Nice One, Robert.

 Robert Jenrick knows how to grab headlines. More importantly, he knows exactly how to lead his critics down a blind alley from which they cannot escape. Yesterday the shadow justice secretary released a video of himself in the London Underground confronting those who had avoided paying their fare. 

Don’t risk tackling fare dodgers, TfL tells staff Advice comes after Robert Jenrick confronts ticket evaders in bid to demonstrate ‘out of control’ law-breaking i...

The political point was hardly subtle: why should the rest of us pay for those who can’t be bothered paying their way? Just as he must have hoped would happen, his vigilantism sparked a massive debate on social media, with users dividing along the traditional Right and Left lines: Jenrick was either a hero who was unafraid to tackle lawlessness on behalf of the majority, or a cynical villain who was at least in part responsible, while a government minister, for the reduction in police and Underground staff who might otherwise have been available to tackle the fare-dodgers themselves.

It all fell so neatly into place for Jenrick. The Left really cannot help itself, and he must have known this before he embarked on his publicity stunt. Channel 4 News spoke for much of progressive Britain who felt offended by his initiative: having watched the footage, they decided that the main news story was not that a worrying level of passengers were skipping ticket checks (nearly one in every 25 passengers, according to Jenrick) but that the Tory MP didn’t have Transport for London’s permission to film there at all. 

Why I stepped in to confront fare dodgers My morning at Stratford station encapsulated Broken Britain

Twitter users with more time on their hands than I have since pointed out that TfL rules seem only to apply to commercial filming, which obviously didn’t include Jenrick’s exercise. But his point was made: confronted with systematic and expensive fare-dodging, the Left would rather ignore the problem if it’s identified by someone whose politics they disagree with.

Let us be clear: Jenrick was offering no actual solutions to the problem. This was an exercise in populism that Nigel Farage himself might have envied, and it is straight out of the Reform playbook to provoke voters’ anger without explaining how they would fix the issue other than a few superficial slogans.

Nevertheless, it was a PR triumph for Jenrick. The tidal wave of indignation that followed the posting of his video could hardly have suited his purposes better. Here he was, standing up for hard-pressed, law-abiding Londoners while eight “officers” (it was not clear if this was a reference to British Transport Police officers or Underground staff) stood nearby. 

“It’s also just annoying,” says Jenrick to the camera, “watching so many people break the law and get away with it…It’s the same with bike theft, phone theft, tool theft, shoplifting, drugs in town centres, weird Turkish barber shops. It’s all chipping away at society. The state needs to reassert itself and go after law-breakers.”

The reference to “weird Turkish barber shops” was also ingenious: most people share Jenrick’s suspicion about the motivation behind their recent proliferation in high streets across the country, but it is exactly the kind of accusation that makes the red mist descend in the eyes and brains of many on the Left who would rather not bring foreigners into it.

At root, there is a fundamental and more complex policy issue which a minute-long video on Twitter can hardly be expected to analyse – the differing approaches to crime and its causes by the Right and the Left. Judging from many of the responses to Jenrick’s original Tweet, there are very few Labour supporters who took to heart Tony Blair’s view that the party should be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”, preferring to emphasise the latter and completely ignore the former. 

Fare-dodging is caused, it seems, either by poverty or by the state not devoting enough resources to prevent the rest of us from behaving badly. Meanwhile, the Right, as represented by Jenrick, believes it’s all about personal responsibility and personal choices. It is not difficult to see whose side most voters will take in that debate.

Labour and the Left in general should never have fallen into Jenrick’s trap. Just as Blair and Jack Straw caused outrage for a few on the Left in the 1990s by criticising “aggressive” beggars and squeegee merchants, yet won the support of a majority of voters who were fed up with the practice and who felt, until then, unable to complain about it, so Jenrick is empowering others to object to a pretty straightforward injustice that is pushing up prices for the law-abiding majority. Cynical? Undoubtedly. Opportunistic? Without question. Effective? Certainly. DT.