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Another "last year" thread I'm afraid.

It is technically a fact that, had you subtracted the overwhelmingly likely Labour votes of those who perished so needlessly in the Grenfell fire the following week, then Labour would not have gained Kensington for the first time (the first time, I should add, that the ultra-swish southern parts of the area had been in a Labour seat; the very different north of the borough where the tower was located had been so previously, under different boundaries) seeing how they only won it by 10 votes.

Of course, their votes were not the cause; they'd have voted Labour anyway, and the swing was the result of far more affluent voters swallowing their pride as a means of punishing the Tories for Brexit (in 1999, both in the European Parliament election and then in a by-election which returned Michael Portillo to the Commons, the then Kensington & Chelsea constituency was the best area for the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, which suggests that it had a reasonable number of voters who were pro-EU but could not, at that time, countenance voting for any party without "Conservative" in its name - although of course some of those would have been in Chelsea, now electorally separate again). In fact, it is overwhelmingly likely that, had Grenfell already happened before the election, the reaction would have been such that Labour won the seat by more. Which makes me think: had Grenfell already happened before the election, would the reaction of anger at Tory policies have been such that Labour - and maybe the Lib Dems, certainly in Richmond Park - could have won significantly more seats elsewhere, to the point where the electoral arithmetic would have been much closer, it would have been something close to a dead heat and maybe they'd actually have had a chance of forming a government?

How much effect would the fire already happening before the election have had? Would it have been the final nail for Theresa May?
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