What happened at Grenfell Tower was appalling and important. It was also very complicated. If you ask people where you can find out about the truth of Grenfell, many of them will say “O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books.” The LRB filled most of its edition on June 7 with a 60,000 word article by Andrew O’Hagan, in which he set out to analyse what happened.

It’s a detailed, moving account of a tragedy, but in my view it also contains serious errors of judgement - particularly in its treatment of the council and local activists. This article questions the freedom that the LRB gave O’Hagan, and its failure to correct the flawed judgements that resulted from it.

[Updated January 2022]

“In every situation pertaining to be a public event, people, often with the best intentions, tell lies. They want the story to be the story they want it to be, and no group is more typical of that tendency than reporters.”

When the novelist Andrew O’Hagan set out to tell the story of Grenfell, one of his motivations was to counter the simplifications promoted by government ministers, press coverage, and gossip on social media. “The council was ‘callous’, ‘cruel’, ‘uncaring’ and ‘unaware’; it was ‘out of touch’ and ‘it didn’t listen to the residents’.”

As a councillor told O’Hagan, “That’s the narrative. And the government was keen to establish it too.”

In The Tower O’Hagan set out to correct that narrative – “My story is just one writer’s response to nearly a full year’s worth of universal media agreement.” There he is, David taking on Goliath – but he does have the London Review of Books (LRB) behind him.

The world of readers divides into two groups – those who have time for the LRB, and those who don’t. When I retired from teaching, I moved from one camp into the other. Finally, I had time to sit back and enjoy the pleasures of the long read. The LRB may occupy a small niche, but it’s not a modest one:

“The London Review of Books is Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers…in the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired round the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance.”

In recent months, while the mainstream press reported the daily antics of Brexit negotiator David Frost, the LRB ran a series of three articles by Perry Anderson, tracing the development of the European Union through its history in intricate detail. You get the chance to do that properly, with fifty thousand words.

It’s not just about length. The LRB has a proud tradition of tough editing, of being prepared to challenge popular or powerful points of view. After 9/11, they published Mary Beard’s observation that some people felt that “America had it coming.” They published Mearsteimer and Walt’s analysis of “The Israel Lobby” in 2006, and Seymour Hersh’s contention that the Turkish government – rather than the Syrian government – were responsible for a sarin attack in Damascus in 2014.

A key text in the LRB’s gospel of editorial independence is the case of Life After Marriage, Al Alvarez’ memoir of his divorce. Karl Miller, editor of the LRB, asked Alvarez’s ex-wife Ursula Creagh to review it. Frank Kermode, eminent critic and regular LRB contributor, was a friend of Alvarez, and wrote to Miller to protest that his choice of reviewer threatened the LRB’s “reputation for unprejudiced comment.” Miller refused to back down, and suggested that they have nothing further to do with each other. Peace was eventually restored, and Kermode remained a regular and valued contributor until he died in 2010, but the LRB prided itself on having stuck to its principles.  

 The assumption is that LRB readers are intelligent adults. They can be presented with challenging views, which can then be balanced against alternative interpretations, and checked against differing selections of evidence. Articles don’t exist in isolation. They are followed by letters from an expert, articulate readership, which allows each reader to form their own view of any particular issue. Except, it seems, for Grenfell.

The Grenfell coverage was always going to be different. The average length of LRB articles is just over 3,500 words. In exceptional circumstances, this may extend to over 10,000. The Grenfell piece was 60,000 words, dominating a single issue.

It was written by Andrew O’Hagan, a respected novelist who’s worked with the LRB for over thirty years. In scale, this project was not so much The Old Man and the Sea, more like Middlemarch. It made sense to set it up as a piece of journalistic teamwork, with the lead author supported by helpers, many of them locals on the ground.

