Walk into the street, right now. Keep walking past the first hundred or so properties that you see. Look at them. Count the doors and the windows. Note the number of cars parked on driveways, in garages, or on the road. Look for cracks of light or flickers of movement or wisps of steam from chimneys. Listen for the unmistakeable sounds of habitation; a footstep, a sigh, a voice on a telephone.

Think of the people inside. Think of the owners or the tenants. Think of their friends, families and lovers. Think of the older child who may be home from university, or may have chosen to travel this summer. Think of the sublets; some legal, some less so. Think of the undocumented migrants and refugees who can haunt London estates like administrative ghosts, invisible to and uncounted by the state.



Think of all that. Then tell me how many people were in your street at 1am on the morning of 14 June. Tell me after their homes have been burnt to blackened shells and their bodies reduced to particles of ash. Can you? I don’t think you can.



Great disasters offend our egos as well as our hearts. They challenge our sense of human mastery over the world. A universe in which a tower block can burst into flames without warning and consume those inside is an unordered and meaningless universe in which we could die at any moment, and this is unacceptable to us on a deep emotional level.



It’s natural that when we see such a disaster our instinct is to quantify it, because through quantification we regain control. How many have died? How did they die? Who, precisely, is to blame. What law or regulation would have prevented it? The grim task of quantifying Grenfell has, for now, fallen on the Metropolitan police. It is a horrible job, that the word “horrible” doesn’t adequately describe.

It may be an impossible job, too. Death tolls in major disasters can be a matter of evidence-based consensus rather than absolute fact: 2,996 people died in the 9/11 attacks according to the official death toll, but more than a thousand of those victims are missing without trace, some controversially so. That they died is extremely likely but still ultimately presumed, as it is in many such disasters.

Despite this, many were surprised and disappointed by a recent police announcement that a final death toll, currently standing at 87, won’t be announced this year. The authorities involved aren’t perfect of course, or beyond question. There are many with legitimate concerns about the investigation, and it’s right that they seek to hold the process to account at every opportunity. Yet fears of a cover-up are rooted in an ironic belief in the omniscience of the very same agencies.

As with the disappearance of Flight MH370, there’s a pervading sense of disbelief that people who are checked, recorded, monitored and connected at every turn can simply vanish without trace. Surely, people ask, the powers-that-be must have lists? Records of our movements? Of course there’s no rational reason to assume so. Records of tenants are at best a rough guide; electoral registers incomplete.

There’s comfort though in the idea that “the system” cares about us, even if that interest is malevolent; and deep discomfort in realising that the system can leave us anonymous, unmeasured, and lost.

Compounding this is a public mood of escalating paranoia. The tone of the recent election was set by two Trumpian leaders, each disdainful of journalists, intolerant of scrutiny or criticism, and speaking only to their own intensely polarised bubble. Social media, long promoted as an engine of democracy, has become an agent of division, increasingly dominated by hyper-partisan blogs pushing stories so dishonest that even the old-school tabloids would have baulked at publishing them.

Mistrust of politics is at an all-time high, yet rather than having the backbone to tackle the problem our party leaders have sought to exploit it, each operating under the fatally mistaken belief that a wholesale degradation of public discourse will only hurt the other side.

In this toxic climate, the behaviour of the local council, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, was as unsurprising as it was utterly destructive and self-defeating. Sharing national politicians’ growing disdain for journalists, and by extension disdain for the public they represent, council leaders sought to retreat into secrecy. That this would only confirm the worst fears of residents, already deeply unimpressed by the council’s response to the fire, seems to have been lost on them.

Inquiries will continue, but the exercise will proceed under a cloud of bad faith, on all sides. No conclusion or recommendation will be quite enough. Politicians on all sides who could show leadership will instead exploit whatever emerges for their own ends. Blame will be more important than solutions.

But remember that for the next several months many men and women will devote their time and energy to extracting every answer that the remains of Grenfell Tower can yield. They should expect scrutiny, but they deserve better than baseless conspiracy theories.