As the Madeleine McCann story endured, I spoke to report­ers who said: “If she was black, or poor, or…” and gave that slightly embar­rassed look that journ­al­ists give one another on stor­ies like this, hop­ing for an acknowledgement.

There’s not much to inform, edu­cate or enter­tain about child abduc­tion. And this isn’t just a case study in how to man­age the media in extremis.

So how do we ration­al­ise the atten­tion? Is there some­thing in the story that some­how we’re miss­ing? Because we are miss­ing some­thing, and that some­thing is opportunity.

The story of Madeleine McCann is an oppor­tun­ity, not for journ­al­ists, but for the pub­lic – or at least a large sec­tion of them: to express their solid­ar­ity with the McCanns and with one another; to hope, how­ever vainly, with Madeleine’s par­ents for a mir­acle; and to affirm the wrong­ness and evil of harm­ing children.

No one doubts the import­ance of col­lect­ive acknow­ledge­ment of loss in war on Remem­brance Day. The BBC doesn’t apo­lo­gise for its broad­cast­ing of state occasions.

And yet – here we are, priests of a self-invented church, unbe­liev­ing cel­eb­rants of a ritual that is some­how filling the aisles with believ­ers, invit­ing us too to believe.

Then the rite is over. The church emp­ties. We have ourselves to talk to once again.