The Sunday Times Magazine • 23covering an area of three football fields,
and Theresa May wept in Downing Street
— though, unlike the Queen, the prime
minister only met firefighters and police at
the scene, not the grieving survivors.
The tower was still smouldering two
days later when a TV reporter chased
Gavin Barwell, May’s chief of staff, down
Whitehall to ask why he did not implement
the long-awaited building guidance review
(the same one that Pickles had put off ) in
his previous job as housing minister. It had
been “overshadowed” by a drive to build
more homes, Barwell agreed at the inquiry.
He is now a Conservative peer. Since the
tragedy the government has maintained the
line that the cladding on Grenfell did not
comply with official guidance.
Grenfell Tower did breach building
regulations, the inquiry ruled in 2020,
but the hearings have since revealed how
dangerous materials came to be widely
seen as compliant. Any criminal charges
will only follow after the inquiry’s final
report next year.
About a week after the first flames
flickered in the fridge in flat 16, police
formally confirmed that Omar, Farah and
Leena had died as well. They were found in
the stairwell, Farah still cradling her baby.
Kensington & Chelsea’s Tory leaders
quit within weeks, following angry scenes
in which protesters stormed the town hall.
London Fire Brigade’s chief, Dany Cotton,
who told the inquiry a cladding fire was as
unexpected as “a space shuttle [landing] in
front of the Shard”, resigned in December- The service told the inquiry it has
since trained 4,500 staff in high-rise fires,
improved 999 control room links and
brought in 15 ultra-long ladders and escape
hoods to protect residents in smoke-filled
environments.
It took four and a half years and a public
inquiry for the housing ministry to say it is
“deeply sorry” — but only for “insufficient
oversight” that companies “abused”.
bedrooms, guarding them. Sara, 13, returns
from counselling before our interview. She
takes out her memory box. There are burnt
baby photos of Zak in their Grenfell flat,
her mum’s wedding ring and her cousin
Mehdi’s marbles. Precious remnants.
Samira’s surviving niece is “doing really
well”. After school in west London she often
goes to visit her grandmother, as she used
to do with her big sister and her mum.
“They [the girls] were the centre of her
universe,” Samira says of her sister. Farah
“was funny. She was a foodie. She was
beautiful. She was annoying at times. She
was all those things. She was ours.”
The multibillion-pound corporations
made it feel “like our loved ones don’t
matter. It feels like they can just keep doing
what they want and no one is going to hold
them to account,” Samira says. “They can
do that and rip your whole world apart, rip
my niece’s whole world apart, and it just
doesn’t matter.”
Five years ago posters of Jessica and the
El-Wahabi children were on road signs,
playground fences and phone boxes. A ring
of tributes grew around the tower. One
placard simply asked: “Why?” It is still
there. Now we know the answer ■HANAN WAHABI
LOST HER BROTHER
AND HIS WHOLE
FAMILY: “I KNOW
IT HAS BEEN FIVE
YEARS BUT IT’S LIKE
I’M STUCK IN TIME”
Left: a poster for Jessica
Urbano Ramirez posted on
a tribute wall at the scene.
Above: her parents,
Ramiro and AdrianaThe tower remains shrouded in plastic,
a green heart the symbol of solidarityGrenfell and cladding campaigners found
the apology “disingenuous” and “deeply
offensive”, because the government still
won’t admit to failing to tighten rules it
knew were flawed.
The ramifications slowly emerged. First
up to 33,000 flats with Grenfell-type
cladding had to be stripped; then, as The
Sunday Times revealed in 2020, almost
200,000 high-rise homes were found with
other flammable materials. Only last month
the government quietly confirmed that up
to 138,000 further flats in mid-rise blocks
also need work. As lenders clamped down,
up to 1.5 million homeowners could no
longer sell or switch mortgages on their
flats. Some flat owners have received
fire-risk bills costing more than their homes.
The government has pledged £9.1 billion
for repairs, but just 21,000 of the 366,000
dangerous flats have been fixed to date.F
or Hanan Wahabi, who escaped with
her children but lost her brother and
his whole family, the pain is still fresh:
“I know it has been five years but it’s
like I’m stuck in time.” She kept
working but the trauma caused her to
step back from her senior teaching job
last year. For 18 months after the fire
Hanan’s family of four lived in one hotel
room. “It was like a pressure cooker,” she
says. She and Salah divorced.
Her children, Zak and Sara, now live with
her in a period terrace near the tower but not
near enough to see it. Sometimes Hanan still
finds herself driving “home” to Grenfell.
From the ashes they were given her
sister-in-law Faouzia’s tagine dish and
traditional Moroccan water jug, the burn
marks visible. In a velvet box Hanan keeps
the silver neck chain found on her brother
Abdulaziz’s remains. “He was like a dad to
me,” she says. “Pobrecita [poor dear]!” he had
teased her that final night for having to do
household chores after a long day at work.
Zak, now 21, found therapy in his husky,
Ice, gifted to him as a puppy shortly after
the fire. But not long ago Hanan found Zak
SWNS, GETTY IMAGES sleeping on the floor outside her and Sara’s