Melanie Coles, a teacher, wrote in a letter to the LRB (21.6.18) that she was “reassured by the fact that at least two people who lived locally were on O’Hagan’s team.” This was the text that she received, inviting her to get involved: “I’m asking the community to help me as only they can, to defy years of prejudice and corruption in local and national government, and let me tell the truth of Grenfell going back years.”

So there’s a team. But then there isn’t. Exactly when, how and why this change occurred is not analysed, but this is how it looks to O’Hagan: “I left the office and ended up on my own again, testing everything that was said against what actually happened…and I saw something: a great many people, many of them appearing in the media every day, were spinning a series of beliefs and wishes into a great concatenation of ‘facts’.”

The journalist team has become the solitary writer, developing his own ideas separate from the people around him – and in many cases diametrically opposed to them. Just as the method changes, so too do the attitudes. The council leaders become decent blokes, misunderstood in their concern to benefit the local community; the activists are no longer victims of justice, but enraged campaigners who refuse to get involved in dialogue and pay insufficient attention to the reality around them.

Which came first – the change in method or the change of view? We aren’t told, but what’s certain is that O’Hagan sees his transition to solitary writer as a gain:

 “Initially, like everyone else, I felt angered by the sight of the burning building. In time, hoping to get to the bottom of what happened there, I set up an office near the tower and took on researchers so that we could examine everything…I came with my agenda and I wrote to everyone and I briefed my colleagues – ‘let’s get the bastards who did this’ – and I left enthused by the general outrage, and by the people on the ground who appeared to be saying the right thing.”

 Saint Paul rues his earlier enthusiasm, before he saw the light.

 “And then I listened more closely, and I began to notice the inventions, and I would check what was being said against the documents and the emails, and I could see the manipulations, great and small, but persistent.”

 Which seems to set us up for a series of stunning revelations, detailed analysis of information which exposes the emptiness of current views. But what we get is a different set of prejudices, hardened by the messianic zeal of the solitary writer, who no longer needs to check what he’s saying against the experience of others, particularly if those others live in the area, or were tenants of Grenfell Tower. That’s a serious charge, and this is complex territory, so I’ll confine myself to O’Hagan’s presentation of two key groups – the leaders of the council, and the activists – and his analysis of the relationship between them.     

The Council Leaders

“As a writer, you try not to be swayed by people’s niceness…I found I liked Paget-Brown.” O’Hagan wants it both ways; he is the maverick writer, whose judgement cannot be swayed – but he also wants it on record that he’s talked to these people, and enjoyed their company. But that concern to defend their decency can lead him into caricature.

In the article he quoted Anna Minton’s Big Capital, with its account of current development: “The zeal with which so many councils are embracing the demolition and rebuild agenda means a rapid reshaping of London is underway…” which seems clear enough, until O’Hagan exclaims: “But does this amount to a case for mass murder?”

As Minton explained, in a letter to the LRB (5.7.18) it’s not as simple as that. O’Hagan had asserted that there was “nothing to support the view that these councillors were corrupt or trying to harm residents.” Minton insists that the concentration on personal probity is not enough:

“This is another false opposition. Exclusion from the democratic process is not about actual corruption but the opaque processes which make it possible for councils, developers and lobbyists to make unpopular decisions without public participation…Feilding-Mellen had a widely reported, controversial history as a property developer in Scotland and Norfolk, in which his failure to listen to the views of local residents has featured repeatedly.”

O’Hagan had presented a key charge:

“I put it to him that some critics believe he only agreed to the refurbishment of the tower to make it look nicer for those in the expensive houses nearby.

‘I just don’t know what to say to that’ he said. ‘I’ve got letters from people in the tower thanking us for the job. Residents took me round their flats and it breaks my heart to think of it. They asked for this refurbishment. The request was coming from them.’ ”

And that’s it. Really? Since when has The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) been responding to spontaneous requests for alterations demanded by some of its poorest residents? How exactly was that demand expressed?

