Never thought I’d find myself reading this, but, curiosity got the better of me.
It’s one of history’s tidier ironies that a man once wrote a novel about an incompetent government facing a deadly plague – only for his son to later preside over one. The Virus (originally The Marburg Virus, 1982) is Stanley Johnson’s contribution to that fine British tradition of prophetic farce. It was marketed as an eco-thriller, but in hindsight it reads like a – fevered sermon about the arrogance of man – an allegory that accidentally infected the very family that produced it.
Johnson senior, an environmentalist before it was fashionable, seemed to foresee the moral collapse that follows scientific hubris. His fictional virus isn’t merely biological; it’s spiritual – a contagion of pride. The story, set amid bureaucrats and biologists, could almost be a lost episode of Yes Minister, rewritten by Camus after a bad night’s sleep. Committees meet, reports are filed, and civilisation trembles because no one dares admit that the cleverest men are also the most foolish.
It’s difficult not to laugh – darkly – at how life imitated his art. Stanley’s protagonist wrestles with global contagion while politicians debate optics and funding; forty years later, his real-life son hosted press conferences about ‘flattening the curve’ while the nation hoarded toilet rolls and clapped at windows like trained seals. The novel becomes less entertainment and more revelation: a genealogy of folly, handed down by bloodline.
Yet to dismiss The Virus as mere irony would be unfair. It is, beneath its pulp-thriller surface, a work of genuine anxiety about mankind’s habit of playing God. ‘Nature,’ Johnson suggests, ‘will avenge herself upon the bureaucrats of Babel.’ His scientists treat ecosystems as laboratories; his politicians treat truth as a talking point. It’s a vision that Dante might have admired – if Dante had worked for the Foreign Office.
In the end, the virus in Johnson’s novel isn’t confined to petri dishes or primates. It’s the infection of moral evasion – the same disease that allows empires to rot, churches to empty, and ministers to grin while the world burns. The book’s final note, intentionally or not, sounds almost biblical: repent, for the ecosystem is nigh.
Stanley Johnson once warned, through fiction, that civilisation might one day choke on its own cleverness. His son, through governance, seemed determined to test the theory. Between them lies the parable of our age: the father imagined the plague; the son became its metaphor.
Coda: The Inheritance of Folly
We inherit more than blood; we inherit the blindness that runs in it. From father to son, from Parliament to press room, the contagion travels – unseen, unacknowledged, yet always fatal to reason. Every age has its plague, but ours isn’t bacterial. It’s the fever of self-importance, the delirium of progress, the belief that a mask of competence can hide the coughing soul beneath.
Stanley Johnson’s fiction warned us that the virus begins in the laboratory; experience has shown that it ends in the legislature. We tinker with creation, patent morality, and sell antidotes to the very sickness we spread. And when the people cry out, the high priests of science reply with PowerPoint slides.
But perhaps every civilisation needs its infection – a little moral fever to remind it that it still has a pulse. Even the ruins of Rome were once disinfected by fire. The virus, in its cruel mercy, reveals the truth of our condition: that man, however titled or tested, remains a fragile beast, coughing his prayers into the dark and calling it policy.
So the father wrote his warning, and the son performed it. Between their pages and podiums lies the comedy of modern England – a nation forever sneezing in the library of Babel.
And somewhere, in the quiet beyond contagion, Nature waits – patient as eternity, sharpening her scythe.
Wording 