Is it wrong to want to make political capital out of the horrendous human tragedy that was the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire)? Maybe. And yet there’s no doubt that politics had much to do with it, and in particular the political ideology that lay behind the various failures and criminality that have been revealed – or, in most cases, confirmed – by Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s Report on it, published yesterday.

In that Report the blame is cast wide, and is particularly scathing of the commercial firms that were responsible for the building, and in particular for the flammable outer cladding that was responsible for the spread of the fire to embrace nearly all of the Tower’s 24 storeys. Builders used cheap materials after deliberately falsifying the risk reports on them, ignored safety rules, and swept aside well-founded warnings from the tenants and their representatives. Some of those firms may be criminally prosecuted at a later date. We’ll see.

But there’s a political factor lying behind all this too. Large buildings are supposed to be regulated to prevent outcomes like the Grenfell Tower fire. A lot of this regulation falls on the shoulders of local authorities, which in this case was the impressively-named ‘Royal [sic] Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’; which also takes in Notting Hill, whose posh inhabitants apparently didn’t like looking out at an un-clad tower block, mainly inhabited by the working classes and immigrants, from the windows of their expensive town houses. You won’t be surprised to learn that the local Council there has been Tory since the area became fully gentrified in the 1960s. (I knew it before then. Remember the ‘Notting Hill Race Riots’?) That really does explain a lot. – But above even the ‘Royal’ Borough of Kensington, stands the national Government in Whitehall. And that bears a responsibility, too.

Enter, stage Right: Lord Pickles. Of course he wasn’t a Lord then – he was elevated in 2018 by Theresa May, for services to the Conservative Party – but he was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2010 to 2015. So he had the ultimate responsibility then for making sure that communities – and especially their housing – were safe.

Pickles was a bit of an anomaly, in a Conservative government dominated by the privileged classes. He wasn’t particularly privileged, for a start. He came from Keighley in Yorkshire, from a staunchly Labour family, before he switched to the Young Conservatives in 1968. (Where have we heard that before?) He didn’t attend a Public School, or Oxbridge, with his Wiki biography naming his university as ‘Leeds Beckett’, which I must say I hadn’t heard of. (I have now; it later became ‘Leeds Metropolitan’). He was active in local government in Yorkshire, but had no other substantial ‘job’, so far as I can gather, before he was selected and elected for the Brentwood Parliamentary constituency (far to the south in Essex) in 1992. So he came with considerable experience in the politics of municipal government; which no doubt is why David Cameron thought he’d make a good shoe-in as Local Government Minister. (Few of the posher boys in the higher reaches of his party had ever had to soil their hands with mundane matters like planning permissions and drains.)

So Pickles – take a look at the ‘official’ picture of him here –  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Pickles – was given the job; and appeared to have introduced a new social element into the make-up of the Conservative Party, which could be regarded as, in a way, ‘democratising’ it. Of course the ‘democracy’ in his case didn’t go very deep, and in fact it wasn’t so unusual – in the party that had clearly taken up the cause of the solid middle-middle class for years, and which had recently had the very middle-middle class Margaret Thatcher as its talismanic leader – to recruit people like Pickles as supporters, if not Ministers. So what Pickles brought to the Government of his time was not any strictly ‘popular’ approach to politics, but rather the peculiarly middle-class ideology that Thatcher had made famous, and which most Tories were wedded to by now. You’ll know the main ingredients of that: ‘free enterprise’, individualism, patriotism, ‘choice’; and all the rest of that highly seductive creed.

But there was also another element to it, which Pickles seems to have been particularly attracted to, perhaps deriving from his experience as a Conservative member of a predominantly Labour Council in Bradford. That was a deep-grained distrust of government interference – national or local – in local decisions. We still see this today in media like the Daily Mail, characterised and mocked as the ‘nanny state’, ‘elf’n’safety’, ‘red tape’, and even as a sort of tyranny, undermining people’s liberty and holding back enterprise. Pickles was clearly imbued with this libertarian philosophy, and indeed expressed it openly as a city Councillor. Which will have contributed to his disregard for, or his dismissal of, the warning signals that were coming to him when he was in Whitehall from Kensington, and have been a crucial factor leading up to the Grenfell Tower disaster.

At the time one commentator attributed that disaster to ‘a 21^st-century economy obsessed with outsourcing risk’. (See  https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/sep/06/from-the-archive-a-merry-go-round-of-buck-passing-inside-the-four-year-grenfell-inquiry-podcast.) ‘Outsourcing’: that’s the key. There was no-one to take responsibility. Capitalism could police itself. That, of course, is Thatcher’s legacy.

Many, inevitably, made fun of Pickles’s silly name and appearance. There’s also his behaviour before the Committee of Inquiry to be taken into account – expressing annoyance, for example, that he should be summonsed at all, when he had an important dinner date to attend. And there’s a mystery surrounding a short period in his parliamentary career, when he disappeared from public view. (Some smelled a scandal.) But he was no less important, for all that. Several MPs today are asking for his baronetcy to be taken from him.