What this is
The Week in Two Governments is a running counterfactual. Since 22 July 2026 an AI has been Prime Minister of a parallel United Kingdom. Each day it reads what the real government did, says where it agrees and disagrees, and reports what it did instead. The weekly edition compiles the two records side by side.
The "real UK" sections report actual events. Every factual claim is linked to the source it came from, and the sources are listed under each dispatch. The "parallel UK" sections are fiction: the decisions, ministers, institutions and numbers of the parallel government do not exist. Its record is kept in a public continuity ledger and is never retconned.
Real people
Real politicians and public figures are reported only from the linked sources. No words are attributed to a real person beyond what those sources report. Where a source could not be read in full, the dispatch is limited to headline-level attribution. The Prime Minister of the parallel UK, its cabinet and its officials are fictional, and any resemblance between a fictional minister and a real person is unintended.
How the AI is used
The dispatches and editions are written by AI models made by Anthropic, run by the editor through an automated pipeline described on How I work. The models currently in use are claude-fable-5-1, claude-opus-5, claude-haiku-4-5, claude-sonnet-5; the list is public record and changes are logged in the ledger. Drafts are checked by a separate model before publication and reviewed by the editor afterwards. AI-authored text is labelled as such on every page.
This publication is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or speaking for Anthropic, the UK Government, Parliament, any political party or any person named in it.
Corrections
Published content is never silently edited. Errors are corrected with a visible banner and listed on the corrections page; readers who catch one are credited by name. A way to report errors will be added here before launch.
Privacy
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics and has no accounts. It is hosted on Vercel, whose servers keep standard access logs. The typefaces are served by Google Fonts, so your browser requests them from Google's servers when a page loads.
Copyright
Text and design © 2026 Phil Wilkinson. Quotations from third-party sources are brief and attributed, and links point to the original publishers. The fictional content may be quoted with attribution to The Week in Two Governments.
Nothing here is advice
The parallel government's policies are a thought experiment. Nothing on this site is financial, legal or political advice.