In the days and weeks after the Grenfell Tower fire, North Ken was flooded with volunteers. Some came to join existing local groups working on the ground, ensuring people were safe, had somewhere to sleep, something to eat, someone to care as they waited, traumatised, for the worst news of their lives.
Some came with specific skills, organising the vast and staggeringly generous inflow of water, food, clothes, nappies, bedding – so much that we ran out of space to keep it where it could be accessed. Others came to offer legal advice, emotional or mental health support, some just to pitch in wherever they were needed. We had local pop stars cleaning loos in overstretched community spaces, or sitting and listening for hours with love and patience with people who only recognised their compassion. Our churches, mosques, synagogue and gurdwara gave exemplary, and trusted, care.
There were certainly gutter press in swarms – I will never forgive the Council for refusing to set up some kind of press verification. They rifled people’s bins, followed them, asked questions of traumatised people, waiting for them to cry so they could get the ‘money shot’.
We tolerated the fake Professor/pastor from East London because he seemed to get it, and spoke very well, and the ravenous press gravitated towards him. There were also what I came to call ‘missionaries’, people who came to take over, or to impose their views.
We suspected from earliest days that there were infiltrators. I jokingly said we could always spot them as they were relentlessly cheerful and patient, wore ‘casual’ clothes awkwardly, and had very shiny shoes or new trainers – probably police infiltrators.
Others came to agitate; from the earliest days we suspected that some of the supposed political agitators had come in bad faith to ensure the community would not unite. Some, probably, remain. We know who you are!
Of course we all know who weren’t there in numbers – senior Council officers and leading Tory Councillors. But that’s for another time.
Two days after the atrocity, the previous MP, a Tory, was interviewed for the Evening Standard. She was clearly appalled that thousands of her former supporters had voted for me; her majority of 7,631 was overturned, by 20 votes. She implied that, because I’d sat on a specific committee five years before the fire, I should take responsibility for it. I was verbally attacked in the street (not by local people who wanted to exchange hugs) and a friend was almost knocked unconscious for defending me. The ex MP was convinced there were going to be riots, and demanded armed police presence on the streets. Fortunately interventions by local community leaders convinced police that if they marched into the streets, where people were gathering, angry and traumatised, there would indeed be trouble; they backed off.
I knew or guessed when I was being followed by gutter press – they sat on a wall across the road from my house, they were shifty but blatant, and rude. Journalists from the mainstream press would call, text or email, or identify themselves if they caught me out and about. But there were others I just wasn’t sure about, who were either ‘kindly’ offering me a shoulder to cry on (they really don’t know me!) or lurked about in an obviously unobtrusive way. ‘Here to help if you need a friend’, pressing their phone number on me – straight from the spycops script.
I had heard elsewhere, though I found it hard to believe, that the government were saying ‘Grenfell could be more dangerous to us than Brexit’. They thought that when this atrocity and huge loss of human life began to be absorbed, the country (ie their voters), or at least North Ken, could turn on them. Social unrest, or riots, could ensue, threatening government. Hence the presence of potential MI5 ‘friendlies’.
I did get a bit paranoid. At one point I discussed it with a senior figure I could trust who worked on the ‘inside’. I asked ‘I think I’m being followed by MI5, am I going completely mad?’ They looked me straight in the eye and said, very slowly, ‘please watch yourself Emma’, followed by what I understood to be a long confirmatory single nod.
It was not the last time there was an orchestrated attack on my reputation. In November 2017 I launched a report on housing in RBKC post-Grenfell; it was shocking but also true, with references. At the very moment I was launching it in parliament another negative story was launched into the press. Again I was followed, harassed and slandered. A few months later, Open Democracy conducted research into the regular attacks I was subjected to. They found that a press officer from Theresa May’s team had left No 10 to set up a ‘PR’ business. He had bragged that he’d done ‘the Emma Dent Coad stuff’.
Another angle of attacks on the ‘Grenfell MP’ was from RBKC Council. In June 2019 I made a speech during the annual Grenfell debate, in which I repeated some of the stories that had been circulating – and some incidents which I had witnessed – about racism towards Grenfell bereaved and survivors. I’d already received threatening letters from a lead Tory Councillor on the subject, but this one came from the RBKC legal team. Of course, under parliamentary privilege, you can say pretty much anything in debates; I was entitled to speak out. While it was framed as ‘please give your evidence as a witness to these events’, it also felt threatening.
Soon after I put in a Subject Access Request, asking for copies of emails mentioning my name soon after I was elected, between senior officers and senior Councillors. Finally, after a six month campaign of negotiation and persistence, I received a 13 page document. It comprised 99% of black ink redactions, extract below:
I have no idea what they might have been saying about me but it clearly wasn’t nice and may have been actionable. Like many in North Ken, we have the constant presence of people we should be able to trust, but we can’t; it’s hardly surprising. The old playbook of ‘divide and rule’ has been played against us from day one, and we’re tired of working out who are here to support us, and who may be agitators sent over from their Vauxhall HQ, to ensure we never unite against those behind the Grenfell Tower atrocity.
I fear the local elections this May will be vicious and personal, and political antagonists will be out in force – maybe MI5? We’ll never know for sure.
But as I plough through the dark, painful and detailed writing process for my second book on Grenfell, on a cold day wearing three jumpers, at least I know – someone somewhere thinks I’m a very dangerous woman. And I laugh.