A Very British WWZ

Chapter 1: The Zombie Tsars

[Let the record show that I, James Calligan, am interviewing former special adviser to the Home Secretary Katie Price as part of the Fulstow Enquiry. We are at her home in the Highlands. The time is 5:04 PM. The contents of this recording are classified. ]

Mrs Price, you were part of the Home Secretary's so-called Lazarus Crew. Can you outline exactly what that consisted of?

"Am I the only one who'd speak to you? Even under threat of prosecution? That's bloody typical. Look, I know it's politically convenient to blame us for everything that went wrong, but every country on the planet had some version of the Lazarus Crew."

Please Mrs Price, it's not my job to assign blame. What you say here will not be made public in either of our lifetimes. Start at the beginning: the Lazarus Crew.

"As you say.

We began as a small group within the Home Office tasked with creating a policy response to the Solomon Virus, known then as African Rabies. We were, for lack of a better description, the Zombie Tsars.

There's been a bit of stink over the fact that we all knew each other from school. But it was a fact of life back then that the best minds went to the best schools. And we weren't all from Harrow, Jerry [Grounds] went to Charterhouse.

At that point, before Soweto, we weren't given any of the resources we needed. The Home Sec[retary] just carted us off to some dusty hovel in Whitehall. Sometimes, it'd take a week or more to even get a meeting with her. Access was constantly being gatekept by that Scottish wanker, [Alexander McCaig] not to speak ill of the dead, but if he'd spent less time politicking maybe someone would have warned him to get out of Surry.

It was him who gave us the nickname Lazarus Crew, i'm sure it was meant to be a cruel joke about how our careers would need to be reanimated, but it stuck."

How did things change after the Soweto Outbreak?

"It was a big bloody wake up call. Alarm bells went off for the PM, he gave the Home Sec[retary] the bollocking of her life, and she served up McCaig as the customary sacrifice. With Mr "leave it all up to the spooks" gone, and the Home Sec[retary] eager to show initiative, we suddenly became the biggest show in Whitehall. Basically, anything we wanted, we got."

If you could focus on policy for a moment.

"You must remember all the policies back then were guided, like surgical missiles piloted by monkeys, entirely through the lens of daily politics. Nothing happened if it wasn't politically advantageous for someone.

On a policy level, the big clash was always between those who wanted the Civil Service in control and those who wanted the Spooks [MI5 and Special Forces] to be left to it. Before Soweto the spook faction were in charge, and we were an afterthought. Afterwards we were calling the shots, and could finally take more overt actions. You'll want to talk to an intelligence agent named Jeremy Carver about the role of MI5 in covering up domestic outbreaks prior to Soweto. Though, maybe even you don't have access to that. At that stage, there wasn't any real debate over the merits of secrecy, only how best to maintain it. After Soweto we were essentially adapting MI5's policy to a much larger scale."

Trace, Contain, Conceal?

"You aren't a SPAD unless you can roll off buzzwords. Trace: to track the spread of the disease, in order to predict and preempt outbreaks. Contain: to keep outbreaks localised, in order to control spread and ease eradication. Conceal: to stop unfiltered knowledge of an outbreak from spreading, in order to prevent panic and maintain order.
It was the overarching strategy of the British government.