'The Tower'

Joshua Loo

№2, Volume V

Andrew O’Hagan

‘The Tower’, London Review of Books

The decision of the London Review of Books to dedicate a whole issue to the fire was commendable. One may object, though few have, that of the 533,125 deaths recorded in the United Kingdom in 2017¹, 72 occurred in the tower. However, this would be to ignore, first, that most of these deaths are from natural causes whose resolution appears to be far more difficult than the avoidance of fire, second, that the average article in the LRB is not optimally altruistic anyway, suggesting that some other metric is useful, third, that the issues to be uncovered will affect far more than 72 lives, in that, in, for example, London, over 500,000 people—eight per cent of the population—live in towers², and, fourth, that close to all of the more than 60 million people living in the United Kingdom are affected in some way by the (in)competence of local authorities.

But O’Hagan has not so much written an article as a book. Brevity is not, in this case, disrespect; brevity would have allowed more than one voice. It is possible that calls to add different voices can be disingenuous; some may not, for example, argue in good faith. Often the excuse of allowing multiple ‘perspectives’ leads to the spectre of The Guardian subsidising the sycophancy budgets of Kagame³ and the Chinese Communist Party’s embassy in London⁴. Yet in this case there is confusion, and so there is a need to have more than one writer. To dedicate an issue is not to dedicate it to one author, or to exclude, by omission, other voices, styles of writing, facts that have been omitted, and so on.

O’Hagan starts with a moving narrative, reminding us that fellow humans inhabited the tower. In this task he will of course fail, as all similar attempts will, for it is difficult even to imagine the scale of one death, one loss in a family, one funeral if the body should be recovered, one widow or orphan, or even one life permanently altered by the fire, and of deaths alone there were 72. To attempt exposition would be to omit almost all the other narratives; one really ought to read it. Yet the inevitability of near-complete failure should not preclude attempts that somewhat improve the situation, or go some way to reminding us of the loss that occurred.

There is not really a plot, except to the extent that a fire breaks out; the writing moves from one person to another, almost stochastically, just as the lives depicted are almost stochastic, and it is chance that conferred membership of the 72. The characters are occasionally a little difficult to follow, just as the story in general appears to have been. This section is largely uncontroversial.

Then, a seemingly innocent paragraph starts a section that has angered the Fire Brigades Union⁵:

Inside the tower, by the lifts, there was a sign. ‘If you are safely within your flat,’ it said, ‘and there is a fire elsewhere in the block: you should initially be safe inside your flat keeping the doors and windows closed.’ Near to 12.15 a.m., a fire began in the kitchen of Flat 16 on the fourth floor. The flat was rented by an Ethiopian cab driver called Behaulu Kebede, a father of one. Some immediate neighbours heard a bang, but the rest knew nothing until, about twenty minutes later, Mr Kebede appeared in the hall in his stockinged feet, saying there was a fire in his flat. He thought it had started at the back of his fridge. He called the police before going to the door of his next-door neighbour, Maryam Adam, who was three months pregnant. ‘It was exactly 12.50 a.m.,’ she said, ‘because I was sleeping and it woke me up.’ She looked at the clock as she made her way onto the landing and looked towards Kebede’s open door. She could see into his kitchen and she thought at the time that the fire wasn’t very big. There was no siren sounding but some of the other neighbours were woken up by knocks at their doors and they too came out. A call was made to North Kensington fire brigade at 12.54. Maryam Adam left the building immediately. She didn’t even pick up her phone, a fact that would trouble her later. ‘I had many friends in the building,’ she said.

This advice, in O’Hagan’s view, turned a minor domestic fire into something capable of killing 72. The suspicion is only gently raised, at first. O’Hagan, however, slowly progresses, till one can but accept the absurdity of the advice raised. O’Hagan describes the consequences of the advice:

The calls are harrowing. The callers are often panicking, choking, praying, but, for hour after hour, the advice was the same – stay put. ‘We know where you are and we’re coming to get you’ was the last promise many of the victims received. The London Fire Brigade reckon they were able to reach and rescue 65 people. The majority of the survivors walked down the stairs quite early in the fire’s progression, but others, mainly higher up in the building, who were not alerted until later, died because they took the advice.

