Evening Standard comment: Why is Boris Johnson so silent on the biggest issue?

Where is Boris? As the fight heats up in the Cabinet between the “sensibles”, who want a soft Brexit, and the “creationists” pushing for a hard one, our Foreign Secretary is absent from the field of battle. Yesterday he was mocked by the Chancellor of the Exchequer abroad, and ignored by the Secretary of State for Leaving the EU at home. Watch the video put out by the Foreign Office on the anniversary of the Brexit referendum, and its boss hardly features.

Check out Mr Johnson’s tweets and you’ll find he is “saddened” about the death of his “friend” the President of Vanuatu and ecstatic about the “stonking performance” of Theresa May but largely silent about the progress of the Brexit negotiations. He scurries from one international meeting to another but never pauses to give us his views on the biggest foreign policy decision facing this country.

Is Mr Hammond right that Britain needs to make the economy the priority in the Brexit talks, or is Mrs May correct that immigration control must come first? Does he agree with David Davis that getting a free trade deal with the EU in the next two years will be “simple”, or with the Treasury, which says we will need many years of transition to such a deal? We do not know where Mr Johnson stands on these debates, and his Radio 4 interview last week left us none the wiser.

Mr Johnson did take time out last week to note, on the death of former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, that he had helped unify his country and built a “Europe whole and free” — accolades which, we suspect, will not be accorded to Mr Johnson when his political epitaph is finally written. However, he need not fear that he will be forgotten by history. For this is the man whose last-minute decision a year ago to support the Leave campaign probably made the decisive difference to the outcome. Surely he has an interest now in making sure that Brexit isn’t — to borrow from his favourite culinary metaphors — half-baked? It’s time for Boris to stop being so self-effacing and tell us what he really thinks.

All councils failed

In May the London Fire Brigade wrote to 33 London councils to warn them about the fire risks inherent in external cladding. It followed a fire (fortunately non-fatal) in Shepherd’s Court in Shepherd’s Bush — the local authority is Hammersmith and Fulham — where the subsequent report said external window cladding was the probable cause of fire spreading on the outside of the building. While the outside metal layer initially withstood fire, the heat exposed internal flammable layers. The Fire Brigade’s letter, headed “Tall Buildings: External Fire Spread”, not only urged councils to review improvements and changes to existing buildings but to undertake mitigation measures to “ensure any potential fire spread does not pose a risk to health and safety”.

The relevance to the Grenfell Tower fire is glaringly apparent. Yet as far as we know, none of the 33 councils to which the letter was sent acted on it. So, although the next fire to be aggravated by flammable external cladding happened in Kensington, the same thing could have happened anywhere. All councils, it seems, failed to act on the warning from the Fire Brigade.

There are other reasons for concern. The independent expert, Professor Arnold Dix, who carried out the investigation into the fire in Lakanal House in Camberwell in 2009, has dismissed existing fire risk assessments carried out by councils as a “box-ticking exercise” which do not examine basic concerns such as the ability of people to leave their homes quickly. It doesn’t help that responsibility for fire risk assessments was taken from fire brigades in 2005 and turned into a self-certification exercise. Every aspect of fire safety in tall buildings now needs reviewing.