London Mayor Sadiq Khan, now caught in the back-draft of the inferno that engulfed Grenfell Tower in a nanosecond, is arguably prone to virtue signalling.

He appears to love putting his moral values on the highest pedestal and, as the first ethnic minority mayor of London, and the first Muslim to become mayor of a major Western capital, he wears his soft-left progressiveness on his sleeve as if a badge of honour.

But there is nothing honourable about it.

Long before he was elected mayor a little over a year ago, Khan knew Grenfell Tower was a social housing rat hole, jammed with upwards of 600 mostly poor Muslims, and ripe for a disaster.

There had been scores of complaints going back years, and blogs that pulled no punches when it came to libel and slander.

Residents saw their low-rent existence as not worth the authorities' bother, and their frustrations levels were red-lining.

And with good reason.

Grenfell Tower, in essence, was 24 storeys of government-owned kindling wrapped in plastic-aluminum cladding that fired up a flame-throwing missile behind it.

The death toll is still uncertain, but it is catastrophic. Some 30 people have been confirmed dead, with upwards of 80 still missing.

When confronted last week by furious survivors wanting answers and not platitudes, Khan gave them platitudes.

"How many children died, and what are you doing to do about it?" asked an emotional seven-year-old schoolboy, all in the wake of a local member of parliament slamming the blaze an act of "corporate manslaughter" that called for people to be jailed.

Khan admitted that, yes, "lots of people died in the fire."

And then he switched off.

"There were a lot of brave firefighters and police and ambulance workers," said Khan.

Then another resident chimed in with, "Someone has to be held accountable. These deaths could have been prevented."

Again Khan ducked the issue, bringing into play again the quick reaction of response teams while ignoring direct calls from the angry crowd to address the cause of the conflagration.

As British fire protection expert Arnold Tarling told the CBC, "If I hear another politician saying lessons will be learnt, I will scream.

"It's just soundbites," he said. "It's just meaningless, just saying lessons will be learned when they've never been learned in the past."

But he was not done.

"It is terrible what happened," he added. "It needn't have happened. And the people responsible are either the politicians or their advisors. It need never have happened."

As stated at the outset, Sadiq Khan appears prone to virtue signaling and platitudes, and falls into it even after being called out on the inherent hypocrisy and shallowness of his statements.

When terror recently stuck London for the third time in three months, for example, he was lambasted by a formerly-supportive media for the banality of his response – like calling victims "innocents," and calling London "one of the safest places in the world" despite MI5 having the threat level hovering between severe and critical, the highest on the scale.

"Forget the meaningless platitudes," read the headline over an editorial in the Daily Mail.

"Banalities will no longer do," the editorial said. "We don't deserve to be patronized. What we want to hear from our political masters are not sermons about not letting the terrorists win, but what they are going to do to stop them."

Within days, however, came another sort of terror when Grenfell Tower went up in flames, and London's mayor offered up another heaping helping of political tripe.

Hence the understandable heightening of public outrage, and Friday's storming of the borough's town hall.

markbonokoski@gmail.com