Madeleine McCann disappeared from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in May 2007

I have never been allowed to say this before.

I’ve been given all sorts of reasons — people who are normally brutally honest with me fobbing me off, arguing I am not bringing anything new to the debate

It’s been a white-out, like the silence of snow.

But seeing the faces of Gerry and Kate McCann yet again this week, promoting the Child Rescue Alert Campaign to track down missing kids, I think it's finally time to speak out.

Kate McCann says she lives in a never-ending limbo.

But I believe the truth is that Madeleine McCann is never coming home.

She is long gone. It is time to stop looking and stop imagining there is some happy ending to this sorry tale. Enough.

There is no amount of money the will right the wrongs of the past, no libel action that will cancel out the damage the McCanns inflicted on themselves.

Kate and Gerry McCann didn't deserve £11million of our cash to look for Maddie or try to resolve their consciences or salvage reputations. Others have greater need.

If you really must blame someone, then Kate and Gerry are right there in front of you. And yet, protected by some invisible force-shield I don’t understand.

Show me a family from a council estate who left their child alone to go out eating and drinking who have been lauded with such support and the protection of the state.

Last year, a father of a two year old was arrested and prosecuted after leaving his daughter in a car for two minutes whilst he ran in to a chemist to buy Calpol.

Even our British broadcaster was in on the act. A Crimewatch Special in 2013 featuring new photo-fits of Maddie’s abductor failed to acknowledge that the McCanns had been sitting on these pictures for nearly five years.

Pictures compiled by their own investigation team whose report they later hid from view when it pointed the finger of blame in a direction Gerry didn't enjoy.

They left their child in an unlocked ground-floor apartment next to two busy roads. Too self-assured to hire a babysitter and too self-centred to care.

Kate and Gerry McCann (pictured above) didn't deserve £11million of our cash to look for Maddie or try to resolve their consciences or salvage reputations. Others have greater need, writes Katie Hopkins

The McCanns put their own children in harm’s way. Those kids were in danger. Because of their parents. And as a mum I can’t look at Gerry McCann — a man his wife says can ‘switch off’ from grief — without the hairs on my arms standing on end.

Kate was no better. There were 48 police questions Kate McCann refused to answer after Maddie was gone. Surely if you wanted to find your child you would give anything, tell police everything you knew, offer anything you had?

We are not the police. We cannot pretend to know what really went on.

What happened that night will remain a mystery and someone will take the truth to their grave

But we can understand as parents how we would feel if it happened to us.

Any mother who has lost her child even for a heartbeat understands how horrifying it is.

Kate and Gerry McCann didn't deserve £11million of our cash to look for Maddie or try to resolve their consciences or salvage reputations

The prickle under the armpit, the sudden silence in a noisy shopping centre, the blind panic. Running through treacle while time stands still.

Waiting for a little face to show itself, telling her off when she reappears because you love her so much you can’t bear for her to be lost even for a second. And in that second you imagined the very worst.

When your first baby is born you join a special group of people – a group whose lives have been transformed.

That first morning in hospital you understand the enormity of your new responsibility to keep another little part of you alive. You have accepted The Fear.

Suddenly the life you knew before is transformed, filled with all the bad things that could happen to your baby. Jabs which go wrong. Death in a cot for no reason. Spots on the chest which don’t go away under glass.

You live every second with The Fear that your baby will be taken from you, or die before you and upset the natural order of life turning everything you trusted into a lie.

I still live in dread of my children’s lives being shortened, that someone might take them from me, strip away the thing I would happily hand over my own life to sustain.

I tell them to shout fire if someone grabs them. And I will never need them to get in a strangers car, no matter what they say.

Others give their children phones, hoping these will keep them safe, imagining them to be protection from predators roaming our streets looking for baby prey.

Mine sleep with the soft toy bunnies they have had since the day they were born. Not so cuddly now, mostly rags at best.

Katie Hopkins says her children sleep with the soft toy bunnies they have had since the day they were born

But rags which I will keep if I live to watch my children grow old. They are keepsakes of another time, when my kids were chubby and twitchy in their cots, when they needed me more fundamentally.

For warmth and food, cuddles for tears and encouragement to be brave.

And when they leave me for families of their own, for every day I wished I didn’t have to do the school run, there will be a thousand more when I am grateful that I did, knowing I kept them safe.

But now the faces I associate with neglect are being used to promote the Child Rescue Alert campaign.

And I am sorry, but I am not buying it.

Because nothing in this story reads well to the mum in me. Or the dad if that's you.

Leaving your babies alone, too far away to see. Knowing your daughter is gone and still able to play tennis. Taking her little bed-time toy, Cuddle Cat, with the last smell of their daughter, and putting it in the wash just five days after she vanished into the night.

I speak to people who have lost parents and cannot bear to wipe messages from their answer machine because it’s something to hold on to. They keep them just to feel close.

Some even call their mothers’ phone, just to hear it ring and imagine she might there to say ‘sleep tight’ one last time.

I would put Cuddle Cat under my pillow every night to be close to the baby I lost. Not wash its memories away.

The night before she became a memory, Maddie asked her mother, ‘Why did you not come when Sean and I cried last night?

I’d ask her the same question now. How did you leave the daughter you longed to have?