There are, it is roughly estimated, as many as 180,000 missing children in the United Kingdom.

According to the home Office, the number of full-time police in England and Wales
is 142,000.

You see the problem, yes? Even if we took one officer and told him his only job was to find Madeleine McCann, he would still have to take alternate Thursdays off to help investigate some other disappearance.

This is why there exists a point at which investigations into missing people are scaled down.

Always reluctantly, always with the hope that one day circumstances will change, but Gerry McCann is wrong to say the police have given up on his daughter, as the third anniversary of her disappearance approaches.

They have not forgotten, but simply lost the trail. This happens. Not every investigation can be resolved, or allowed to continue interminably when leads and clues are exhausted.

I do not believe any police officer fails to comprehend the significance of finding Madeleine; not just for her parents, but for the mental health of the nation.

Police may respond inadequately to vandalism or petty crime, but if any of the information Mr McCann says has recently been unearthed by private detectives was of use, an official investigation team would have been all over it.

The charity PACT (Parents and Abducted Children Together) says one child goes missing every five minutes; the police, therefore, are not, like the McCanns, solely responsible for a single lost toddler.

Are those most urgently in need of help now to join the end of an ancient queue?

Police work prioritises, it shuffles resources, evolving in the most harshly pragmatic way.

It cannot become mired in history, as cold as that sounds. Russell Bohling is a vulnerable 18-year-old with a speech impediment, who was about to inherit £300,000 to start his own business.

His car has been found on a cliff top in east Yorkshire, and he is missing. The quicker police act, the more chance there is of resolution, happy or otherwise.

At the same time there will be other cases in the area, as yet unanswered. each officer assigned to Russell’s disappearance is therefore being taken off another duty. What is the alternative?

Give his family a number like at a supermarket delicatessen counter and tell them to wait their turn?

‘Find Madeleine’ was the campaign. The police tried and failed. Now they must find Russell.

Next week, it will be someone else. Tragic realities are confronted all the time, but what more can they do?  

• Civil servants at the Foreign Office are sitting around honing their open-mic routines for the Comedy Store, and calling it blue sky thinking. That is the most irritating aspect of the Papal visit memo.

By contrast, the most offensive comment came from Jim Murphy, the Scottish Secretary in charge of arranging the trip. ‘On behalf of, I think, the whole of the United Kingdom, I would want to apologise to his holiness the Pope,’ he said.

Oh really, Jim? And when did I appoint you as my spokesman? Who authorised this apology from me?

Tell you what, next time you’re talking, tell his holiness that when he gets round to saying sorry for his part in hiding institutionalised paedophilia, I’ll be listening. But apologies the other way around? right now, I don’t think so.

Some kid made a mistake, sent a silly joke, forgot he was supposed to be at work. Don’t do it again, son. Now, we move on.

We’re talking crimes and misdemeanours. If the Pope is such a great Christian, he’ll forgive.

And maybe, one day, the abused will do the same. In the meantime, Jim: speak for yourself.

The reason one must fear for Gordon Brown’s mental state is that the question from pensioner Gillian Duffy which so flummoxed him was: ‘All these eastern Europeans, where are they flocking from?’

This must be the easiest riddle to solve since Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott predicted: ‘Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town.’

Now, I’m no Sherlock holmes, but

May does the moral fandango

Prissiness on heels, Brian May, guitarist of the group Queen, set out his spirited opposition to fox-hunting and his finely-tuned ire that a hapless Conservative councillor from Leicestershire had the temerity to challenge him.

His tirade — May called David Parsons ‘a snivelling little dweeb’ — has publicised the cause more successfully than his poster campaign to stop the Tories overturning the hunting ban; but it was May’s take on his merging of music and politics that was more intriguing.

‘Most of my life has been about changing the world through songs,’ he said. ‘Sometimes, to affect change on a global scale, you have to stand up and be counted.’

Of course. Who can forget the great Fat Bottomed Girls crisis of 1978, or that time when Scaramouche wouldn’t do the Fandango.

Then there was the moment in 1984 when Queen did something truly ground-breaking and ignored the United Nations cultural boycott of South Africa, playing a series of gigs in Sun City.

Caused a bit of a fuss, that did. Queen were placed on a United Nations blacklist until apartheid ended ten years later.

‘We thought about the morals of it and it is something we decided to do,’ said one of the group.

‘We play to anyone who wants to come and listen. The band is not political.’

His name? Brian May. The snivelling little dweeb.