The LRB has exposed Grenfell’s awkward political facts

Andrew O’Hagan of the London Review of Books did something very valuable this week: he re-complicated Grenfell. His 60,000-word piece ‘The Tower’, which takes up the entire current issue of LRB, wrestles the Grenfell calamity from the infantile moralising of Corbynistas and much of the commentariat, and reminds us that this was a strange and complex and horrific event that is not bendable to simplistic point-scoring. And of course he’s being pilloried for having done this, for daring to suggest the Grenfell horror isn’t a black-and-white one.

His piece is a thorough account of both the fire and its fallout. It makes for grim reading. And it has proven explosive because it calls into question the childish reading of Grenfell as the handiwork of nasty Tories or greedy rich people that some on the left have breathlessly promoted over the past year. You remember: Labour MP Clive Lewis tweeting ‘Burn neoliberalism, not people’; Polly