Sir Martin Moore-Bick
The 72-year-old chairman of the public inquiry retired as vice-president of the court of appeal in December 2016. Educated at a grammar school in Tunbridge Wells and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, most of his practice as a barrister and time as a judge of the commercial court involved technical cases related to shipping and transport. That knowledge of contract law is expected to come to the fore in the second phase of the inquiry, which will investigate the overlapping responsibilities around the Grenfell Tower renovation. While his legal expertise was never in doubt, he faced a greater challenge in winning the confidence of bereaved families.
Dany Cotton
The commissioner of the London fire brigade (LFB) was only six months into the top job when she was woken at her Kent home and called to Grenfell. She angered survivors when she told the inquiry she wouldn’t have done anything different on the night of 14 June 2017 and that planning for a cladding fire like Grenfell would have been like planning for a space shuttle landing on the Shard. She is due to retire next April after 32 years’ service.
Michael Dowden
A watch manager at North Kensington fire station who happened to be on shift when the fire was called in. He was the first incident commander on the scene. He had been in the LFB for 14 years but given his relatively junior rank he should not have been in charge of a 20-pump fire, which is the level it was at when he was stood down at 1.50am. His apparent failure to gather information about what was happening as the blaze developed and order an earlier evacuation was criticised by Moore-Bick.
Matt Wrack
The secretary general of the Fire Brigades Union represents the rank and file. He has said firefighters are braced for a “stitch-up” and that his members will rally around Michael Dowden, the watch manager who became the first commander on the scene. Wrack began his service as a firefighter in 1983 in Silvertown, east London, and then served in Kingsland station in Hackney. He was a lead organiser during the FBU strike over pay in 2002 and has seen both of the stations he worked at closed as a result of cuts.
Behailu Kebede
The minicab driver in whose Grenfell Tower flat the fire broke out, was turned into a scapegoat by some media before the inquiry. Originally from Ethiopia, he had lived in the tower for 25 years. He was woken by a fire alarm and discovered smoke billowing from behind a Hotpoint fridge freezer in his kitchen. He phoned 999 and banged on his neighbours’ doors on the fourth floor to warn them. “Whatever the origin of the initial fire, the evidence indicates that it was accidental,” the report states. “Mr Kebede, in particular, bears no blame for what occurred in his flat, much less for the catastrophic events that followed.”
Natasha Elcock
The chair of Grenfell United, which represents most of the bereaved and survivors was trapped in the building and only escaped with her partner and six-year-old daughter when the flames were roaring through her 11th-floor kitchen window. The mother of three has led the survivors group since the summer of 2018.