O’Hagan also claims that ‘[a]ccording to some of [his] sources, radio communication between the firefighters in the tower and the chiefs on the ground wasn’t working’, that ‘they had been issued with oxygen packs of standard duration’ (inadequate to reach the upper levels), and that ‘the response was weak’ not simply due to cost-cutting but also due to ‘the way the Grenfell response was managed.’

This does not seem implausible. If O’Hagan is not lying about the problems with equipment and the advice given, it is possible to conclude with some, though not total, certainty that an evacuation might have been helpful, and that, organisationally, the response may have been inadequate. This is orthogonal to whether the firefighters fought bravely, and so on—of course they did, and that we can be sure of that is a hallmark of civilisation, a tribute to their spirit, and not really been questioned.

Matt Wrack, of the Fire Brigades Union, however, objects:

They do not deserve, and they can do without, armchair critics such as the writer Andrew O’Hagan, editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, telling them “the firefighting effort wasn’t all that it could have been”. They can do without the Sunday Times columnist Sarah Baxter saying “the fire brigade certainly let people down”, seeming to regard firefighters as “jobsworths” who “stick to the rigid demands of bureaucratic protocol” and bow to “the bureaucratic gods of health and safety”.

…

Journalists seem to forget that we had a 24-storey tower block in the middle of one of the wealthiest boroughs in one of the world’s richest cities that was effectively coated in petrol. If non-flammable cladding had been used on the building, the fire would most probably have been contained to the floor it started on.

It seems, however, that rectification both of any problems that existed in the emergency services’ response (to the extent that there were any) and rectification of problems in construction are neither mutually exclusive nor orthogonal. O’Hagan does not say that the extent of the fire was due to the firefighters alone. Equally, however, many factors can contribute to a single outcome. To simply focus on one, whether the construction of the building as Wrack suggests, or the emergency services’ response, as O’Hagan, in Wrack’s view, did does not seem to be a terribly good idea.

Wrack further writes that the ‘“stay put” policy’ was ‘longstanding’. It is true that the fire seems to have behaved unpredictably. As has been revealed at the inquiry, the watch manager was untrained in this⁶. Again, however, to claim that Michael Dowden, the watch manager, could have been better trained is not to blame Dowden; it may be to blame the institution, and possibly some individuals at the top level, but not necessarily those who responded at the time.

O’Hagan does not fixate on the firefighters for long; he continues to policy at a national level. He does, however, note the framing and incentives surrounding choices of building materials. Everything ‘‘of course’’ is safe; one therefore chooses based on cost, æsthetics, and other factors. The lack of oversight is blamed on ‘privatisation’: O’Hagan quotes Dave Silbert, an ‘industry expert’, who says that ‘building control officer[s]’ would have stopped unsafe choices, all this due to ‘competition’—those who raise the alarm will ‘lose out on the fee’ in future contracts. He concludes:

There is strong evidence that a concatenation of failures at the level of industry regulation and building controls, more than anything else, caused the inferno that killed 72 people. More than sixty different organisations and subcontractors were involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower, and many are answerable for small oversights with huge consequences. But the biggest of all has to do with industry regulations about cladding. Councils all over the country were victims of serial perversions of safety standards, overseen by government agencies going back to 1997.

O’Hagan proceeds to discuss the Grenfell Action Group. His criticism, broadly, is that the group’s previous warnings were unrelated to the true cause of the fire. Quite how O’Hagan knew that their warnings were of no import is unclear, given that buildings tend only to end up in fires of the sort that occurred once—there didn’t seem much time for the other issues raised to set the building on fire, given that most of them seem to have been burned up in the fire. It may be true, therefore, that the group ‘never said anything about cladding or the safety controls relating to the new materials.’ Nevertheless, this coverage is problematic in a number of ways.

First, the Grenfell Action Group includes a large number of victims. Using quotation marks to quote things is a helpful convention. Using quotation marks around the word ‘warning’ in the middle of a paragraph neither reflects convention nor does anything other than suggest a certain contempt for the group. O’Hagan thus says that the group ‘hate the Tory council’, who, to the group, are ‘rich toffs’. In this context, the ambiguity of ‘agitator’ certainly tilts unhelpfully. O’Hagan is not writing privately; his words will have an effect, somewhere. Perhaps he should have thought more about, at the very least, how he expressed himself.