There is another account of the roots of this refurbishment, provided by Architects for Social Housing (ASH). Their report documents the planning process which preceded the refurbishment. In 2009 Urban Initiatives Studio presented RBKC with their vision of the future for this area: “The Far-Sighted Option aims to maximise overall value in the long run and create a high quality new neighbourhood.” And where does Grenfell Tower fit into this?

“We considered that the appearance of the building and the way in which it meets the ground blights much of the area east of Latimer Road Station...On balance our preferred approach is to assume demolition.”

The financial crash led to a fall in house prices, and perhaps for that reason RBKC turned down the “Far-Sighted Option” and settled for the “Early Value Option”, which envisaged more superficial change:

“The changes to the existing tower will improve its appearance, especially when viewed from the surrounding area.” An artist’s impression of a shiny new tower was attached, and when the work was complete Nicholas Paget-Brown confirmed that the goal had been achieved: “It is remarkable to see first-hand how the cladding has lifted the appearance of the tower.” 

O’Hagan had received a copy of the ASH report, and had spoken to one of its authors, but none of that evidence surfaces in his account.

He does, though, have to deal with allegations that the spread of the Grenfell fire was aided by the use of substandard materials. O’Hagan does not see this as a serious charge.

“The suggestion that Feilding-Mellen and others at the council pushed for cheaper and less safe cladding – a hallmark of media coverage since the fire – is fully disproved by the string of emails between those individuals.”

It’s very hard to prove a negative. Fifty emails about cladding which don’t mention saving costs don’t prove that that wasn’t happening; all it takes is one to prove that it was. And that email exists.

The housing chain of command is complicated. RBKC have overall responsibility, but day-to-day management is delegated to the Tenant Management Organisation (TMO). They sent Feilding-Mellen an email saying that they hoped to “achieve savings by negotiating with the planners over the cladding material (aluminium instead of zinc).” Feilding-Mellen said later that he didn’t know the difference, and he told the police in August 2018 that he was only aware of this alteration after the fire. Three months later he told the public enquiry that he had received this email before the fire but hadn’t registered its significance.

Which sounds reasonable. We’ve all skimmed emails, and missed something significant which caused subsequent regret. What’s interesting is not Feilding-Mellen’s carelessness but O’Hagan’s categorical insistence that Feilding-Mellen was innocent of any responsibility for this crucial change, and his confidence in his own grasp of the evidence. Didn’t he consider that there might be emails he wasn’t shown?

O’Hagan argued that control over the quality of materials was the responsibility of manufacturers and builders; like many other councils, RBKC was helpless to control that kind of issue. That wasn’t their responsibility.  

But they were not like other councils. On August 9, 2018, The Guardian reported that the TMO had received specific warnings from the fire service, and from an independent fire risk assessor. In June 2016 the assessor recommended action on more than forty “high-risk” issues. In October 2016 it asked why action had not been taken on more than twenty of these. In November 2016 the Fire and Emergency Planning Authority highlighted problems regarding fire doors and the possible spread of smoke, and demanded action by May 2017 (a month before the fire). A responsible council would have acted differently, and have saved many lives.

The Activists

The people who get the roughest deal are the activists. In O’Hagan’s view, they’re clearly distinguished from the residents, a decent group who have no taste for agitation – although that crude distinction has since been strongly questioned. For O’Hagan the activists are a small, unrepresentative bunch who make a lot of noise but don’t know what they’re talking about:

“In any event, whatever the arguments, the members of the group, who would come to be seen as the wise men and women of the disaster, had a long history of objecting to the council and its representatives…

…a great deal of material, all of it characterized by a fundamental assumption of guilt, and many errors…

…I met with countless activists, and recorded what they said, checking it as I did with every witness. They had loud voices and good causes but what they didn’t have was facts…

…I liked my cups of tea with the activists and was sad to disappoint them. But I knew they’d be OK: public opinion, that great and ceaseless legislator or fairness, was on their side…”

 There isn’t much argument going on here. He could offer us specific weaknesses in the activists’ case, particular pieces of evidence which they disregard, but he doesn’t, settling instead for a breezy assumption that these people can safely be ignored. 

