She won by just 20 votes in June’s general election. Four days later, Grenfell Tower went up in flames, and she’s been fighting for the victims ever since

For four days in June this year Emma Dent Coad was able to celebrate one of the more unlikely electoral victories in modern history. At the age of 62 she had, by a margin of 20 votes and after three recounts, become the first Labour MP ever to win her Kensington constituency in London. “For those four days,” she says now, somewhat wistfully, in her office in Westminster, “it was just amazing. I had strangers hugging me in the street, some who had never voted in their lives before, because they thought nothing would ever change.”

The victory was particularly sweet for Dent Coad, who had lived most of her life in the borough, in social housing, and who had been a minority voice on the local Tory council for the previous decade. During those years, she says she kept a little notebook of the ways she and her colleagues were patronised when they tried to speak about poverty in the country’s richest and most unequal local authority. She once raised the question of child malnutrition on one of the borough’s estates, she recalls, and a council member smiled and told her: “Labour loves the idea of rickets”.

“Kensington and Chelsea attracted a particular kind of Conservative,” she says. “They liked to think of the council as a one-party state. And they just thought they could laugh at us.” For half a week in June, Dent Coad was the one with the broadest grin. And then her reality changed.

The first the MP knew of the Grenfell Tower fire was the sound of helicopters over her home, a few streets away from the inferno. She got up and headed to the scene as soon as she realised what was happening. She knew a few families in the tower and had connections to many others. People immediately turned to their new MP for help and for answers. In the days and weeks and months that have followed, she has lived with the burnt-out tower block in her eyeline, and the burden of that expectation every day.

There have been three rounds of death threats – or maybe four by this morning, I haven’t looked yet

You don’t have to spend long talking to her to have a sense that it has taken a toll. “It is a tough thing,” she says, of the experience of that first day and what has followed. It is, she several times insists, not a story about her, “but I have been checked out, and I don’t have PTSD, thank heavens. I have just been diagnosed as very angry and sad. The anger is driving me, and the sadness doesn’t stop. I see the pain in people’s eyes when I visit them, and I have been to quite a lot of funerals. Not all of them, but as many as I can. It is the same feeling over and over. People you have known for years who have lost a close relative or friend in this terrible way...”

For arguing that the fire was not some act of God but a terrible unforeseen consequence of a particular cost-cutting ideology in the borough, she stands accused of “politicising the tragedy”. She is unrepentant. The day before we meet she launched a report she’s put together, “After Grenfell”, which collects statistical and anecdotal evidence of the scale of inequality in Kensington and Chelsea: the fact that 4,500 children are living in poverty, two-thirds of them in working families, while the median income in the borough is £140,000; the fact that life expectancy differs by a staggering 22 years between corners of the richest and poorest wards; the fact that in the epicentre of offshore property ownership there are 1,200 “long term empty homes”, 9,300 second homes and 2,354 families living in hostel or bed and breakfast accommodation. The report runs to 24 pages.

A day after its release, Dent Coad finds herself, however, not expanding on some of these troubling facts but defending herself against calls to resign. Hostility towards the report has, in her eyes, been twofold. First, the new Conservative council leaders dismissed it as “littered with typos” (not true) and containing nothing that is not already widely known. (To which she responds: “Well, if you have always known all this and have done nothing about it, then shame on you.”)

Second, there has been a series of attacks on her across the media based on something she wrote about the black Conservative London Assembly member Shaun Bailey. In a pre-election blog post seven years ago, Dent Coad quoted some North Kensington constituents’ view of Bailey as a “token ghetto boy”. The phrase, without quotation marks, had been picked up as evidence of racism. Dent Coad has apologised for the remark, but is in no doubt that the timing of the story is part of a campaign to discredit her fact-finding work in the wake of Grenfell, a campaign she believes has gone on ever since the fire.

There were many things she expected of her new life as a British parliamentarian back in June, Dent Coad tells me a little shakily, but she did not imagine that by Christmas she would have experienced “three rounds of death threats – or maybe four by this morning, I haven’t looked yet”.

She takes me reluctantly through the history. The first time it happened was after a comment from her defeated Conservative opponent, Victoria Borwick, suggesting that Dent Coad should take some responsibility for the fire because she had been on the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation when the fateful refurbishment of Grenfell was first discussed. She was, in fact, on the committee from 2008 until 2012, and welcomed a commitment to upgrade the building. “But between then and 2015 or 2016, when all of the decisions were made about the detail of the work that would be done, I wasn’t involved,” she says. She asked Borwick to correct the record but that didn’t happen. “They wanted to dip everyone’s hands in the blood, frankly,” she says, of the council’s desire to make this a “non-partisan” tragedy.

The accusation of culpability has been repeated twice subsequently, she says, and each time she has had another round of mostly online threats, which she has made known to the police. The verbal attacks on her were exacerbated by a “distasteful” joke she made about the royal family at a Labour fringe meeting. “Somebody did an analysis of all the Twitter hatred, and they said half of it came from these bots,” she says. “What kind of evil world are we living in?”

