Theresa May has issued an apology for her most visible and symbolic failing in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire. Following the fire, she visited North Kensington to speak to firefighters and council workers, but didn’t speak to any of the local residents or survivors.
“But the residents of Grenfell Tower needed to know that those in power recognised and understood their despair,” she wrote in the Evening Standard yesterday. “And I will always regret that by not meeting them that day, it seemed as though I didn’t care. That was never the case.”
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Whether May really could have met the victims, even if she had wanted to, is an open question – she actually stayed away due to “security concerns”. When she visited a local church, she had to be escorted away by police to avoid angry locals. Now, she’s trying to paint it as an honest mistake by a caring politician, rather than a cowardly move by a pariah who had completely lost it.
In any case, it’s telling that her main concern is about not being seen to care, rather than saying anything material about what more she might have done or might still do to help victims.
At the time, her concern to be seen to be in control actually made things worse. The Tower, a lengthy investigation into the fire by Andrew O’Hagan, published in the London Review of Books, was rightly panned by housing journalists for letting the council almost completely off the hook – but it does contain some interesting nuggets about where Theresa May’s head was at. After the fire, the Prime Minister “according to sources who worked closely with her, ‘began falling apart’”, reports O’Hagan. “So soon after a close election, ‘she thought the Grenfell incident could bring them down.’”
May’s career was her primary concern: “May was vulnerable, and in her own circle it’s said that she felt the accusations of failure at Grenfell played to the strengths of her opposite number [Jeremy Corbyn].” One key Conservative told the writer she was “having a bit of a breakdown… was getting bad advice and had no real hold over her colleagues”.
And so, panicked, May told Parliament that she had “fixed a deadline of three weeks for everybody affected to be found a home nearby”. This was despite council advice that life isn’t as simple as all that, and that finding hundreds of people new homes isn’t something you can pull off in no time at all.
According to the North Kensington Law Centre (NKLC), who are representing many residents, this arbitrary, political deadline resulted in “too many unsuitable, poor quality housing offers made to survivors within the first three weeks following the fire”, in a policy “designed primarily to satisfy the Prime Minister’s timetable”.
“I will never vote again after what I’ve seen,” one of the housing officers told O’Hagan. “It was like House of Cards. Like we were all becoming political footballs in all of this. We were really making progress, then the government moved in to seek its own advantage.”
May was later criticised by Barry Quirk, the new Kensington and Chelsea council Chief Executive for raising people’s hopes and then dashing them. “It’s terrible that we have a situation where we haven’t found properties that are suitable,” he said. “A lot of that is about scarcity. But I don’t achieve anything by making impractical, infeasible demands on our own organisation.”
Not that the council can wash its hands and blame central government. Cllr Elizabeth Campbell has said that “every cent of our reserves will be put towards rehousing people”, but they have not done that, and NKCL note that “the manner in which survivors have been rehoused and the associated delays have added to the community’s suffering”.
Meanwhile, having dealt with the messy business of saying sorry for not meeting survivors, May’s apology article moves to self congratulation about the “real progress” that has been made to re-house the victims. And while some progress is the least you could expect, only one quarter of those from the tower and surrounding area who were evacuated have now moved into permanent accommodation. Having initially thrown the council under the bus with May’s stupid three-week deadline, the government is now showing reluctance to set any deadline at all for when all the residents will be permanently rehoused.
“The Grenfell fire was a tragedy that should never have happened – I am determined that it will never be forgotten,” concludes May’s apology. Fat chance. If Theresa May thinks she can consign the disaster to the history books by glossing over the ongoing needs of the people affected, then it’s evidence that she still doesn’t care.
