The architectural historian has been campaigning on housing for years and had been a Labour MP for just four days when she was faced with the catastrophe of the Grenfell Tower fire. Two weeks on, she explains why there is no time to be overwhelmed

It is shortly after lunchtime when Emma Dent Coad sits down in her tiny Westminster office to speak to the Guardian, but she has already had what is, by anyone’s standards, quite a day.

The newly elected Labour MP for Kensington is an early riser, she says, which has got to help, since her morning started with a 7am radio interview and ploughing through “a mountain of emails”, before she met with Labour MPs from neighbouring constituencies. Then came another TV interview alongside survivors of the Grenfell Tower, some of whom remain angry over the response to the tragedy, she says, “so that was quite a difficult one”.

Next, she went to the Westway sports centre, the hub for the relief operation for survivors in the shadow of the blackened tower, “just to see how things are going. I’ve been there regularly but it changes day by day. And on the way over, people stopping us saying, ‘This isn’t working,’ ‘This is what is happening with me ...’”

By midday, Dent Coad was in the Commons chamber for prime minister’s questions, although she wasn’t called to speak. She had wanted to ask Theresa May whether the government’s commitment to resettle all the Grenfell families within three weeks – “that expires next week, by the way” – was still on track. “She committed to those three weeks, but I don’t think it’s possible for them to do that.”

When we meet, it is two weeks to the day since the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower killed dozens of her constituents and made hundreds more homeless, and Dent Coad understandably seems a little tired, after the most unenviable baptism into parliamentary life anyone could imagine.

The 62-year-old had been an MP for precisely four days when she awoke before 6am on the morning of 14 June to the sound of helicopters, switched on her radio, and leaped out of bed to dress in a frenzy. Dent Coad lives only a few streets from the block, and was standing in front of it within minutes. “And it was horrible. Just awful. Unthinkable.”

As unimaginable horror was compounded, in the days that followed, by bureaucratic ineptitude, with bereaved and homeless families struggling in many cases to access basic help, the new MP found herself at the centre of a humanitarian catastrophe, while those charged with managing it were, in her words, “running around like headless chickens”.

A fortnight on, with the hapless Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) having at last been relieved of its responsibilities leading the relief efforts and a new “gold command” put in place, things are finally “miles better than they were”, says Dent Coad.

“A lot of people who were the worst hit are getting the help that they need, at last. But there are certainly people in hotels on their own, where they are the only survivors in a hotel. They may not want to eat in a restaurant, they may not have the right kind of food they want, or at the right times they want.

“Some people are still having trouble getting access to the money they need.” She’s not quite sure why. One woman whose child had been in hospital after the fire, and needed extra facilities in her hotel after the child was discharged, was told they weren’t available, says the MP. “She was quite rightly angry about that. So, there are a lot of things that aren’t being dealt with properly, still.”

Her biggest concern now, she says, is that “even for people who are well accommodated now and well looked after, they have got one hell of a life ahead of them.” Kensington and Chelsea does not have enough facilities for people who may have a mental health crisis, she argues, despite the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the fire, she was inundated with offers of help from senior psychiatric doctors and consultants, “and there was nowhere to send them for the first 10 days. It was just ridiculous.”

She is encouraged by assurances that residents will be resettled within reasonable travelling distances, but won’t be fully reassured until it happens. Fundamentally, says Dent Coad, “the council is going to have to put its hand in its pocket. They have a third of a billion pounds in reserves. They don’t have to spend all of that to house quite a lot of people.”

(The RBKC said that of the £283m in its usable reserves, “approximately £110m is held for statutorily defined purposes including schools and public health” and only £21m of the remainder was “housing revenue account reserves”).

Although she says now that “it was always possible”, very few before 8 June would have confidently predicted Dent Coad’s election to parliament to represent a seat that has been rock-solidly Tory since it was established in 1974. It was a knife-edge win that took three counts and two days of tallying votes before the Labour candidate was confirmed to have won just 20 more than her Conservative predecessor, Victoria Borwick.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dent Coad with Jeremy Corbyn visiting the area in the shadow of Grenfell Tower. Photograph: Alastair Grant/AP

Her victory, in the immediate aftermath of the election, was taken by commentators as proof of the breadth of Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal, of the strength of the remain vote (Borwick was a leading Brexiter in an area that voted strongly against leaving the EU) or of changing demographics in an constituency that at least until last month was much better known for its multimillion-pound mansions than its creaky tower blocks.

Dent Coad herself puts it down to many from disconnected communities voting for the first time – “it’s just getting people to believe in something” – but also to traditional Conservatives lending her their votes.