 In the June 21 edition of LRB two of the activists got the right of reply. It was a long, clear letter, which argued that O’Hagan had caricatured the Grenfell activists. Amazingly, given the extreme nature of the opposed views, the LRB left it to O’Hagan to adjudicate in this dispute:

“In reply to Grace Benton and Flora Neve, I would say simply that people can have their own opinions but they can’t have their own facts.”

 The loftiness of that “simply” raises O’Hagan above the fray, where he can clearly see what’s going on. They’ve got the opinions; guess who’s got the facts? But we are never told which pieces of evidence the activists have chosen to ignore. The basic argument is “They’re wrong, and I’m right – because I know I am.” That’s not what we expect from the LRB.  

 O’Hagan went on:

“Benton and Neve are right to defend the Grenfell Action Group; their basic mission was an admirable one, to protect the rights of tenants. But in my analysis their hatred of the Tories overshadowed their ability to bring about change. They spoke effectively (and still do) to their supporters, but they couldn’t build relationships with the other side…”

And RBKC, how did they do on that criterion? Were they good at building relationships “with the other side”? The dialogue between council and residents isn’t a conversation between equals. It’s a power relationship, in which RBKC not only make the decisions, but also decide how much they will listen to residents. In this particular case, the answer is “not much.” Which helps to explain the anger with which some residents expressed their criticisms of the council, because previous attempts to put their case had been ignored.

This was pursued in the Talking Politics podcast (20.6.18), in which David Runciman interviewed O’Hagan about his article and the controversy it has aroused. Runciman gently suggested that the failure of the council to listen might outweigh the failure of activists to put their case, and O’Hagan rapidly agreed. But neither of them registered that this represented a significant change of attitude from the stance he had adopted in the original article and subsequent debate.

This political aspect, about who has power and how it’s used, was the core of Benton and Neve’s second complaint. O’Hagan had accused them of being ‘political’ while he had ignored the political dimension within which RBKC operated. His reply gave no sign that he understood that criticism, since he offered no response. 

‘Political’, for O’Hagan, is a dirty word. His heroes are the people who want nothing to do with that stuff, innocents with their purity intact. “Hassan had lost everything but he didn’t want to be on any committee or join any delegation; he didn’t want to meet the prime minister or make the fire be about something else. He just wanted answers to his questions.”

And somehow O’Hagan knows that the answers Hassan seeks won’t be in any way connected with the world of politics.

“Several of the residents we spoke to – Antonio Roncolato, Karim Mussilhy, the Alvest family – were sympathetic to Grenfell United, the ‘bereaved, survivors and community’ group that has the ear of the prime minister, which they filled (both ears) with stories of how much they hate the council. Many of the survivors I spoke to had nothing to do with the group…”

The cheeky flourish of “(both ears)” indicates that objective analysis is being abandoned for the enjoyment of caricature. O’Hagan is for the non-political residents and against the Grenfell United sympathisers, but he would have got a fuller picture if he’d listened to what the other camp had to say.  Antonio Roncolato, for instance, doesn’t strike me as an impatient fantasist. He had lived on the 20th floor of Grenfell for 27 years. He was rescued by firemen after waiting for six hours: “I kept thinking if I remained calm and acted rationally that I would come out of this alive.”

Roncolato told the public enquiry that many residents had been unhappy about plans to relocate gas boilers into the building’s corridors. “Those residents who did not speak up were bullied into having the new boiler installed in the hallway.” The TMO had been reluctant to meet tenants: “The meetings were often tense and residents would walk out.” (The Guardian 4.10.18)

It’s not O’Hagan’s fault that he doesn’t address this testimony, published months after his article. But he did speak to Roncolato, and there’s no evidence that he asked him for his views on consultation. If he wanted the fullest picture, why not ask the residents about their relationship with the council?

