The poor, the black, the white working class, underprivileged women — these were the people the prime minister said she would put first when she took power. Yet in their hour of need in north Kensington she had nothing to say to them. On her first visit to the scene of the Grenfell Tower disaster she didn’t even meet victims or their families.

Her two subsequent visits, hastily arranged the next day, seemed only to stir anger among locals complaining of a lack of co-ordinated disaster relief. As some staged protests, the belated grant of £5m of taxpayers’ cash seemed overdue and the least they could expect.

The tower contains uncounted dead. The survivors are disoriented and displaced. As Theresa May struggles to find a