Second, O’Hagan writes that ‘[w]e wanted political scalps before the fire was out, even if it meant that the worst failures of the night would take a long time to be recognised’; it is unclear who ‘we’ are, but it is also unclear to whom he is referring, and what they said. Quotations would be helpful; O’Hagan doesn’t appear to have attempted to source anything, even when much coverage is still on-line.

Third, O’Hagan quotes a council worker who denies the group’s accusations that the council failed to take into account their concerns. Perhaps the group are lying, or exaggerating, or misleading by omission, but the council workers quoted have every incentive to also do so, and self-deception of the sort that O’Hagan (if we are being charitable) implies pervaded the community of survivors was not necessarily unknown to the council worker too.

O’Hagan then discusses the aftermath of the fire. His broad claim is that the council did far more than was initially recognised.

So the first thing that happened was that local voluntary organisations – many of them, though no one admitted it, maintained, supported or set up by the council – took on the role of frontline provision.

Was he unable to elaborate?

‘As often as possible,’ Frida from Children’s Services said, ‘we had to sit down and cross-check to see that every family had a keyworker. But families would then say to journalists and politicians, “Oh no, I’ve not seen anybody from the council,” because they didn’t associate the person sat next to them in the room with people from the council.’

What sort of tenable epistemic principle would simultaneously cause one to take this at face value and assume that the survivors were lying?

O’Hagan may have been right to suggest that an unhelpful ‘narrative’ was created. Specifics finally arrive, separated by hundreds or thousands of words from the initial accusation, in the form of discussion of the number of casualties. Yet this occupies a paragraph. Suddenly, quotations from nowhere appear: ‘[t]he story was about “them”, men and women of “their kind”, posh ingrates, white English toffs.’ One asks, again and again: where? Who said this? How many people agreed? O’Hagan does not always fail to answer, but placing incomplete and unsatisfactory answers far away from the points at which one asks them is most unhelpful.

This is followed by one of the more bizarre parts of the piece. An extremely sympathetic picture is drawn of Nicholas Paget-Brown, the leader of the council at the time. The relevance of his mannerisms is unclear. Eventually, O’Hagan exonerates the council:

I asked the council’s severest critics for evidence to back their claims. ‘You are right to seek actuals not speculation,’ one of the Grenfell Action Group stalwarts wrote to me, but he found it difficult to supply them. His communications were colourful and provocative, damning and suggestive, but each of them depended on one’s mind already being made up before one considered what he supplied as ‘evidence’.

At this stage, it seems more appropriate to ask O’Hagan for evidence. What did, for example, the critic say?

Occasionally, some more useful evidence arises; O’Hagan quotes Clare Chamberlain, who was a ‘Children’s Services manager’. Chamberlain notes that ‘[b]efore the fire, Ofsted had just completed an intensive four-year assessment of social work …and of the three rated “outstanding”, Kensington and Chelsea was just one.’

On the one hand, at this point, O’Hagan’s credibility seems shot through. But on the other, this being the LRB, there are still some useful and interesting anecdotes about Paget-Brown’s council. The dichotomy is illustrated well by this paragraph:

I went to see Paget-Brown several times. He still seemed shell-shocked. ‘He is of his age and background,’ a friend of his told me. ‘He probably appears to many to be some sort of patrician Tory. But he has given thirty years of his life as a councillor, and you don’t do that out of some sense of noblesse oblige. You do it because you are deeply interested in the circumstances where you live.’ As a writer you try not to be swayed by people’s niceness – and besides, nice people can do terrible things. But self-sustaining decency was a commodity in short supply, and I found I liked Paget-Brown. He would be nobody’s idea of a bold and inspiring superhero, but he doesn’t want for self-knowledge, he knows his own faults, and he took a modest but fierce approach to maintaining local services. He never closed a library. ‘Yes, he did,’ the activists say. But we’ll come to that. He never closed a library without proposing a better one to replace it. He opposed supercars and rich people tearing up the streets of the borough to build private cinemas. (He opposed dozens of applications.) He built schools. He was a trustee of the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre and the Al-Manaar mosque for 12 years. He kept the council in funds. (The press always talk about the borough’s cash reserves as if it was money embezzled from the people. On the contrary, a council’s reserves are usually taken to be evidence of good management, and Kensington and Chelsea’s money was very clearly earmarked for capital projects in the borough, a rebuilt primary school in Barlby Road as well as a new special needs school, the first in the borough, and a new North Kensington Library and Youth Centre, as well as regeneration and investment schemes that local activists simultaneously demanded and denounced.)

