On 14 June 2017, a devastating fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, eventually killing 72 people, injuring hundreds more and leaving over 200 households homeless. Yesterday, a Prime Minister not renowned for being closely acquainted with honesty has trumpeted that the formal unveiling of the Report of Phase 1 of the Public Inquiry into the Grenfell disaster will offer the bereaved, survivors and wider affected community “the truth”. We really hope so, but the media reporting of the Inquiry’s findings so far shows the battle that lies ahead.
It should come as no surprise that it was Johnson’s former employers at The Telegraph who chose to break the reporting embargo, and thus deny the affected community the right to take in and frame their reactions to the report when it was given to them two days before its formal release. It reeks of a deliberate move beyond boosting newspaper sales – one designed to distract attention from the role of key state and corporate actors in creating the atrocity at Grenfell, shifting the glare of publicity onto those who responded to the fire on the night. And so it has proven.
The evidence presented to the Inquiry, summarised in the report, establishes beyond doubt what experts have known for the past two years: that a faulty fridge-freezer sparked a small kitchen fire the size of a wastepaper basket in a flat on the fourth storey, which then rapidly engulfed the entire 24-storey building principally because of its encasing with combustible cladding and insulation. Mr Kebede, the flat’s occupant who has been vilified by racist trolls on social media, was not only exonerated of all blame but was praised for his swift actions that enabled vital evidence to survive the fire. Instead, the Inquiry Chair, retired high court judge, Sir Martin Moore-Bick, could not be clearer in his verdict on where blame ultimately lies:
