The Prime Minister has given his backing to a permanent memorial to murdered schoolteacher Ann McGuire. He was going to import a Chinese one that would fall apart within days, but eventually decided to ignore Beijing’s fury at not being allowed to supply it. “These are the kind of tough decisions that tough leaders have to make in tough times,” he said self-effacingly.

No doubt many readers will find that opening paragraph tasteless, in which case I’d have to say that such is entirely apt. Next time the rabbits creep in after dark and eat all my lettuces, I’m going to erect a permanent memorial to the lettuces. I’m going to call it A Fence. While it won’t bring my lettuces back, it will demonstrate that I have the measure of the bunnies, and am on the case. To be frank, I don’t think much of Mr Cameron’s fence.

Gestures are the only things politicians do well. But by definition, gestures are a distraction, and always too late. Above all, they remove the need to face uncomfortable facts, and provide the opportunity for discreet sub-carpet kicking as necessary.

The most unpleasant fact about the McGuire murder is its encapsulation of Britain’s civilisation crumbling before our eyes, a culture jammed to the rafters with armed barbarians, power-mad barrow-boys, and aristocratic planks. Much as I feel an almost obsessive need to keep on pulling everyone’s eyelids upwards about this post-imperial descent, I long ago reached the conclusion that it’s a one-way street: and if that be true, then perhaps we need a Memorials Tsar: a Minister whose sole job is to erect memorials, so that they might act for future historians as milestones marking our progress towards Bedlam – a record of all the millstones placed upon the citzenry, in fact.

For example, I think we need a large statue of Nigel Farage to go up in Newark, depicting the UKip leader as Flashman atop a billy-goat, waving a plastic sword around as he wobbles away from the sound of gunfire. Cannons to the Left of ‘im, cannons to the Right of ‘im, but mainly cannons disappearing be’ind ‘im. The plaque should be suitably ironic, bearing the words “He who scares sins”. Every Easter, we could pelt it with eggs. Britain is nothing without tradition, and I fancy this one would catch on quickly.

Mr Farage is the latest in a long line of great white hopes. They turn without fail into great white elephants who were not so secretly great white sharks all the time. I would thus expect any Memorials Tsar worth his salt to give serious thought to a Hall of Blame, inside which the featured inmates would include Tony Blair, William Hague, David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and Boris Johnson.

In the City, our Tsar might create a new roundabout, in the middle of which could be a memorial entitled The Ones that Got Away. Bob Diamond, Fred Goodwin, James Murdoch, Jeremy Hunt, Leon Brittan, Michael Fallon, Ed Balls and Jack Straw would all be given starring roles, and permanently circling this motley crew would be the last ten crooked Chief Constables aboard a paddy-wagon, all waving white sticks while yelling “Nothing to see, move on please now, single file, single file”. Chasing behind the wagon we could have a cardboard replica of ikkle wikkle Mark Williams-Thomas shouting “Paedophile! Paedophile!”

From the death of a McGuire to the abduction of a McCann. Whether we like it or not, it is a continuum.

One of the things truly puzzling me this afternoon is how Kate McCann’s apparently frequent need to visit Portugal looking for Maddie is “a private thing”, yet we all seem to know about it. One clue I’m taking very seriously in relation to that mystery is the way in which Kate told the Mail she wants to “walk the streets and look for answers”, the Express that she “just wants to know the truth, even if it’s worst-case scenario”. The day before she told the BBC about wanting to know, and later today she fitted in a chat with the Daily Star to say the truth was important. Tonight she’s on New Zealand telly giving out the same thing.

Mrs McCann is very public about how she likes being private, and to be fair she’s like any mother would be in such circumstances: just wanting closure. But the Missing Maddie Industry is to me one of the most repugnant phenomena in modern history. The only thing I can take to one side and treasure about the case is that it happened too early for Mark Williams-Thomas to enjoy a seven-year wet dream about it. Apart from that, it makes my skin creep on just about every dimension.

It has everything those of us interested in the empirical (minus the unethically sensational and manipulative) dislike about contemporary media coverage of a tragedy. There is the tabloid need to suggest intimacy with the family by always calling the child Maddie, the invention of ‘trails’ that Newscorp editors knew perfectly well were utter crap, the gratuitous use of grainy shots accompanied by “Could THIS be Maddie?”, the mixing together of newsspeak and lachrymose faux-sentir (“Heartbreak Mum Kate McCann talks exclusively to Cressida Turdlynger about her empty-space horror ordeal”), and finally – head and shoulders above anything else to do with this – the latching on of the sucker-fingered octopoid Underlife with their mollusc-brained and/or commercially motivated “theories” about what really happened.

Last year, while clearing out my Devon house prior to moving further south, I came upon a poem I wrote late in 1972. It was, most of it – as one would expect – the self-conscious piffle one writes before knowing what one’s doing. But these lines stood out:

Pan in on the wringing hands/of the victim’s widowed bride/for reasons of taste/we shall not reveal her name.

That easily recognisable media voyeurism from four decades ago scores 11/10 for hypocrisy. But as is obvious on reading it, things have gotten a whole lot worse since then.

There is something about the McCanns’ media behaviour that has always ticked a dark box in my brain. And I have never been able to dismiss from that dark box the way Kate McCann ran into the restaurant on that awful evening seven years ago, and said “They’ve taken Maddie!”. Why “they”? It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t now.

But on the other hand, I was parked behind them on a ferry coming back from France last year, and they looked like a really nice loving couple who adored their kids. What genuinely pained me was the presence of two minders who made the Ian Fleming character Oddjob look like a 9-stone teenage weakling. The McCann parents are two people whose lives are forever f**ked. One wonders why they continue to encourage it, and one tries not to judge. It’s a mystery, it will always be a mystery, and the world, including the McCanns, should move on.

Earlier at The Slog: Today’s balls in quadrophonic Readerama vision