While much has been made since the fire of the frustrations felt by poorer Kensington residents with their council, and suggestions that their complaints and warnings of poor maintenance and fire dangers were ignored, Dent Coad argues many of the area’s wealthier residents have felt similar frustrations, and sense that developers and planning consultants are being favoured over the needs of long-term residents.

“A lot of Conservatives, I think, thought the current regime in the council and in parliament was far too extreme for them. They didn’t like it.”

With the events of 14 June, however, Labour’s delight at Dent Coad’s election rapidly turned to widespread horror. When the fire struck, two working days after she had been declared the MP, she had no parliamentary office and no staff. A cramped room was quickly found for her and a couple of volunteer assistants borrowed from elsewhere in the party. On a whiteboard hanging on the back of her office door, someone has written in two colours of pen: “Bringing socialism to a constituency near you.”

Dent Coad’s maiden speech on 22 June was quietly delivered but damning: “The burnt carcass of Grenfell Tower speaks for itself, and has revealed the true face of Kensington. The mask has dropped. We have poverty, malnutrition, overcrowding, poor maintenance and, underlying this, a lack of care. The people who have been failed want justice and accountability, and an honest and transparent process to achieve it.”

“But – yeah,” she says now. “The mountain of work coming our way is just extraordinary.” She already has a queue of between 350 and 400 casework requests from constituents awaiting her attention, about 300 of which are related to Grenfell. “I’m trying to get an experienced caseworker in yesterday, just to start ploughing through it all.” Does she feel overwhelmed? “You can’t allow yourself to be overwhelmed. With something like that, you just have to tackle it.”

It is a huge task, all the same, for a woman who until a few weeks ago was a journalist and architectural historian writing a PhD on the authoritarian architecture of Franco’s Spain. Dent Coad was born in Chelsea; her father was a professor of medicine whose roots were in Spain but spent most of his childhood in Britain, her mother a vicar’s daughter who converted to Catholicism to marry him. She is the youngest of six, and all her other siblings have left the capital, “but I stayed, because London is definitely my thing”.

She was politicised at her convent school in Hammersmith, she says, where the headteacher, Mother Bunbury, encouraged students “to read everything, go to everything and make up your own minds. That opened my eyes rather, from about 15. I think that’s where it started for me.” Dent Coad became a journalist specialising in architecture and design, her interest in housing eventually leading her to run as a Labour councillor for the RBKC, where she has represented Golborne ward – just across Ladbroke Grove on the other side of the Westway from Grenfell – for 11 years.

She has campaigned on housing for years, writing a blog that has frequently criticised the council’s planning decisions and that, as recently as April highlighted Kensington’s “tale of two cities”. The poorer and more vulnerable communities of the borough, she wrote then, were “being squeezed out by voracious development to benefit the few and very wealthy”. Public spaces were being prettified and privatised, with little concern for the conditions in which the poorest lived.

Did she ever have any sense, after following housing conditions so closely for so many years, that a calamity such as Grenfell might be possible? “Oh, no. I never could have imagined that something of that scale could have happened.”

Dent Coad has faced some personal criticism over the fact that she sat for a time as an opposition representative on the board of Kensington and Chelsea’s tenant management organisation (TMO), which managed Grenfell on behalf of the council; her involvement in a housing scrutiny committee meant Dent Coad shared “collective responsibility” for the tower’s refurbishment work, Borwick told the Evening Standard.

The new MP angrily refutes the accusation, pointing out that she left the TMO in 2012, before the refurbishment programme was undertaken, and insisting that decisions on contracts and specifications were taken by cabinet members not committees.

“Let me tell you something,” she says. “That comment was a disgrace, and one of my colleagues got beaten up in the street because of it. I wasn’t on the committee at the time. I didn’t make any of the decisions. I didn’t sign the document.

“If I had been on the committee at that time I would have been agreeing to improve the lives of the people, and money being put aside for it. It’s not for us to ask about all the specifications.”

With the immediate needs of the survivors now finally being met, and an urgent review of safety in tower blocks under way, what is the biggest question that she believes the public inquiry has to answer?

“The point is: who signed off on that contract [to clad Glenfell]? And did they understand what was in the contract? Who specified that cladding? For me that’s the most important thing, because a cabinet member has to understand what he or she is signing off.”

She would also, inevitably, like to see tighter legislation and enforcement around construction standards. “Health and safety is not an albatross around the nation’s neck, as David Cameron called it. It keeps people alive. Safety shouldn’t be an aspiration.”

Does she feel, in that case, that she’s in the right place now, able as an MP to influence national legislation in ways that are not open to local councillors? “Well, it’s probably a good thing that there is somebody with a bit of background knowledge in here. I know enough about tower blocks and how they work, and they are not unsafe if they are properly built and maintained. They should be safer than terraced houses.”