It’s been seven years now. That’s some 86 months since that terrible night in June 2017 when a fire started on a fourth-floor flat in Grenfell Towers at nearly one in the morning. A fire that would ultimately lead to the death of 72 people.

All this week on Radio 4 Kate Lamble has been telling the story of that fire ahead of the publication of the final report from the Grenfell Public Inquiry at the start of September. Stripped over 10 episodes in all (with another five on Radio 4 next week, although all 10 are already available on BBC Sounds), her series is a cool, considered weighing up of the evidence that at the same time can only leave anyone listening to it angry and heartbroken.

Next week’s episodes which cover the fire itself are, I have to say, really difficult to listen to. But it’s important to bear witness. And to ask the questions Lamble asks here. Because, as she states in the first episode of Grenfell: Building a Disaster, “corporate deceit, government deregulation and a construction industry engaged in a race to the bottom all played a role” in what happened.

Because this was a fire that was foreseeable and preventable. In episode two on Tuesday she visited Irvine where a tower block fire in 1999 led to the death of one man and provided proof that putting flammable cladding on buildings was not the brightest of ideas. Regulations were changed in Scotland in the aftermath. But not in England.

Over the run of the series Lamble gives us a systematic breakdown of companies getting around weakened safety regulations by not admitting to test failures, of a culture of landlords in the local council not listening to the residents and of politicians making showy points about slashing red tape and not recognising that there would be consequences.

We are now seven years on from the fire. The police have said no criminal charges will be made until the end of 2026. In the meantime all we can do is remember and keep asking questions. Lamble does that very well here.

Al MurrayAl Murray (Image: free)

Slightly more ancient history on Radio 4 on Monday morning. By which I mean actual ancient history. On Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics, the classicist-comedian was investigating the historian Livy in the company of Professor Llewelyn Morgan and comedian Al Murray.

Livy was not the most rigorous of historians, it seems. “He is not forensic,” Haynes pointed out, “he fudges his geography, he doesn’t quote his sources.”

But then the Romans in general mixed up myth and history willy-nilly. We’re much the same, suggested Murray. “A friend of mine had to do the citizenship test quite recently. A Canadian guy. He wanted to become British for some reason at this precise moment. And a large chunk of his test was all about 1688 and the Glorious Revolution.

“For a long time it’s been perceived as this moment where we reconciled ourselves to having a constitutionally controlled monarchy and it was the triumph of Parliament and constitutionally jolly good British sense. And not one drop of blood was spilled. Blah, blah, blah. Basically, it’s a foundation myth for our modern polity. And it’s all cobblers.”

That said, Murray was all in favour of Livy’s interest in putting a good story before historical accuracy. “Whether what he is telling you was actually what happened is arguably irrelevant,” he said “What he was interested in was an idea of truth and moral truth. And that is more interesting than maybe the truth.”

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“Narrative truth should be a whole category, I think,” Haynes agreed, before adding, “I do see that is what Goebbels would have said …”

Still, moral truth seems a valid - if challenging - goal for history to grapple with.

Which brings us back to Grenfell. Because in a sense the fire - like the Post Office Horizon scandal, like the infected blood scandal, like Hillsborough and even Orgreave during the miners' strike - reminds us that the British sense of itself as the place of fair play, common sense and decency isn’t always borne out by the evidence. Or, as Al Murray might have it, it’s “all cobblers”.

We have a long and ignoble history of cover-ups in this country. Cover-ups that protect those in positions of authority and penalise their victims. And so you end up with a tragedy like Grenfell because, as Lamble points out, safety is “regarded at best as not a vote winner, at worst an obstruction to the economy.”

There’s a harder question that Lamble’s programme asks, one I’m not sure she really answers, but maybe it’s implicit in everything she lays out. Is the system broken, or was it built this way?

Well, what do you think?

Listen Out For

Do-Gooders, Radio 4, Tuesday, August 27, 6.30pm

I’m still a bit undecided about Garrett Millerick’s charity-based sitcom. It has all the flaws of Radio 4 comedy; there’s a sense of trying too hard and it’s full of punchlines that feel tacked on to keep the laugh track going. And yet it has a sly humour and Frank Skinner is clearly enjoying himself as the curmudgeonly Ken.