[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. While we recognised African Rabies as a serious security threat, we did not expect it to overwhelm the state even at city level. To be frank the large scale outbreak in Soweto shocked us as much as it did everyone else, but at the time it was politically convenient to maintain that we'd expected it. We shifted to arguing that underdeveloped nations lacked the ability to trace or contain spread, but that in a 21st century Britain we have the ability to do both, and that we could protect ourselves by helping prevent large scale outbreaks in the global south. Our basic assumption always stayed the same: that the biggest threat posed by the virus came from unjustified panic on behalf of the public.
We put together a proposal for the PM called the 'New Normal'. We maintained that with some key safeguards and reforms, the British public would be safe to live with the African Rabies Virus. As long as the state existed to trace, contain and conceal outbreaks, then we'd be able to avoid any large scale problems like they were facing in South Africa."
Do you now accept that such an outlook was dangerously optimistic?
"No. Everyone now says "why didn't you go further". But I'd like to remind you that we were painted as the second coming of Stalin when we implemented the new codes. 'Nanny State Gone Nazi State', I think one headline read.
One of the reforms we pushed through was 'the Public Safety Act'. It enforced a mandatory 24 hour quarantine around outbreak sites and empowered emergency services to detain, without charge, anybody suspected of coming in contact with the infected for a period of up to 14 days. Pretty reasonable in hindsight? But the response we got was appalling. A group of Human Rights activists chained themselves inside the House of Lords. I got dog shit pushed through my letterbox. What a load of wankers.
Then we had people 'complaining' about the use of lethal force during containment. Before we implemented broadcasting restrictions, it reached a point where special forces had to delay luring the infected into Eradication Sites because journalists were trying to sneak through the containment. And then we became the government that shut down the free press.
We spent more time fighting political fires than we did fighting African Rabies!"
Some people argue being upfront with the public would have allowed the Government to take greater action, and could even have prevented the Great Panic.
"Nonsense. If anything the Great Panic proves that Conceal was a vital part of the process.
Obviously after Soweto we couldn't tell the public that the virus didn't exist. That was why we were put in charge instead of the spooks. But secrecy was still important. We let people think that the virus was something we understood, that if they took the vaccine they'd be safe, and that all they had to do was close their door and call 999 if they ever saw one in person. All people knew was that these were very sick individuals, who lashed out at those around them. It was only during the Great Panic that the public became aware of the extent to which the virus transforms an infected person into a weapon."
How effective were these pre-Panic measures?
"I'll admit that the number of cases did grow faster than expected. Before Soweto the spooks were dealing with a couple of cases a week, a handful of low-level outbreaks over the entire period. But in the months afterwards it kept spreading. Every time we stomped out one trail of contagion, two more popped up that we couldn't track. The new, more draconian, measures stalled the problem, even reduced the spread for a while, but it kept coming back in unexpected places. Unfortunately the first part of the operation, 'Trace', wasn't working.
On top of all that, there was the slow motion collapse of the global economy to deal with. Almost comically, the stock-market wasn't doing that badly. Yet with global supply lines being disrupted, the government was forced to implement rationing on fuel and other goods.
But even with all the problems, we were handling it. It never got out of control until the panic set in."
Why do you think the Great Panic happened?
"Lots of people blame either the Phalanx placebo, or the St George Outbreak, for causing the panic. But if Journalists in the UK had done what they were told, then we'd have been able to keep people calm. But they had to have their little rebellion live on the Six O'Clock News. They gave the public information they didn't need, and showed them images they weren't prepared to handle. By the time we'd stopped the broadcast it was too late.
Why couldn't people just act predictably? When everyone was at home, going to work, doing what they should be, we could control it. Suddenly every major road in England was blocked with people trying to flee. Scum took the news as license to riot. The shops were stripped bare by panic buying. There was a run on the banks. It was chaos. For God's sake, do you know how many different things stop functioning when the people meant to keep the lights on decide not to go to work? Too much happened, too quickly.
Not that I had to deal with it for long. It was the Lazarus Crew's turn to take the fall for other people's cock-ups. By the end of the week we were out. I'm probably one of the most hated women in the nation. But if it wasn't for those journalists, we could have kept Britain going."