The Mail on Sunday has a picture of a “Portuguese drifter” who is the “spitting image” of the “Madeleine suspect.” The only response to this is “I spit on your image recognition capacities…” Apart from longish dark hair, there are no points of resemblance between the absurd “sketch” and the photograph of a newspaper-delivery man who lives 80 miles away.

And let’s get back to the “witness” who claims this is the same man.

Well, blow me down with a copy of the Mail folded in a fan shape, who is it but “Witness Gail Cooper”

Witness Gail Cooper, who saw a man lurking near children in Praia da Luz just days before Madeleine vanished, said Mr Agostinho was “the spitting image” of the man she saw.

I must mention that Gail Coper’s holiday was OVER before the McCanns stepped off the plane. She can only be a “witness” to there having been a person in that area that she – with her strangely unparallelled knowledge of the secret hearts of men – regarded as looking disreputable. (He walked in the rain and looked a bit Moroccan – prima facie evidence of guilt to Middle England.)

Gail Cooper’s shady-looking Moroccan doesn’t quite constitute a

latest e-fit of a possible kidnapper.

A “possible kidnapper”,? This must be only in the sense that anyone spotted in Praia da Luz who wasn’t an English holiday-maker somehow fits this role? (Set aside such niceties as how you define kidnapping. Doesn’t that mean capturing someone for ransom?) There is still no evidence of a kidnap.

No matter how many self-serving detectives earn their fees by keeping these unproven theories on the front pages of the tabloids, there is NO EVIDENCE that Madeleine was kidnapped or abducted. There appears to be no convincing evidence of what happened.

Hence, I favour an alien abduction theory. If the press or the McCann machine will pay me, I will willingly go into space and search for the alien abductors. The truth is surely out there.

The Mail on Sunday article suggests that the correct British holiday-maker response to seeing any unkempt Portuguese person speaking is to panic.

Moments later a woman raced out of a nearby villa, shouting and calling to the children, and then scooped them up and took them away from the man.

Harsh as this may sound, Mail readers – if you are frightened of anyone who’s not English, take your vacations in the West Country or the Lake District. Then, you can run to the local police if you accidentally spot anyone who looks vaguely North African….

Just to see how far the hysteria has spread:

Meanwhile a potential sighting of Madeleine in Chile with a man who looked like the Mrs Cooper sketch was ruled out by police.
Detectives were called to the Gabriel Mistral museum in Vicuna after a man spotted a girl who resembled Madeleine, but the girl was revealed to be American Haylee Dreyer, six, who was on holiday in Vicuna with her Chilean grandparents.

Urgent advice to anyone who looks a bit Iberian or Moroccan

Never go to a tourist spot with any young blonde female relatives.