HARRINGTON suggested last week that we all had to watch out for people trying to make a buck on social media with a cameraphone in London.

Robert Jenrick, the loser in the Conservative leadership contest last year, probably doesn’t need the cash from clicks, but he too has joined the show.

In the style of Alan Partridge or at the very least Richard Madeley, he yesterday (Thursday) unleashed an action man film of him stopping people he suspected of fare evasion on the tube.

As people skip the barriers, he invites them to go back and pay at the machine, blending in with his civvies of a DIY Dad checked shirt.

At one stage, he asks one of his targets whether they have a knife.

“You can say ‘f*** off’ all you like,” he tells another young man.

It is very easy to mock and it’s not the biggest problem in London, the UK or the world, but Mr Jenrick is willing to look a little bit of a wally because he knows the majority of people will agree with him on this.

Nobody likes being tail-gated through the barriers at Oxford Circus ­– you feel like you are being pickpocketed.

And when passengers have paid pretty steep fares, many will be left angry when they see evaders simply barging through the double gates without any challenge from the station staff.

What really are TfL’s employees going to do to stop it, though?

The Conservative Party is lacking personality. Perhaps that’s a good thing if personality means some of the worst excesses of Boris Johnson’s time, but Mr Jenrick must see a gap in the market.

Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the party, has struggled to gain important national recognition, and it was even whispered to the lobby hacks this week that some MPs want Mr Johnson to ride again – ugh, that sounds wrong ­– as the only man they can see as saving them from Nigel Farage and Reform.

And that’s where it’s worth looking at what Mr Jenrick goes on to say in his playful film. Fare evasion is a sign of a broken city, he suggests, listing other London problems like unsolved bike thefts.

But he also says London has a problem with “weird Turkish barbers” ­– a line straight out of the Farage playbook slipped casually into a film about chasing fare dodgers.

London is actually full of fantastic Turkish barbers who will bring you a Turkish coffee and really make sure your nasal hair disappears. They don’t deserve this disrespect, or to be made the scapegoats for somebody else’s frustration that London isn’t exactly the same as it was 60 years ago.

It’s right Sadiq Khan is challenged on falling standards and that feeling that this is becoming a capital city where lots of things don’t really work as they should. A sense of trouble exists.

But there are complicated reasons for that, some the mayor’s fault, and some due to the past government Mr Jenrick served in.