Didn’t he worry that he might be missing something? Given the original employment of researchers (“so that we could examine everything”) it would not be surprising if O’Hagan’s adoption of a solitary role were to be accompanied by some anxiety as to whether or not he was right. On the contrary, it seems to have solidified his confidence in his own judgement.

In the podcast, Runciman treats this as an entirely positive progression, with O’Hagan moving from unthinking shared anger towards a more considered, independent view. I’d argue that there are risks as well as advantages in that isolation. 

He doesn’t acknowledge insight or assistance from anyone else, despite clear evidence that he’s received plenty. It’s a romantic, old-fashioned view of the solitary seer, and it contrasts with the approach of many contemporary novelists – Arundhati Roy, for example, or Jennifer Egan – whose acknowledgements of assistance are long and detailed. They don’t see listening to others as a weakness; it’s the surest way of getting to the truth.  

Early in the podcast, O’Hagan describes “the sense of the individual writer”, who faces a crucial choice: “You either please the crowd, or you interrogate the data.”

At the end of it, he returns to this crude, dangerous opposition between the sensitive individual and the unthinking crowd, insisting that he stands by his position “because I found it genuinely, and not from a place of political bias.” Are those the only alternatives? Could there be a form of bias which doesn’t have political roots? Might a consistent anti-political stance create a bias of its own?   

 In O’Hagan’s view “the public inquiry that May set up would be a whitewash and I decided to examine the council’s actions for myself.” It’s taken its time, but the Grenfell Tower Inquiry has not been a whitewash. In the three years since the LRB published O’Hagan’s article, we’ve learnt a lot. His initial outrage, that the council were being uniquely blamed for a complex combination of errors, has been entirely vindicated. The Inquiry has heard about building contractors aware of fires but failing to react, cladding companies selling materials they knew were unsafe, savage cuts to the resources available for regulation. On top of that are numerous failings by national government, vividly demonstrated in their failure to respond to the cladding crisis across the country.  

But the new information doesn’t support O’Hagan’s account of decent councillors trying to do their best. Here’s a selection of headlines arising from the inquiry over the last year: “Grenfell landlord ‘held secret meeting to cut costs’…Residents and fire chiefs gave council warning on Grenfell…Grenfell residents say council treated them as ‘sub-citizens’ …Grenfell’s smoke ventilation system unrepaired for five years…Councillor was told of plan to cut cladding costs before Grenfell fire…Council ‘lacked humanity’, housing chief admits…Grenfell management boss ‘kept board in dark’ about fire safety issues.”

There’s the council, and the activist tenants. O’Hagan forms his view of each group, and I go through the reports of the enquiry, and the growing mound of written testimony, to check whether or not he’s right. But then, in September 2021, we received fresh evidence. It’s almost too good to be true – a film record of the relationship between these two groups. It shows meetings between the TMO and the residents, from 2015, two years before the fire. Even better, this is not rogue footage, surreptitiously recorded by troublemakers; it’s an official record, filmed by Constantine Gras, a local artist who’s been employed by the TMO to provide a promotional record of the refurbishment. Grenfell: The Untold Story was shown on Channel 4 on September 8th, 2021.   

In these meetings the tenants are articulate and angry, but with good reason. They’ve repeatedly asked questions and pointed out how the refurbishment has departed from the original plans, but have received no response. In a survey they’ve carried out, they report that 46% of tenants feel that they’ve been ignored by the landlord. Sheila says “But never ever once have you heard them mention a human being who lives there. It’s all about the building. It’s all about that.”

The shots of TMO representatives at the meeting bear that out. They look distant and embarrassed, would clearly prefer to be elsewhere, and totally fail to respond to the serious concerns which are being raised – problems with the lifts, with water, with gaps around the windows and shoddy workmanship, while workmen are entering tenants’ homes and working on their flats without permission. Nowhere do the TMO representatives seriously address the issues which will be vital two years later. Many of the most eloquent voices at these meetings belong to residents who will later die in the fire.  

