Freud ‘drank in resort bar with ex-Maddie suspect’
Ex-MP’s local was dubbed the Plough and Paedophile
SIR Clement Freud drank at the same pub as a former suspect in the Madeleine McCann investigation, it was claimed yesterday.
The paedophile ex-MP was said to have been on ‘nodding terms’ with Robert Murat and the two men both visited an expat British pub near the town where Madeleine vanished.
Sir Clement, who was revealed as a serial child abuser last week, was also a regular at another Algarve pub, which locals nicknamed the ‘Plough and Paedophile’.
The former BBC star had a villa in Praia da Luz and befriended Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry after the three-yearold went missing in the Portuguese resort in 2007. Locals said they had been sur-
‘It made you wonder what Freud was up to?’
prised to learn he had invited the couple to his £1million villa, Casa da Colina, and cooked for them.
Pub landlord Robert Hurst, who runs the Pig’s Head in nearby Burgau, said Sir Clement had drunk at the pub regularly. Mr Murat was also a customer there, and the two men were on ‘nodding terms’.
British expat Mr Murat lived near the McCann family’s rented holiday apartment and was named as an ‘arguido’, or suspect, in the botched Portuguese police investigation into Madeleine’s disappearance, but was later cleared of any involvement.
Mr Hurst questioned why Sir Clement, then 83, had befriended Mr and Mrs McCann after their daughter vanished.
He told The Sun on Sunday newspaper: ‘I find that really odd. I can’t imagine why he would suddenly want to invite them to his house.
‘At the time Madeleine went, all hell was going on. Police everywhere, people just stunned and he’s straight in there having them over to dinner. When it came out that he was a paedophile, it made you wonder what he was up to?’
In her book about her daughter’s disappearance, former GP Mrs McCann described how Sir Clement wrote to her and her husband to invite them to his villa, which is no longer owned by the Freud family.
She said the former Liberal MP offered them strawberry vodka and cooked them chicken and mushroom risotto, and described him as ‘incredibly warm, funny and instantly likeable’.
Mrs McCann also described a nightmare in which she dreamed Madeleine was buried on a hillside on the outskirts of Praia da Luz, close to Sir Clement’s villa.
The villa is also near a spot where a British tourist said he saw a man carrying a child, hours after Madeleine vanished.
The McCanns were said to be appalled about the revelations that Sir Clement had abused girls as young as ten. The married fatherof-five died in 2009, aged 84.
He was said to have visited a Praia da Luz pub near the McCanns’ holiday apartment called the Plough and Harrow, although locals dubbed it the Plough and Paedophile.
The nickname was coined after a Briton working there went on the run after police tried to speak to him about allegations of child sex abuse images and grooming. Christian Ridout, also known as DJ Shifty, disappeared in 2005.
One of Sir Clement’s victims, Vicky Haynes, now 64, said she went to police after she saw Mrs McCann’s book and realised he had befriended Madeleine’s parents.
She said she was convinced he was part of a paedophile ring operating in the Algarve. Police have refused to comment on whether Sir Clement was ever part of their investigation. His son Matthew said his father was in Britain at the time Madeleine vanished.
Sir Clement, the grandson of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and brother of artist Lucian, was a regular on the popular BBC Radio 4 panel show Just A Minute.
But last week, three women came forward to say he had groomed and sexually abused them, with one, Sylvia Woosley, detailing how she was only ten when she was first targeted. Another of the women, who wants to remain anonymous, said he raped her in 1978, when he was still an MP.