What has the friend to do with anything? Why should ‘self-sustaining decency’, whatever that is meant to be, be of relevance here? Perhaps O’Hagan genuinely found it, but given his previous errors, he can hardly rely on the trust of the reader necessary for this to be of any import.

Yet, on the other hand, there is finally a reasonable criticism of many of the ‘activists’. Again, we don’t know who they are, but, generously assuming that they exist and have said such things, there is a reasonable defence of council policy on reserves, libraries, and so on. The close reader will find that the council did better than one might have thought, but this is easily forgot in the vast mass of sympathy and other unhelpful flotsam.

Then he sides with the council over ministers; both, of course, have their own incentives, and it is quite clear that the local council would not be hurt by a narrative that suggested ministerial abandonment of the councillors. Why, one wonders, trust the housing officer quoted?

‘Did the minister understand,’ I asked housing officers, ‘how complicated it was going to be to buy flats for hundreds of suddenly homeless people, in a city with a housing shortage and terrible waiting lists?’

‘Not for a second,’ one of them replied. ‘He thought it was just a matter of spending money.’

Yet it does seem that the response at a national level was not as competent as it might have been—O’Hagan manages that, again, in a few thousand words. The Home Secretary’s refusal to answer O’Hagan seems rather suspicious. Perhaps the ministers did, after all, exploit the fire.

Later, the same issue recurs: nearly a thousand words are given over to Feilding-Mellen’s family background. Of what relevance are they to any investigation into what happened? Again, there is no answer. O’Hagan inserts a quick quote, whose existence, even, is in doubt at this stage:

‘Rock isn’t your typical Tory,’ according to someone in a London Labour council who has worked with him. ‘He can come off as arrogant, sure of himself, but he’s interested in real housing problems.

Then, the real matters of import.

Two separate sources spoke to me of emails between Peter Maddison, director of Assets and Regeneration at the TMO, and Feilding-Mellen and others, discussing the colour and type of fixing for the proposed cladding on Grenfell Tower. At the time, residents were putting some pressure on the TMO and the council’s Housing Department to get on with the refurbishment, so these emails were chiefly intended to resolve planning issues as quickly as possible. It was not Feilding-Mellen’s job to make the decisions about the cladding and at no point does he seek to determine the issue. On 15 July 2014, Bruce Sounes of Studio E, the architects appointed to work on Grenfell Tower, sent an email to Feilding-Mellen attaching a link to the George House flats in Kilburn which showed the cladding they wished to use. ‘It uses the same brushed aluminium material and finish proposed for Grenfell Tower, but folded into cladding cassettes which conceal almost all fixings.’ Feilding-Mellen replied to say he could see the ‘look’ they were going for and he expressed a view about the colour. Maddison replied later the same day, saying the planners preferred the champagne-coloured finish. He adds, as perhaps any director of assets would, that ‘any savings would be a benefit in terms of value for money and risk management of the budget.’

The suggestion that Feilding-Mellen and others at the council pushed for cheaper and less safe cladding – a hallmark of media coverage since the fire – is flatly disproved by the string of emails between these individuals. In any case, the question of who chose the cladding is a red herring: hundreds of councils made similar choices, believing that cost and colour – not safety – were the issues they were being asked to adjudicate.

Who are the sources? In which positions were they? Perhaps the emails exist, but how strong would recollections of emails from about three years ago be? If O’Hagan does not rule out the falsity of others’ narratives, why does he seem to rule it out in relation to these emails?

Yet, if one still trusts O’Hagan at this point, this section is rather significant. It suggests that the blame principally lies at the national level, and not at the level of the council; the council, it seems, must have been led to believe that safety was not an issue. This is, seemingly, not unreasonable.

What have others said? Unsurprisingly, a large number of letters⁷ appear to have been sent to the LRB.

Grace Benton and Flora Neve’s letter largely raises valid concerns; they charitably describe that which they later question as ‘the facts he presents’—the comparison to ‘a whore’s wedding’, for example. But where O’Hagan is perhaps strongest—the occasional direct comparison of who said what—is also where the letter is perhaps wrong. ‘Why couldn’t the councillors have known that the whole approach they were overseeing would ultimately cause harm?’ is one of the few questions that O’Hagan approaches a satisfactory answer to. His argument that the choices made at the time seemed more to be between colours and costings than between safe and unsafe options remains, in all probability, intact. They write that ‘the Grenfell Action Group’ knew. O’Hagan writes that their concerns were not so much about the cladding that, it appears at this stage, was the principal factor behind the scale of the fire, as about other potential fire hazards. His dismissal of their concerns is unfair, but, equally, it is valid to note that they were not about cladding.

