Most days outside the colonnaded porch and white stucco of London’s 121 Westbourne Terrace, you’ll find a throng of faces staring back at you. Blown up, laminated photos of the dead, held aloft solemnly by their bereaved relatives when the Covid Inquiry is sitting within. Some people there are semi-permanent sentinels, stationing themselves outside on camping chairs to ensure they don’t miss a single witness entering the hearings.
Their anger is raw. Partygate, Eat Out to Help Out, Boris Johnson’s hospital handshakes, the wait to impose lockdowns, the haste with which they were lifted… all these are the animating political events of their lives. Having sat in on some of the hearings, I learned that no amount of legal interrogation, document disclosure or Dominic Cummings swear-mongering would ease the pain in the public gallery.
And so it turned out. Some members of the official group, Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice, were disappointed by the inquiry’s first report last year, which, they suggested, pulled its political punches regarding the previous government’s failings. “I think it’s disgraceful, disgusting,” said Charles Persinger, whose wife and mother died of Covid within six weeks of each other.
A similar dynamic rubbles the long and painful path of other inquiries into state failure.
The Grenfell United group of survivors and bereaved families was ambivalent about the final inquiry report last year, saying “justice has not been delivered”. Others spoke of the seven-year process as a trauma in itself. “This inquiry was forced on us. It’s delayed the justice my family deserves,” said Hisam Choucair, who watched six of his family members perish in the tower block fire. “No one has asked me if I wanted this inquiry,” said Karim Khalloufi, whose sister was one of the 72 killed.
When the long-delayed report on police misconduct at Hillsborough came out, bereaved relatives spoke of the “disgrace” that no officer would be charged. They also commented on the long wait for justice. “We were beaten by the passage of time,” said Steve Kelly, who lost his older brother in the terrace crush.
Victims find voice in numbers. They form organised groups that hold press conferences, make statements and form conclusions about inquiry chairs, recommendations and reports: a sort of official victimdom. Though treated as a mouthpiece by the press, they cannot realistically represent every life blighted by the disaster in question.
We all respond differently to grief, after all. Over 230,000 people died of Covid in the UK; not all their family and friends will feel the same about the inquiry process. When asked in retrospect by the pollster YouGov last month how well or badly the government handled the pandemic, 26 per cent said “fairly well”, while 31 per cent said “fairly badly”.
Even among the contained circle of Grenfell survivors, there are differences in tone and emphasis – represented by various collectives: Grenfell United, Justice4Grenfell and Grenfell Next of Kin among them. Some are more directly political than others.
The new national grooming gang inquiry is a stark example. When five disillusioned participants quit its victim and survivors panel, they said they would return if the safeguarding minister Jess Phillips resigned – only for it to transpire that another five would only continue if she stayed in post.
When we lose a loved one, a majority of us will work through grief’s famed five stages, and eventually start feeling better. I’ve experienced this myself, after my dad died. It is neither straightforward nor linear. It suddenly felt fresh, for example, six years later, when I had my first child and felt all over again the loss of not just a dad but a granddad. It is tough, but it is a matter I long ago stopped bargaining with: you can’t campaign for cancer to show up at a judge-led inquiry to answer for itself, after all. You can’t vote cancer out.
But a small proportion of us will enter a state of what is known as “complicated grief”. There are many definitions of this, but it is essentially when you become stuck in the very intense feelings of early loss long-term. This is more likely to afflict those who have lost someone in a particularly traumatic or unexpected way.
It is that latter limbo that comes to mind when I speak to victims trapped in the gloomy passage of the state inquiry. There is usually a worthy will to ensure their views are core to the process. But trying to shape policy with this feeling is unlikely to relieve it: inquiries are ultimately in the service of the future, whereas victims groups are condemned to reliving the past each day. It was the state that betrayed them, and now it is the state that cannot allow them to move on.
[Further reading: Bring back the spirit of the 2010 student fees protests]
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