SIR – The announcement that the metropolitan police are reviewing the investigation of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance – and that £3.5 million has been set aside – is good news, but has prompted conflicting opinions.

Those who express reservations about this have to a large degree been castigated in the national press, as if they are in a sense against the continued search, aren’t interested in her safe return or in finding out what happened to her. This is a misrepresentation, I feel.

Without doubt, everyone wants, or should want, to see her return to her loving family and for her to be safe, or for her family to know what happened to her, for their own sanity.

They sympathise with the family’s pain. They support Madeleine.

But that isn’t totally the same thing as unqualified support for her parents.

Why? Because, although it has been often repeated in the national press in recent days by some renowned commentators, ‘We have all done something similar when it comes to leaving our children unattended’, the simple fact is we haven’t.

This is the fact that won’t go away. And, when it is raised, those who do so are in some circles branded heartless. They aren’t.

They are just being honest.

If this case is to be reviewed, which it should be, then surely the case of Ben Needham [the then 21- month-old boy who went missing on the Greek island of Kos on July 24, 1991] needs to be reviewed as well. His mother doesn’t have the same publicity machine available to her, but her pain is surely the same.

RICHARD FARRELL-ADAMS
Worcester