Rupert Read largely agrees with one of O’Hagan’s claim, viz. that responsibility lay and lies at the national, not local, level, adding that funding cuts were not particularly helpful; he doesn’t say how deep they were, but the National Audit Office says that there was a ‘49.1% real-terms reduction in government funding for local authorities, 2010-2011 to 2018-2018’, resulting in a ‘28.6% real-terms reduction in local authorities’ spending power’⁸ over the same period.

Peter Greenland suggests that O’Hagan ends up blaming ‘everyone who voted for Thatcher and Blair’, rather than the council. If that is what blaming deregulation is, then perhaps O’Hagan does do so. However, in that case, blaming Thatcherite and Blairite electorates also seems to be a thoroughly reasonable thing to do. In any case, there are six instances of the word ‘vote’, none of which in relation to the elections that produced Blairism and Thatcherism in the first place, five instances of Thatcher’s name, none of which refer to the electorates that chose her, and two instances of Blair’s name, of which, again, none refer to the electorates that started their ministries.

Nick Steiger writes that he wishes to ‘distribute the article as a study piece’; one wonders whether a piece in excess of 60,000 words long is a good idea in such instances.

Melanie Coles, an interviewee, writes

The version of ‘The Tower’ published on the LRB website originally included a video of me speaking, with the caption ‘Melanie Coles describes Fethia Hassan’s last day.’ I did not give my consent for the video to be posted publicly. The act of posting this video was dishonest. I feel I was not just misled, but lied to.

O’Hagan responds:

I understand Melanie Coles’s position. In a story of some 60,000 words, she only appears for a few sentences, and she wants to take them back, and right herself with the Grenfell community.

The implication is twofold. First, O’Hagan implies that Coles wished to have a greater say in the article. This seems unfounded. Coles criticises the article for failure to consult ‘bereaved local people’—not her, specifically. She then also complains about their specific treatment of her testimony. These two issues are orthogonal, and it is not clear why O’Hagan conflated them, in an attempt to suggest that Coles wanted more of a personal say. Further, Coles’ suggestion that the bereaved be consulted more about their experience of the council is not unreasonable, given that there are no detailed interviews with those who were served by it, but there were very many with council workers.

Second, O’Hagan implies that, for some reason, Coles, as portrayed, had lost her credentials within the ‘Grenfell community’, and is merely performatively complaining. This is completely without evidence. It may be that the ‘Grenfell community’ is some hive of performative villainy; O’Hagan, just as before, provides no evidence to substantiate this implication whatsoever. Perhaps Coles simply wanted to correct the record, just as O’Hagan professes to have desired to as well.

O’Hagan continues by complaining that Coles is attempting to ‘censor and censure’ him. Those who ask to correct newspaper articles do not ‘censor’; they correct. Those who write letters to the editor, pointing out that they have been misled, and asking for apologies, equally do not ‘censor’; they do what was just described. Criticism and censorship are distinct.

Coles also suggests that O’Hagan fictionalised quotes:

He writes that Fethia was upset about losing a white flower from her shoe. ‘It would be there the next day,’ O’Hagan writes. ‘“Fethia gets herself all churned up about such things, but it will all be fine,” her teacher said to herself as she closed her classroom for the day and made her way home.’ I do not know how much poetic licence is ‘allowed’ in an account like this, but to me, if you put something in quote marks, the implication is that this is what the person actually said, or at least said that they were thinking. But I did not say ‘Fethia gets herself all churned up about such things,’ nor did I say that I thought it. I do not think I have ever used the term ‘churned up’ about anything.

O’Hagan responds:

Melanie mentioned Fethia again and the flower falling off the shoe. ‘She was thinking about how worried F. had been about it – last time she saw her, at end of day she found it, put it on peg and [when] she [was] going home she left the class and thought how little Fethia was worried and all funny about it but she’d be all right …’ When Melanie said this I remember her moving her hands in front of her stomach, like people do when they mean like butterflies or being churned up.

