It seems that others are beginning to notice the way Gavin Barwell, the Conservative candidate who is defending his 165-vote majority in Croydon Central, says one thing in his campaign literature when trying to get re-elected, but then does something else when it comes to his actions in parliament.

Barwell gets a dishonourable mention in this week’s edition of the scurrilous satirical magazine, whose editors appear to have been reading Inside Croydon rather carefully.

So we’ll just put this out there for you to ponder and consider for yourselves…

Truth is, there has not been a “recent rise in knife crime”, but a steady increase in knife crime over the last seven years. Ever since, in fact, Barwell first became an MP.

Barwell has been part of Tory-led governments since 2010 which have cut spending on policing, while presiding over a continuing rise in the number of knife crimes being committed.

Croydon had 1,026 reported knife incidents in 2016, including six murders related to knife crime. Barwell remains vague on what a government in which he is a part would do differently to their disastrous and tragic record for the past seven years.

Meanwhile, yesterday’s Evening Standard describes gaffe-prone Barwell as a “Flag-bearer of ‘modern and classless’ Toryism”. Seriously.

In fact, “classless” Barwell was sent to a Whitgift Foundation private school and then went to Cambridge University, before starting his career as a politician by taking a job at Tory Central Office. He’s never had what hard-working families might understand to be “a proper job”.

The Evening Standard is edited by the work experience chap, Gideon Osborne.

Osborne has fewer qualifications as a journalist than he did as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He is the heir to the Irish baronetcy of Ballentaylor and Ballylemon in County Waterford, and has an estimated personal fortune of around £4million from a trust fund established for him by his father. Osborne went to a leading public school and then to Oxford, where he was a fully paid-up member of the Bullingdon Club.

So Osborne’s notion of what is “modern and classless” might not be very modern, or classless.

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