How much does it cost to buy an MP?

In a couple of lines, rashly committed to paper, Labour Chief Whip Geoff Hoon throws huge doubt on the Government's oft-repeated claims that no MP was bribed to support Gordon Brown in the Commons vote on 42-day detention.

'Just a quick note to thank you for all your help during the period leading up to last Wednesday's vote...' he wrote to Labour's Keith Vaz, who had mysteriously switched from opposing the Government to supporting it.

'I trust that it will be appropriately rewarded!'

What can that mean, if not that Mr Vaz  -  who has been censured in the past for misconduct  -  was expected to benefit from changing his mind?

Mr Hoon says this was just a 'jokey remark'. But who's laughing? Not the people of Britain, who are sick of the stench of corruption in our public life.

Indeed, the more we learn of last month's vote, the more unpleasant it smells.

Detention without charge is a deeply sensitive issue, touching on the vital balance between national security and civil liberties.

Indeed, it's an issue so highly charged the Shadow Home Secretary felt compelled to resign over it.

It is certainly not a matter to be decided on promises of rewards for individual MPs or  -  in the case of Ulster's Democratic Unionists  -  untold millions of taxpayers' money to be spent in their constituencies.

May we now know precisely what was offered, and to whom, in return for supporting Mr Brown? If our MPs' votes have an 'appropriate' price, at the very least we should be told what it is.

Beating the gangs

Three cheers for Britain's longest-serving woman chief constable, who has latched on to truths the Mail has been proclaiming for years.

Yes, family breakdown bears an enormous share of the responsibility for the gang culture of drugs and violence now terrorising Britain's inner cities.

Yes, tribal loyalty has replaced family loyalty among 'almost feral' youths who lack adult role models.

And yes, Barbara Wilding is right again when she says the police can provide only short-term solutions to a problem that should be tackled at its cultural roots.

The question is how. As she admits, her suggestion that gang members should go into church-run residential programmes falls into the 'high-cost category'.

But while such schemes may be worth exploring, isn't there much else that could be done, far more cheaply, to initiate the cultural changes we need?

For a start, the state should stop trying to take over the functions of the family. That only encourages feckless parents to shirk their responsibilities.

Meanwhile, we should urgently recruit more male teachers to provide role models for boys in our increasingly feminised education system.

As for the police, it may be true they alone cannot stamp out gang culture.

But couldn't they do a far better job, as yesterday's report from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary makes frighteningly plain, if they could waste less time on bureaucracy  -  and restore discipline to their own insubordinate ranks?

Mandelson is right

The Mail  has never made a secret of its distrust of EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson, the spin doctor who played midwife at New Labour's birth.

But in his row with French President Nicolas Sarkozy over free trade in agriculture, he is 100 per cent right.

At a time of world food shortages, exacerbated by French protectionism, for once Mr Mandelson holds the moral high ground.