Every MP must see this play: Value Engineering – Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry reviewed

Scenes from the Grenfell Inquiry is a gripping, horrifying drama. Nicolas Kent and Richard Norton-Taylor have sifted through the public hearings and dramatised the most arresting exchanges. Ron Cook, often miscast as a comedian, is superb as the frosty and occasionally irascible inquisitor, Richard Millett. Early on, he asks the witnesses ‘not to indulge in a merry-go-round of buck-passing’. Later, he comments acidly, ‘That invitation has not been accepted.’

Every witness has something to hide and something to be ashamed of. A fireman searching for a child on the upper floors can’t explain why he didn’t rouse families from their flats and help them escape. A witness describes the inferno’s ghastly noise, ‘like sparklers’. The tower was as flammable as a box of fireworks.

The decision to fit the wrong cladding was taken by a tangled mass of private companies and municipal authorities. Each witness tries to claim that the job of enforcing safety standards was someone else’s responsibility. A clear chain of command should have been in place. Without it, we may never learn who burned Grenfell.

A QC, Leslie Thomas, blames racism and poverty. ‘The majority of the people who died were people of colour,’ he says. This argument overlooks the facts of economic progress. Migrants arrive here with imperfect English and so are unlikely to become high court judges or millionaire financiers (though their kids might). And after working for decades in low-paid jobs they find themselves stuck in cheap flats because they’ve had less time to accrue wealth than their white neighbours whose families have been here for perhaps 20 generations. That’s not racism, it’s chronology. Even today, there are white Londoners doing low-paid work whose ancestors were here to greet Julius Caesar.

The QC might have proved his case by citing racist comments made by the builders, planners and subcontractors whose correspondence was pored over by teams of lawyers.