As Coles notes, it seems rather misleading to put something in quotation marks in a position where it seems likely to have been interpreted as speech. Perhaps it was of no import in such a large story; that O’Hagan refuses to apologise, however, suggests that he holds his interviewees in a certain contempt. Yet these are, ultimately, victims. Coles is not a politician, or at least not the sort of whom it is right to immediately ask ‘why is this lying bastard lying to me?’—she was touched, perhaps less deeply than those who died, by the fire as well. O’Hagan adopts here the tone of the journalist attacked by some Trumpian politician, but here he has been attacked by a teacher.

Brendan O’Neill writes in The Spectator⁹ that the piece ‘wrestles the Grenfell calamity from the infantile moralising of Corbynistas and much of the commentariat, and reminds us that this was a strange and complex and horrific event that is not bendable to simplistic point-scoring’; he then proceeds with a weak exposition of the fire. In a paragraph, he dismisses suggestions that cuts were unhelpful as ‘morbid opportunism’. O’Neill seems to have ignored the section on privatisation, which was the product of successive neoliberal governments. Thatcher is mentioned five times, as noted above; Blair twice. There is a certain irony to a piece featuring a one-paragraph dismissal of the role of reduction of government expenditure in a piece that criticises ghostly ‘Corbynistas’ for their simplistic outrage in response to a complex event.

Some socialist websites, however, have accused O’Hagan of having a particular agendum:

There’s a sizeable portion of the British public that wants – if not expects – that criminal investigation to be on charges of misconduct in public office or gross negligence manslaughter (both of which carry a criminal sentence) rather than corporate manslaughter (which only carries a fine). To prepare the way for that not to happen, and for the perpetrators of this crime to walk away free from the crematorium of Grenfell Tower, a radical change in the public’s opinion of those responsible will be required. Enter Andrew O’Hagan…¹⁰

The Tower, a 60,000-word essay, was penned by the same individual who produced a hatchet job account of Julian Assange’s life in 2011 in his book The Secret Life. In that work O’Hagan portrayed the WikiLeaks co-founder as narcissistic, paranoid and lying. In an interview with the Times, he accommodated himself to accusations that Assange was a Russian stooge because of WikiLeaks’ role in leaking documents pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 US election campaign, as well as to the bogus rape charges against Assange.¹¹

Their criticisms, however, are sufficiently long to go beyond the scope of this piece; many of them coïncide with those here and those that others have reasonably made, but the implication that the London Review of Books are part of some conspiracy to pervert justice seems a little far-fetched, as does the suggestion that O’Hagan is part of the deep state.

It is appropriate to draw some conclusions. First, the piece’s core contention—that the council were less responsible than the national government—appears to remain intact, despite the many issues of the article. Few have rebutted the assertion that O’Hagan made in relation to the council’s view of the choice of cladding as one of cost and colour, not safety. Indeed, O’Hagan does the greatest damage to this contention himself, by drawing his own credibility into question with the remainder of the article.

Second, the article is significantly epistemically flawed in places. O’Hagan asks us not to trust survivors, but then requests that we trust not only him, but those whom he trusts later—council officers and those whom he quotes favourably. It may be that this trust turns out to have been correctly placed. Yet he has not justified this decision. On face value, therefore, he seems to have been biased in favour of members of the council at the expense of those who are denied the agency of quotations and interviews. Quite why he does so is not clear.

Third, the piece is unhelpfully written, in that the various chains of reasoning often are widely separated. It could have been structured such as to connect specific actions that were criticised to broad criticisms, for example, by printing them adjacently. Unfortunately it seemed not to.

Fourth, the length of the piece was unhelpful. There were many individual issues that were all conflated, smudged over, and were covered for the worse as a result of the monolithic structure of the piece. The responses, too, were somewhat confused and scattered, eerily reminiscent of the exchange between Niall Ferguson and Prankaj Mishra¹²: one responds to the other, the other points out something else in the mass of words that they wrote, and the cycle repeats. An abstract would have been extremely helpful, or per-section summaries.

All these issues might have been resolved, had the issue contained multiple articles, had O’Hagan opened himself up to criticism before publishing, or had the editors exercised a little more control. Unfortunately, they will not. It remains to say, however, that O’Hagan’s work, despite its many flaws, and despite his cavalier attitude to those whom he covers, must ultimately have been conceived and completed with good intentions; good intentions that O’Hagan reveals, however, may not have been enough.