A bonfire, a bonfire, a bonfire. David Cameron promised one as prime minister, as did Boris Johnson, as did Liz Truss when she ran for the highest office in the land. Conservative leaders come and go, but they all want a conflagration. Always of red tape, of course, the semi-mythical substance that is said to throttle business. The trouble is that, in the case of Grenfell Tower, it was human lives that burned. The 30-year pursuit of deregulation in the building industry demonstrably contributed to the killing of 72 people in their homes. It helped lead to the moment when a two-year-old boy died coughing and crying in his mother’s arms while she was on her phone to a firefighter, shortly before she too died.
Show Me the Bodies is a clear, moving and powerful account of Britain’s worst fire since the second world war, written by someone who knows what he’s talking about. Peter Apps, a journalist who specialises in housing, was already investigating – before the disaster – the dangerously combustible insulation and cladding used on British apartment blocks. “On the morning of the 14th June 2017,” he writes, “when I woke up to the images of Grenfell Tower on fire, my first thought was ‘it’s happened’.” He has since followed the public inquiry into the fire and the plight of those living in other buildings wrapped in materials similar to those that burned at Grenfell.
