Grenfell tower

Wednesday

Hannah Tomes

Is Margaret Thatcher ultimately to blame for the current social housing crisis?

By the time she was 25, the journalist and broadcaster Kieran Yates had lived in almost as many houses. Having rented for more than a decade, I feel her pain. I’ve lived in flats that made me physically unwell (mould has a lot to answer for) and survived housemates whose approach to kitchen hygiene made every day a salmonella minefield. I would visit a former boyfriend whose bedroom was, essentially, a glorified crawl space in a cold artists’ warehouse. He was 6ft 6in and couldn’t even kneel up in it, but, aged 24, I thought it was cool. Now I see it for what it was: an indictment of London’s

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Gandhi’s killer is more loveable than his victim: The Father and the Assassin reviewed

Dictating to the Estate is a piece of community theatre that explains why Grenfell Tower went up in flames on 14 June 2017. The abandoned block stands, like a cenotaph, a few minutes’ walk from the social club where the show is presented. The local council never cared much for Grenfell’s 120 families. Plans to destroy the tower and expand the estate – with higher rents, of course – had long been under discussion. A one-bedroom flat in west London goes for half a million pounds so there were profits galore to be made. ‘A gold mine for the council,’ said one developer, ‘and they don’t even have to dig

Monday

Isabel Hardman

Why is Westminster unable to solve the cladding crisis?

The government was never going to come out well from Monday afternoon’s cladding debate in the House of Commons, given it has taken so long to address the crisis facing tens of thousands of leaseholders trapped in dangerous and unsellable flats or holding bills for tens of thousands of pounds. Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick stayed away entirely, leaving housing minister Chris Pincher to respond at the start and junior housing minister Eddie Hughes to do the wind-up. This gave the impression that ministers do not see this as a priority, despite it developing into a huge scandal that will blight the lives of

Thursday

Emma Byrne

Is the government about to bankrupt thousands of homeowners?

Within the next year or two, I could go bankrupt. My mistake: to join a government-backed affordable housing scheme and purchase a one-bedroom flat in east London. For the past four years, it has been my pride and joy — not to mention my savings, my pension and my financial future. I was grateful for the government’s help in getting a foothold in the city. But now another government policy is hurtling towards me, against which I have no defence. Nor do potentially tens of thousands of first-time buyers and the owners of affordable housing in my position. It might be the next big scandal to hit the government. It’s

Thursday

Stuart Jeffries

The guileful, soulful art of Khadija Saye

Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This Smells Like My Vagina scented candles and must-have child-calming essential oil sprays, a shopfront has been taken over to display a poignant series of self-portraits by a rather different woman. Khadija Saye died three summers ago with her mother in the Grenfell Tower fire. Much of the 24-year-old artist’s work was destroyed in the blaze, including three tintype images from a series of nine called ‘in this space we breathe’. The other six were displayed that summer in the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Saye’s first major international

Thursday

Ross Clark

Toxic regulations, not the fire brigade, are to blame for the Grenfell deaths

It has been bizarre to hear the London Fire Brigade taking the brunt of the blame for the deaths of 72 people at Grenfell Tower. Its commissioner Dany Cotton certainly deserves condemnation for persisting in telling residents to stay put when it ought to have been clear early on that fire was engulfing the building and it needed to be evacuated. Her suggestion that she ‘wouldn’t change anything we did on the night’ — in spite of the role her advice played in boosting the death toll — compounds her errors. Yet by the time the fire service arrived, tragedy was already assured. To pin the blame on Ms Cotton,

Tuesday

Kate Chisholm

Voices of import

By the age of eight Vaira Vike-Freiberga had learnt that life was both ‘very strange and very unfair’. Her baby sister had died from pneumonia the previous year because of the harsh conditions of life in a refugee camp in Germany (this was late 1944 and her family had fled their native Latvia for fear of the communists). Her mother soon had another child but when Vaira went to see her new brother in hospital she observed the young woman in the next-door bed turning her face to the wall against her wailing baby, product of a gang-rape by Russian soldiers. The nurses had given this unwanted baby girl the

Ed West Ed West

The Left don’t mind hating immigrants – so long as they’re rich

It seems a long time ago that Jeremy Corbyn made an impassioned defence of immigration from both within and outside the EU, telling his party that: ‘Migrants that have come to this country make an enormous contribution to it. Our conference understands that and Tom Watson put that case very well about the work that migrants have done in the NHS and education and other industries … we should live with that but also understand the number of British people.’ That was last September, yet it seems to sit ill at ease with what he told Andrew Marr recently, that under his rule: ‘What there wouldn’t be is the wholesale

Friday

Spectator Money

What have been the most expensive public inquiries in recent times?