Meanwhile, the real-world challenges she is trying to highlight have only got worse. “They say there has been a culture change at the council,” she says, “but I don’t see it.” She points to the horror of a leaflet recently sent to residents by the Conservatives which includes a survey asking people to rate “how important to you and your family” the Grenfell Tower disaster and other “local issues” are, from “0 – not important at all” to “10 – very important”. This sounds, to Dent Coad, exactly like the same old council. “All the effort is still being put into arse-covering rather than trying to fix the problem.”

The sharpest end of that problem, almost inconceivably, remains stubbornly unresolved. In the week in which the death toll was finally settled at 71 and while the council still has nearly all its vaunted near-£300m surplus in the bank, only 26 of the families made homeless by Grenfell have been permanently housed; some 203 displaced households remain in hotels or B&B accommodation, including 226 children.

“They were saying people would be housed ‘by Christmas’. But that is now ‘an aspiration’,” she says. “Most in hotels are sharing one room, because the rooms they have been given are not connected, and they want their children safe with them.”

In all instances, Dent Coad says, of the people she visits, they are struggling with bureaucracy. She says she recently met a family where the daughter was a barrister and had had to take full-time leave from work just to deal with all the paperwork. And even now there is no single point of contact.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dent Coad with Jeremy Corbyn visit the scene the day after the Grenfell Tower fire. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

In some ways it can seem that Dent Coad has spent a whole lifetime readying herself for this challenge, but nevertheless it has overwhelmed her. She was born in Chelsea (“it wasn’t posh then,” she insists, though I’m not entirely convinced) the youngest of six. Her father, a “Spanish Catholic”, was a professor of medicine, her mother a vicar’s daughter who converted. She learned her politics, she says, at that rare thing, a free-thinking convent school. At election time the family would be variously represented by posters for all three main parties in the front window. She studied design at the Royal College of Art and subsequently wrote about architecture and the politics of planning for a variety of publications (“I wrote a lot about the social imperative of estates, for example,” she says. “I like the idea not only of listing buildings, but of listing social purpose.”)

And then the ceiling fell in at her home in North Kensington.

She had a shared owner tenancy with Notting Hill Housing Trust, and the collapsed ceiling resulted in a five-year legal battle with the trust, over responsibility for repair, which she eventually won. As she recalls this, you can imagine a slightly Erin Brockovich cast to her approach. She became a councillor, she says, first because she believed she could help others in similar stand-offs, tenants up against management companies who “employ surveyors who aren’t surveyors to come and tell you five times the toxic black mould on your wall is there because you do not open the window when you boil spaghetti”. She is no stranger to labyrinthine complaints procedures. “When people come to me with a shopping trolley full of legal folders I empathise with that,” she says. “Because I was once that woman.”

Her belief, having viewed the council and its housing policy at close quarters for more than a decade, was that a barely covert policy of social cleansing was occurring in the borough. People were being “developed out” of their homes, as more and more buildings were sold off for private development.

“There was a turning point in 2009 when [think-tank] Localis did this report on social housing, you can find it online,” she says. “That was the point where the language changed. Tories started using those buzz words to describe tenants, “social dependency” and “shirkers and workers” and all that.” Dent Coad used to play “Tory cliche bingo” in council meetings, ticking off the phrases one by one.

I wonder how confident she is that the inquiry into the fire – now delayed – and the ongoing police investigation will dwell on that “policy”?

“I don’t talk about individuals,” she says. “But there has to be a day of reckoning for whoever made those decisions about that building. We have to have faith that the inquiry or the criminal investigation will reveal that.”

And if Labour were in power, what are the things she would argue for first to address the structural inequalities she has described?

“Two basic things,” she says. “First, people using property purely as an investment, whether corporations or individuals, need to pay taxes.” She points to the multimillion-pound apartments “which are literally all bubble wrapped”, in which unused £80,000 kitchens are replaced every two years to keep them state-of-the-art. And second: “People need proper pay – a London living wage – for work they do. Two-thirds of people who get housing benefit in Kensington and Chelsea are in full-time jobs. We are forcing people to become welfare recipients, while subsiding employers.”

The commons chamber is a bear pit, honestly. Some of it is so personal and nasty

Awful and terrible as it was, does she still see the fire at Grenfell as an opportunity to establish that change?

“It has to be,” she says.

I wonder if there are things that she misses about her previous life, the one that would have carried on but for 20 votes the other way?

“My PhD for one thing,” she says, with half a smile. “I am halfway through, and I am determined to finish it.” She is researching architecture and political ideology under General Franco.

I realise as I’m talking to Dent Coad that in any normal interview with an MP just five months into the job I’d probably be asking how she has settled in. The question seems slightly beside the point. But still.

“How is Hogwarts? Around the offices of my colleagues, it’s been welcoming,” she says. “But the commons chamber is a bear pit, honestly. Some of it is so personal and nasty.”

She invited some school children to watch recently. One seven-year-old asked her afterwards: “Why do they all laugh when they are talking about sad things?”

Towards the end of our interview, Dent Coad becomes aware of her phone buzzing with messages, journalists asking her to respond to the Shaun Bailey story, emails of support, anonymised vitriol, the usual. She scrolls quickly through it.

“I have great friends,” she says. And then: “Social media is a despicable world. They want me back in my box.”

She half smiles again, somewhat wearily and warily, and scrolls down some more. “I am not getting back in my box,” she says.