Tower horror shows the Maybot is broken

It would be brave to the point of recklessness to believe the catastrophe at Grenfell Tower is not another severe test of the Tory party’s tolerance of the limitations of Theresa May. If she lasts another few weeks, she may well get her Queen’s Speech through: but it cannot be long before the Men in Suits call to discuss arrangements for the orderly transition to a Tory leader who actually understands the need to lead. Her robotic and sequestered performance when visiting the disaster scene showed that Mrs May is not that leader – an impression confirmed by her subsequent TV interviews.

It served as a microcosm of all that went wrong in the election campaign: a complete failure to connect with the public. I don’t doubt that in private Mrs May unleashed her emotions, and felt the same sickening sense we all did when learning that so many fellow human beings had died in this hideous and unnecessary way.

There remains much to be said for the despised national tradition of not expressing such feelings in public. But had she done immediately what her predecessors did at such times – one thinks of Mrs Thatcher going to hospitals to visit casualties of bombings perpetrated by Mr Corbyn’s friends in the IRA – and engaged directly with the victims, she might have improved public perceptions. But she waited until Friday, when it looked like a necessary political act rather than a spontaneously human one, and that won’t be forgotten.

Apart from finding a new leader in the most dignified and least damaging way, the Tories must study how Labour serenely politicised this disaster, and seek to combat that – while not showing disrespect to the scores who died and those bereaved and homeless.

It was brave of Andrea Leadsom, the new Leader of the Commons, to visit the scene and spend an hour talking to residents on Friday, and she did well. But the political ordeal has barely begun. A public inquiry under a senior judge was the first, obvious and necessary step. Long before that reports, however, there must be signs of contrition. Mrs May’s new chief of staff, Gavin Barwell, was before losing his seat and job as housing minister, said to have “sat on” a report highlighting the fire safety risks in tower blocks. It would be no admission of culpability on his part for him to resign, and would remove a nasty smell from the Government. He spent much of his time as housing minister vilifying Brexiteers on social media, time that might have been better spent ensuring people were not incinerated in one of the tower blocks whose regulation he had to decide. Then there is the question of Conservativecontrolled Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, not merely a local authority but a place for highly ambitious municipal politicians to make their mark on the Tory party, running one of the wealthiest areas in Britain. The public inquiry must decide whether the council, which owns the tenants’ organisation that runs Grenfell Tower, was negligent in ignoring residents’ warnings that the building was a disaster waiting to happen. They would be well advised not to play the austerity card and try to blame Government cuts for the cheap and combustible cladding that turned the building into a chimney. We are told that for £5,000 Grenfell could have been clad with fire-resistant materials – less than half the £11,000 basic allowance paid to each of the 50 councillors. Their allowances sit uncomfortably with the £5m package announced for victims of the fire.

As the scale and enormity of what has happened sinks in, and a high death toll is confirmed, political leadership will be vital to calm public outrage. Perhaps Mrs May can try again to connect with victims, but that risks looking staged, cynical and forced. Other ministers can follow Mrs Leadsom’s excellent example, which would at least prevent Labour from asserting it has a monopoly on compassion. And there must be promises, to put it crudely, that someone will go on trial for allowing this to happen. The manufacturers of the cladding made no pretences of its lack of fire resistance, and the sub-contractors who installed it only obeyed orders. But whose orders? Who ascertained its suitability? Where does that buck stop? Then comes the problem of shutting other stable doors before the horses bolt. Checks are already under way on other blocks with similar cladding. The Government should announce that any publicly owned blocks that have a similar risk of conflagration must be evacuated and the tenants rehoused until they can be rendered safe; any that are privately owned are the responsibility of the freeholders, who would doubtless be aware of the potential consequences. And, in blocks not clad in this way, the review of fire safety on which Mr Barwell “sat” had better, nonetheless, be implemented. But – in another act of leadership – the Tories would do well to talk about the need to improve the conditions in which too many of the urban poor live. A programme of low-rise housing built to a decent specification, where tenants are offered the right to buy into part or full ownership, would surely be a scheme to find favour even with the present hung parliament. If it is said it cannot be afforded, then let us think again about the overseas aid budget, not least because what happened suggests we are a Third World country in the way we expect our people to live in death-traps.

One hopes all this would be the least the Government would do. But with its notional leader resembling a wounded, timid piece of wildlife caught in the headlamps, one is forced to conclude it will address this calamity, and all the other messes it must clear up, far more effectively when under new management.