London Review of Books

 I wonder about what’s happening inside the LRB. Giving O’Hagan carte blanche to work on his own, to decide which angles his 60,000 word piece will take, frees up a lot of editorial time. Were none of these critical minds concerned by the sudden change in working method, the abrupt change in direction?

When the piece came out, O’Hagan’s line was unhesitatingly backed. The teaser on the front cover read: “So we wiped our eyes, and blamed the council.”

But when the letters came in, and O’Hagan airily dismissed the concerns of Benton and Neve, didn’t anyone in this nest of ferocious editors worry that important points were being missed?

And now, as the evidence accumulates to confirm that the activists had serious concerns which were ignored, and the councillors failed to consider health and safety as they plotted to cut costs, somebody within the LRB must surely be asking “Did O’Hagan get some things wrong? Did we – in giving him total freedom – also get something wrong?” If they had made a mistake, how would they know?

You might think that this piece should be appearing in the LRB. I thought so too. I sent them an earlier version of this article, in August 2018. Alice Spawls, assistant editor, wrote back saying “We can’t publish pieces about things we’ve carried.”

Which I found gobsmacking. No, you don’t routinely want articles feeding off other articles. But if you make space for a 60,000 word article which has serious flaws, it’s going to take time and space to explain those. The normal “space for reactions” – the following two editions – had already been taken up, rightly, by people directly affected.

“I hope the debate will continue elsewhere”, she said. But which debate? The Grenfell debate? Or the “How did the LRB cover Grenfell?” debate. Because the latter really belongs with the LRB, as I was informed by one publication which read this article and responded “I’m not sure that it’s our job to answer a piece that ran in the LRB. This is such a specific response to the Andrew O’Hagan piece, it should go to the LRB. It would be weird for us to run it.” They clearly didn’t share the assumption that you can’t publish pieces about previous articles  you’ve published.  

But it limited my options about where to go next. As evidence emerged from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, the faults in O’Hagan’s approach were demonstrated more clearly. I wrote a letter to the LRB (19.11.20) suggesting that in the light of that evidence they might go back over that ground, to offer some corrections and apologies. They didn’t publish that, so I wrote again to the editor, a detailed two-page letter, not for publication  (22.12.20), explaining the ways in which I thought they had departed from their own high standards, and asking what they thought. I received no reply.

Back in 2018 Alice Spawls had written: “I’m sure Andrew O’Hagan’s piece won’t be the last thing we publish on Grenfell. But the next piece, when we have it, will be making its own arguments.”

I’ve seen nothing in the LRB on Grenfell during that time, and no sign that anyone in the organisation has had second thoughts about O’Hagan’s article, despite accumulating evidence which suggests that on some issues he was seriously wrong.

During 2021 I was revising this article, to take account of the recent evidence, and before sending it out to other outlets I wanted to guard against the response I’d had before, which assumed that its proper place was with the LRB. So I wrote again to Alice Spawls, who had in the meantime succeeded May-Kay Wilmers as joint editor. I enclosed the revised article, asking if she had any response, since that would be helpful to explain to other outlets why this piece would not be carried in the LRB. That was four months ago, but Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas seems happy to settle for “no comment.” My  New Year resolution is that they may be persuaded to look again at their version of the Grenfell story.   

Paul Francis

January 2022                     

Sources (links open in a new window)

Andrew O’Hagan,  The Tower, in LRB (7.6.18), and subsequent correspondence (21.6.18 and 5.7.18)

ASH (Architects for Social Housing) report – The Truth about Grenfell Tower  (21.7.17)

Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman and Andrew O’Hagan (20.6.18)

The Guardian stories, individually referenced in the text.

 Grenfell: The Untold Story, shown on Channel 4 on September 8th, 2021.