The inquiry into the Grenfell Tower fire could last years. What have been the most expensive public inquiries in recent times? Bloody Sunday £191.5m, 12.5 years Rosemary Nelson (N Ireland) £46.5m, 6.5 years Robert Hamill (also NI) £33m, 7 years Billy Wright (also NI) £30.5m, 6 years Harold Shipman Inquiry £21m, 4 years Chilcott Inquiry £13m, 8 years Leveson Inquiry £5.4m, 1 year  

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 7 June 2018

Home A third runway at Heathrow Airport was approved by the cabinet; £2.6 billion was earmarked for compensation and soundproofing. Northern Rail brought in a temporary timetable that removed 165 train services a day until 29 July, but scores more trains were still cancelled; all trains to the Lake District were cancelled for a fortnight. Thameslink and Southern also wallowed in incapacity. Petrol prices rose by a record monthly sum of 6p in May to an average of 132.3p a litre. The government reduced its holding in the Royal Bank of Scotland from 70.1 to 62.4 per cent, losing £2.1 billion on selling the shares which it bought to save the

Thursday

Toby Young

Dawn Butler spoiled one of the best days of my life

Last Saturday was shaping up to be one of the best days of my life. Freddie, my ten-year-old son, had been chosen by Queens Park Rangers, our football team, as one of five ‘Local Heroes’ to be honoured at half-time — part of the club’s excellent ‘QPR in the Community’ programme. This was on account of his charity work, believe it or not. After seeing the club’s Game4Grenfell, a pro-celebrity football game organised to raise money for those affected by the Grenfell Tower fire, Freddie was inspired to organise a football-and-netball tournament for under-11s at Club des Sports in Acton. With the help of his mother, he managed to raise

Monday

Danny Kruger

The right response to the Grenfell Tower disaster

Everyone agrees the Grenfell Tower disaster must usher in a new era of social housing in the UK. The danger is that it sends us back to a very old era, when the council owned, managed and controlled community housing. There is another way forward, one which meets the rightful sense of injustice felt by people living on Lancaster West, the estate where Grenfell Tower stands – not the injustice of a botched refurbishment which (probably) caused the tragedy, but the injustice of residents not being listened to when they raised concerns, over many years, about their safety or quality of life. For decades – indeed, since 1974 when the

Thursday

Helen R Brown

A cold coming to Cornwall

In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge her passion for abstract form. But her commitment deepened. The solid ovoids she sculpted carried the weight of grief and the hope of eggs. To Hepworth, they became ‘forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’. They were a means of retaining freedom whilst carrying out what was demanded of me as a human being… a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic ‘will to live’ as opposed to the extrinsic disaster of the world war. References to Hepworth roll all the way through Ali Smith’s new novel,

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The wisdom of the skies

It took a spate of air disasters in the late 1970s, in particular the Portland crash of United Airlines Flight 173, for aviation experts to pay attention to something called Crew Resource Management. This is a set of procedures first conceived by Nasa with the aim of minimising human error in flight. UA173 — where the pilots had spent so long fixated with a dodgy landing wheel that they failed to notice they’d run out of fuel — was one of a growing number of incidents in which disaster arose from failures in crew interaction. As with the Tenerife airport disaster and the Air Florida crash in 1982, there was

Thursday

Taki

High life | 13 July 2017

I was going through my paces in Hyde Park, sweating out the booze, raising the heartbeat with short wind sprints, keeping my mind off the weekend’s debauchery and the ensuing Karamazovian hangover. I sat down on a bench, took off my sweaty polo shirt, opened the Daily Telegraph, and took in some rays. A police officer approached me — but with a smile. ‘Are you by any chance Taki?’ he said. ‘Guilty as charged, constable, but this time I’m clean.’ He smiled broadly and asked if he might sit down. Well, Constable Hackworth turned out to be straight out of The Blue Lamp. A Spectator reader, he somehow recognised my

Saturday

Charles Moore

The Grenfell inquiry outcome must not be predetermined

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s

Thursday

Ian Katz

Media culpa

A thread runs through several of the stories that have defined this turbulent summer: reporters have been shocked by the levels of hostility they have encountered. ‘They hate us,’ one seasoned producer told me returning from a Grenfell Tower protest. ‘I haven’t felt anything like it in 20 years.’ When the battalions of the media descend on any big story, the experience rarely leaves those caught up in it feeling warm and fuzzy about the fourth estate. But this is different. In each case there is a specific, albeit related, animus. During the election, it was Corbyn supporters convinced the mainstream media was bent on doing down their man. At

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 6 July 2017

Home Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged colleagues to make the case for ‘sound money’; he said, ‘We must hold our nerve,’ as he came under pressure to end the public-sector pay cap of a 1 per cent rise a year. Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, thought that pay rises could be awarded in ‘a responsible way’; Michael Gove, the Environment Secretary, did not think that taxes would need to increase to accommodate pay rises. Firemen boasted of a 2 per cent pay rise. The government won the vote on the Queen’s Speech by 323 to 309 after heading off an amendment by the Labour MP Stella Creasy,

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Diary – 6 July 2017

A trip to the supermarché at the beginning of our French month yielded many of the necessary things one also buys at home, but even washing powder acquires romance when sporting a French label, and the fresh fish, meat, veg and wine sections are far bigger than ours, with mountains of lettuce and seven different varieties of tomato. The Carrefour bookshelves also yielded Tintin books which are, like Asterix, best read in French. I bought Tintin et L’Ile Noir, Tintin et La Crabe au Pinces D’or, and my favourite, Tintin et Les Bijoux de Castefiore. The French is simple, the drawings are masterpieces, subtle, witty, full of style and character.

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 6 July 2017

Having worked flat-out to defend judges over the Article 50 case in the Supreme Court, the BBC has gone the other way, in relation to the judiciary, over Grenfell Tower. Its news coverage is working hard to displace the retired judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick from his appointment to chair the inquiry into the fire. Groups purporting to speak for the Grenfell victims are given airtime to denounce him. The idea is that they and their activist lawyers are entitled to a veto on who runs any inquiry, thus attaining effective control of what it decides. Something similar led to the hopeless, expensive collapse of chairman after chairman in Theresa May’s