On the night of 14 June 2017, 72 people lost their lives at Grenfell when their homes were engulfed in flames.
In the years since there has been a so far often frustrating search for justice, with a public inquiry still yet to finish.
The bereaved, survivors and residents of Grenfell deserve to have the major figures in this disaster giving evidence before the inquiry and held accountable. That includes key politicians.
Of course, this isn’t about seeing politicians squirm. It’s about understanding what happened so we can stop it happening again.
If it fails to hear from key politicians the inquiry will end up half-baked - just one more let down for the bereaved, survivors and residents, after what will likely be more than five years of no accountability.
Yet it looks like that is exactly what is about to happen. The key politicians when it comes to the disaster are being let off the hook. Many of them are not being brought before the inquiry.
One is Boris Johnson.
He was mayor of London from 2008-2016, vital years in the run-up to Grenfell – and as mayor of London was responsible for London’s fire and rescue service.
This alone would be enough to justify him being brought before the inquiry. But what makes that a certainty is what he did to London’s fire service.
The years of Boris Johnson’s mayoralty are synonymous with cuts of breath-taking scale.
He drove through unprecedented cuts such as 10 fire stations closing their doors, the scrapping of 27 fire engines and the loss of nearly one in five London firefighter posts between 2010 and 2016 alone.
It is absolutely impossible to make cuts like these and have no effect on London Fire Brigade’s response to major incidents – such as Grenfell.
Indeed, on the night of the fire it took 38 minutes for a high-reaching aerial fire engine to reach Grenfell. Under the cuts forced through by Johnson the high reach appliances were cut from the list of engines sent immediately to fires of this type.
It isn’t like Johnson wasn’t warned about his cuts, either.
In 2013 a Labour London Assembly member asked him about the impact of cutting fire stations, fire engines and firefighter posts.
Johnson told him to “get stuffed”.
Failing to put key politicians like Johnson on the stand touches on a trap that the inquiry is in significant danger of falling in to.
The key root cause of the Grenfell Tower disaster is politicians cutting costs and deregulating. It is those politicians and their politics that should be the centre of the inquiry’s focus.
If the inquiry, as it is set to do, spends years questioning others and spends little or no time on politicians this takes the focus off them and puts it on others.
Individual firefighters and control staff, who I represent, have faced days and weeks of stringent questioning at the inquiry.
It is right that the inquiry hears from as many relevant witnesses as possible. But they were not responsible for Grenfell.
Firefighters crawled along smoke-filled corridors to save lives, in a burning tower which, as far as they knew, could have been about to collapse. Control staff tried to reassure victims of Grenfell who were to later lose their lives.
They had no role in the cuts or scrapping of standards around this disaster. They should not be the focus when it comes to finding out why this happened.
And the privilege of holding the office of Prime Minister should not allow Boris Johnson to escape public scrutiny on Grenfell.
Boris Johnson has a long list of situations where he has been careless, reckless, malevolent or a combination of all three.
Yet he seems to get away with it, time and time again.
72 people lost their lives for no good reason at Grenfell. This cannot be another one of those times.
