Just as I'd discovered the second body, neck broken, eviscerated, feet tragi-comically poking skywards, I turned to see the fox leg it over the back fence. My kingdom for a weapon. Though discharging a 12-bore would have scrambled the Peckham division of Operation Trident. And he'd gone anyway, the bastard, leaving me to bin-bag his decapitated prey.

It's all very Marie Antoinette, I know, keeping a half dozen chickens in a London garden. Even before the casualties, my Petit Trianon wouldn't have broken even until at least 2020. But the eggs are miraculous, still warm in the hand. The Suffolk company that made our coop has just had a surprise flurry of orders. In an uncertain world, there's comfort in chickens. It is deeply pleasing to watch hens do what hens are rarely allowed to do, take dust baths and scrat about for bugs, their silly burble more calming than whale calls.

Of course we should never have let them out. Not even during the day, since foxes, like other urban criminals, have grown bolder since the 1970s - when they only struck after dark, I'm told - sunbathing brazenly on my neighbour's lawn or dragging a KFC carton through the Sainsbury's car park. They've been here longer than us, carved up every South London garden into invisible territories, like vulpine Kray brothers. We'd heard of an owner who just went inside to answer the phone and returned to a massacre. Our local pub is called The Fox on the Hill. Duh! Yes, what townie fools we are.

At night he came back. All around Hen HQ were signs of energetic digging. In my faux-country idyll lurks a determined serial killer. There is something unknowably evil about the fox, with its strangled-baby night yowls, its reeking urine and cold reflective eyes, living invisibly among us, waiting. When its worst crime was to eat the leather straps off my Camper sandals, I let it live. But now it has killed my chickens, I want it dead. Then I'd like to cut off it's mangy tail, blood my children and pin it on the coop pour encourager les autres. But how?

Guns are a no-no - if easy to purchase in my part of town; snares are cruel; and even catching Mr Fox alive and driving him off to live in a pleasant wood could land a prosecution for abandoning an animal. But then I read that the Association of Chief Police Officers has decided that it will no longer enforce the ban on fox hunting: it has better things to do, apparently, than trail over moorland after wide-bottomed men.

Imagine that, a piece of legislation that took 700 parliamentary hours, a multimillion-pound public inquiry, caused years of fury and anguish, dragged our mildest, tweediest citizens into civil disobedience and made a hero out of Bryan Ferry's idiot son, just hanging in mid-air. Surely there should have been some brusque retort from the Home Office to those pesky chief policemen: we make the laws, officer, you enforce them. Instead, like a rural copper watching a posse of horsemen head over the top fields with dogs and a sack, the Government has just wearily shrugged.

I remember in 2004 following the prolonged battle to impose a hunting ban with some bemusement. Was the new Labour dream already so fully realised? Schools and hospitals, child poverty, the brand new war in Iraq, were they all ticked off now? Had the agenda reached “any other business”? Moreover, when the House of Lords kept batting the ban back, Tony Blair employed the Parliament Act, that constitutional override button pressed only in direst emergency, to force it through. All that legislative muscle for a student union motion.

At the time I would have called myself an animal agnostic. I have never been part of the cuddly-wuddly tendency, the animal-loving, people-hating hardcore, who get nasty when you rebuke their large dog for menacing your small child. I can't abide the earnest crusties outside Somerfield thrusting leaflets showing mangled foxes into your face. (Although now I shall tell them this is exactly what I have in mind.)

But then neither am I a country person: I rarely leave London unless compelled, I can't ride or fish or shoot, I harbour no rural retirement fantasies and I don't own a trug. Like most urban people, hunting a fox to death on horseback seemed as bizarre to me as eating the still-beating heart of a snake. So on balance, with little passion either way, I supported the ban.

Perhaps it was seeing my best hen, the golden Wellsummer who laid unfeasible XXXL-size eggs, killed for foxy fun that changed my mind. But also in these strange, nihilistic times, the anti-hunt law now looks like the first signs of a national disconnection from the political process: the feeling that something that matters to you deeply is being determined by those to whom it matters not at all. I felt it in Sipson, meeting villagers whose schools and homes will be demolished for Heathrow's third runway, a project so unwanted, so counter to the spirit of our age, yet which is trundling remorselessly on. I felt it at a protest last Friday against a lap-dancing club that opened, to the horror of residents, close to three primary schools. Even the local council couldn't ban it, thanks to Labour's 2003 Licensing Act.

In all these cases was a sense of powerlessness, that public consultation was loaded, that no amount of petition signatories or good people taking to the streets could affect the inevitable. And more infuriating was the knowledge that your political masters are not motivated by passion or righteous belief, but the need to horse-trade. Tony Blair, no particular fan of the fox, feared animal rights activists would mobilise against Labour in marginal constituencies. Gordon Brown pushes on with the Heathrow extension to buy off the unions with jobs and, it seems, increasingly, out of pure bloody-mindedness.

The hunt ban was an act of political triumphalism, a random kick in the crotch of the Tory shires. To save the lives of a few foxes - and only three cases have ever been prosecuted - cost a deep and lasting social division. That it was almost impossible to force through Parliament was a small clue that there was no consensus to support it, that it would always be unenforceable. Now it sits dead yet unmourned, still on the statute books, making a mockery of the rule of law.

Perhaps you need to own chickens to understand foxes. So pass me the stirrup cup, unleash the hounds, I'm going hunting.

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