Thank you.

No, I think we've covered all our points, thank you.

Sure.

Sure.

Thank you, sir. I would like to emphasise that I strongly believe in freedom of speech, but where you have people who are repeatedly carrying out inaccuracies and have been shown to do so, then they should be held to account. That is the issue. I don't have a ...

Sure.

Yes. I did have a quick look at the National Union of Journalist's submission and there are standards, but there are no penalties for not sticking to them, and whatever your profession is, particularly in this country, then there is fairly strong regulation which we have to abide to ...

Yes, it wouldn't be explicit to judicial secrecy in Portugal, and by judicial I meant the whole process which in Portugal is obviously overseen by a judge. So you have information. We were told we were under judicial secrecy not to give details of events. What became very apparent ...

Yes.

Mm-hm.

Yeah. I think it's something obviously we probably hadn't thought too much about before we found ourselves in the situation that we are. You take your anonymity for granted. What I find disturbing, clearly, when you're being followed, you're being put in danger by either reporters ...

Correct.

No.

I think it is an example of the system working in part, however we would much rather we weren't awarded any damages and the stories had not been published, and I think it's very important to emphasise that we have experienced long-lasting damage as a result of the ...

I think we can speak with experience about how powerful the media are, and how much damage they can do. We've already said how many good things that they have done as well, so there is power, there is no doubt about it. But what we see on a ...

I think I would agree with it, and it's probably for others to decide whether the PCC could have changed it. I think that's a moot point.

I think the ultimate thing was we discussed a course of action and our advice, which was given in no uncertain terms, this is legal advice, was that the PCC were not fit to deal with the accusations, the nature of them, the number of them and the severity.

It's probably fair to put in there that I had a number of conversations with Sir Christopher, primarily because we became friendly with his wife, Lady Catherine, through her work with PACT, so on that first occasion I met Sir Christopher and he broadly asked, "How are the media ...

Yes.

Yes.

I think we had also indicated earlier in the summer of 2007 that although we tacitly agreed to having photographs of us taken in Praia da Luz, largely because we felt that we couldn't stop it, particularly with international media being there, that as the situation dragged on over ...

Yes.

If I did, it was lost in the time when we were obviously dealing with lots of things, and I would say probably similar to Mrs Gascoigne who gave evidence earlier this morning, that I was only vaguely aware of the PCC at that time.

Yes.

We had written to the Home Secretary saying that we'd be launching the book, and asking her to update us on where they had got, and we got one letter which really didn't say very much, and then we did the open letter to the Prime Minister, which ...

Yes, I think --

It was.

I think it's probably worth just elaborating a little bit because it's quite a complex decision-making process in terms of agreeing to serialise the book.

News International actually bid for the rights to the book, along with Harper Collins, and one of their pitches was the fact that ...

Yes.

Sure.

It's probably one of the most recent examples of what I would say is the contempt for Madeleine and her safety. There was no check. This sighting had been reported to the police, I think we were actually on holiday. They emailed us a photograph and we quickly indicated ...

The impact that these things have in what should be a little bit of respite, but there have been several occasions where we've gone behind the scenes at the eleventh hour.

Friday nights. Another example there which I don't think is in our evidence, but again it transpired on a Friday evening, is journalists had gone to speak to my mum, I think they said even -- you know, Clarence said it was okay and my mum let them in and ...

For one of the stories that was not published and isn't libellous, not defamatory, but we were alerted to it and it was done by a freelance journalist who has written many inaccurate stories, and had submitted it, I think it was to the People, if I'm right ...

I mean, I think 97's probably important.

Mm.

I think the first thing to say is that Clarence would speak to Ian Edmondson, who was deputy editor and was probably responsible for most of the stories about Madeleine at that time. So Clarence spoke to Ian on a regular basis and one or two of the News of ...

Yes.

Because clearly it was an illegal copy.

I would like further investigation as to where it came from.

And ordered that any copies be destroyed.

I think it's clear that the police had copied the journal and had it translated, and of course at the time we didn't understand why the journal could have been relevant because Kate only started keeping it a couple of weeks after Madeleine was taken, so we didn ...

And of course we were trying to make the distinction between interacting with the media for what we thought was something helpful for the search, and simply doing an interview, which we knew would focus on the human interest aspects and not necessarily the search for Madeleine.

I think it would be fair to say that Mr Myler was irate when he learned of the publication which happened and was berating us for not doing an interview with the News of the World and told us how supportive the newspaper had been, the news and rewards, and ...

I think the first thing to say, it was very specific and we had -- clearly we've talked about our prime objective, which is finding Madeleine, and what we've hoped is that some good would come out of what happened to us. And one of the things, through our ...

I'm happy to carry on.

Yes. I think it's very important, given the scale of the task that faced us, and we were given -- we made our decisions after being fully informed of the pathway, and I think that's very important. It was a last resort. And at the time, given our circumstances ...

We did settle. They paid damages and there was an apology published in the Evening Standard. The Daily Mail did not publish an apology.

Sure. There were many similar articles like that, particularly in the Evening Standard at that time.

There had been a large number of articles, similar tone to the ones that we had complained of previously, so it was more again about DNA, blood, suspects, Madeleine being killed, et cetera, rather than anything else. Paragraph 40 --