Too little, too late from May
years of inflicting brutal cuts on poor families like the flats’ residents while making the super-rich even richer.
May and 311 other Tories banded together last year to vote down a Labour amendment that would have forced private landlords to make homes “fit for human habitation” before moving families into them.
Seventy-two of those Tories were themselves registered as private landlords. May’s fire service minister, Nick Hurd, was one of them.
Anger was also growing at the seven-year failure of successive Con-Dem and Tory housing ministers to act on calls for better fire safety in tower blocks.
A report in 2009 after a fire that killed six people demanded improvements, but the Tories did nothing.
Against that background, grief for the dead of Grenfell Tower continued to turn to anger.
The official toll rose to 17, amid fears it could top 100.
May did visit the site. But once again, as she did throughout her disastrous election campaign, she massively misjudged the public mood.
She chose not to meet any local people, and photographers had to use a long lens to snatch pictures of her as she spoke to senior figures from the emergency services.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, in contrast, hugged grieving residents at a refuge centre for survivors.
He demanded that the empty homes of foreign millionaires in nearby Kensington be “requisitioned if necessary” to house the people who have lost everything.
Corbyn called for fast action from the new inquiry to reassure the hundreds of thousands of Britons who live in tower blocks that their homes are safe.
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon met ministers to discuss the fire and assured tower block residents that all lessons from it would be learned.