Image: Emma Dent Coad MP, at the Grenfell Tower inquiry preliminary hearing. PA Images, all rights reserved.
The night after the general election, a crowd throwing flowers greeted Emma Dent Coad at Kensington and Chelsea’s red-brick town hall on Hornton Street. After four recounts, I watched the veteran councillor snatch the home of Kensington Palace and the Daily Mail by twenty votes.
Days later crowds were back at Hornton Street, this time in shock and desperate grief. Missing posters, police cordons and debris lined the roads after a blaze ripped through Grenfell Tower in the worst civil disaster in London since World War II. The scene wouldn’t have looked out of place in a war zone. Emma lives a few minutes’ walk from the tower.
