Grenfell Tower and the politics of needless death

As the body count rose from the Grenfell Tower fire, sensible people warned us not to rush to judgement. Activists, mainly from the left, denounced a complacent housing bureaucracy at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and a Conservative government, which had refused in its laissez-faire way to regulate rented housing.

The warnings sounded sensible. At the time of writing, I still do not know for sure why the fire spread with such ghastly effectiveness. Why rush to judgement and into print? In any case, is there not something wrong with people whose first reaction to a disaster is to take cheap shots?

But sensible points can be beside the point. From the moment I heard the accents of the survivors on yesterday morning’s news, I understood that the fire was inescapably political.

London is a city of the rich and the poor. The middle and skilled working classes are finding it increasingly hard to rent a home within five miles of the centre, let alone buy one.