Dany Cotton is used to receiving bad news in the small hours. As commissioner of the London fire brigade, she is one of three senior officers on the brigade’s rota who will answer a call alerting them to a major incident. Last Tuesday night it was Cotton’s turn on rota. She was six months into her job running the country’s largest fire service and had almost three decades as a firefighter under her belt. But nothing prepared her for the horrors of the ensuing hours. “When I arrived I got out of my car and looked up at Grenfell Tower. My first thought was that it looked like something out of a disaster movie, like something that could never happen in London.”