disappeared will help rule out her parents as suspects.

A source close to the family said: “Kate and Gerry have singled out these witnesses because they were present . . . they can explain exactly what happened that night, and because they can show what a normal, loving relationship the parents had with their daughter.”

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