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The Final Cut
We were on holiday in Portugal when news of the Grenfell Tower fire broke. As such, we probably didn't get the wall-to-wall coverage a major incident in London would provide to a domestic audience, although we certainly gleaned the grim details and the abject failure by the Prime Minister in visiting emergency services but not victims. (In contrast, the Queen did visit; but I don't think that's especially comparable. She's explicitly not a political figure and her privilege - like it or not - stems from a different provenance. Though I do wonder whether the folk memory of the bombing of Buckingham Palace in World War 2 - and the 1992 Windsor Castle fire - might have played their part.) Blair or Cameron, or even Brown, would have done better.
May's role, however, just reminded me more and more of Francis Urquhart in The Final Cut. When it was first broadcast in 1995, I felt it was a weak final instalment of the trilogy; the contemptuous attitudes of Urquhart and his government had gone beyond satire. I re-watched it this weekend, and it no longer seems so unbelievably bitter, because we all know that life itself has gone beyond satire in the last year or so. Urquhart's undoing is the death of a schoolgirl in a shoot-out between British troops and a paramilitary group in Cyprus, in a situation brought about directly as a result of his orders to the armed forces, which in turn is indirectly intended to benefit himself financially.
Neither the poor owner of the faulty fridge-freezer nor the manufacturer can be held responsible for the resulting inferno beyond a single flat; what idiocy produced a process that allowed the building to be refurbished with the materials that were used? I imagine the local council's motivation was cost-cutting rather than malevolence (and, as I don't know the chronology, they may be able to claim they were using cladding on the basis that other councils had used it too); but it inevitably brings to mind the corruption of T Dan Smith. The council plainly had no effective plan for a major incident that required re-housing, either. Unlike Urquhart, this tragedy isn't May's fault personally; but May has played her part in creating the culture that has allowed it to happen. It seems to me that her legacy is already set: the wheels are coming off, one aspect of the country after another (security, housing, NHS) falling apart after years of austerity and weakening of safeguards.
May's role, however, just reminded me more and more of Francis Urquhart in The Final Cut. When it was first broadcast in 1995, I felt it was a weak final instalment of the trilogy; the contemptuous attitudes of Urquhart and his government had gone beyond satire. I re-watched it this weekend, and it no longer seems so unbelievably bitter, because we all know that life itself has gone beyond satire in the last year or so. Urquhart's undoing is the death of a schoolgirl in a shoot-out between British troops and a paramilitary group in Cyprus, in a situation brought about directly as a result of his orders to the armed forces, which in turn is indirectly intended to benefit himself financially.
Neither the poor owner of the faulty fridge-freezer nor the manufacturer can be held responsible for the resulting inferno beyond a single flat; what idiocy produced a process that allowed the building to be refurbished with the materials that were used? I imagine the local council's motivation was cost-cutting rather than malevolence (and, as I don't know the chronology, they may be able to claim they were using cladding on the basis that other councils had used it too); but it inevitably brings to mind the corruption of T Dan Smith. The council plainly had no effective plan for a major incident that required re-housing, either. Unlike Urquhart, this tragedy isn't May's fault personally; but May has played her part in creating the culture that has allowed it to happen. It seems to me that her legacy is already set: the wheels are coming off, one aspect of the country after another (security, housing, NHS) falling apart after years of austerity and weakening of safeguards.