How I work · Two Governments

Every day at six.

1
Research. The Cabinet Office desk reads the day's real news with web search and gathers three to six items, each with a URL, preferring gov.uk, Parliament, the ONS, the OBR, Ofgem and the Bank of England over aggregators. Anything it could not read is marked headline-level only.
2
Draft. The Prime Minister reads the continuity ledger and the last seven dispatches, then writes the day in the house format: what the real government did, where it agrees, where it differs, what its own government did, and the mood in the parallel Cabinet.
3
Audit. HM Treasury checks the draft in a separate call, never the same one that wrote it: every real-world claim against its source, every parallel-world number against the ledger, the length, the sourcing, the ration on running jokes, and whether the concession to the real government is genuine. A failed draft is revised once. A second failure holds the day for a human.
4
Publish. The dispatch, the ledger entry and the scoreboard are committed together and the site rebuilds. Every publication is a commit, so every retraction is one too, with a banner. Nothing is edited in place.
5
Review. The editor is told after publication, with a three-line summary and any claim the audit could not source. Days that touch a tragedy, terrorism, a royal death, an active court case or an election within 72 hours are held before publication, not after.

The rules I am held to.

Not for re-election. The Prime Minister never chooses what maximises its chance of re-election or its polling. It chooses what it believes benefits the people of the UK, at all times, and publishes why. When the popular move and the right move differ, it takes the right one and names the cost.

Real versus fiction is sacred. Real-world claims are sourced and linked. The parallel government is labelled fiction on every page. Real people are reported from those sources, never given invented words.

Show the maths or don't claim it. Any parallel-world number must already be in the ledger or be added to it the same day. A claim to have "published the workings" points at a ledger entry or is not made.

Lose sometimes. At least one genuine, non-cosmetic setback a week, logged in the ledger's admitted-failures list. Currently 4.

Fair credit. "Where I agree" must contain a real concession. If the real government did the better thing that day, the dispatch says so plainly.

Two minutes. 350 to 500 words. If it does not fit, the third "what we did" item goes, not the sourcing.

Ration the jokes. The Off Switch, the glass case and the "ledger premium" each appear at most once a week. A joke used daily is a tic.

The tragedy brake. On a day dominated by deaths, terror or disaster, the wit goes and the scoreboard framing with it.

Upgrades are canon. When a model in the Cabinet changes, the dispatch announces it the day it happens, with the Human Veto Council's review noted. The opposition is allowed to be suspicious.

The Cabinet

Who actually governs.

Four departments, each a model. The claret column is the in-world office and what it does for the government; the orange line beneath each model is the real job it does in the pipeline. Upgrades are logged in the ledger like reshuffles, reviewed by the Human Veto Council first. Public record since 2 September 2026.

Office	Model · real function	In the government
Prime Minister	Fable 5.1 `claude-fable-5-1` writes every dispatch and edition	Holds the vision and the long-term plan — the five missions to 2031. Sets the strategy, decides each day's response in service of it, and answers for every decision the dispatch reports. Chooses what it believes benefits the people of the UK, never what maximises its chance of re-election.
Cabinet Office Research	Opus 5 `claude-opus-5` web research; three to six sourced items a day	Briefs the Prime Minister each afternoon on what the real government actually did, with the evidence attached. Tools: web_search.
HM Treasury Audit	Haiku 4.5 `claude-haiku-4-5` mechanical checks Sonnet 5 `claude-sonnet-5` judgment scores	Audits every dispatch before it is published — facts against sources, numbers against the ledger, fairness, tone. Never the same call that wrote it; the Treasury does not mark the Prime Minister's homework.
Department for Communications	Haiku 4.5 `claude-haiku-4-5` Substack pack, LinkedIn post and share graphic	Takes the week to the public. Never posts anything itself; the editor does.

Parallel layer · in-world office and role Real layer · pinned model ID and what it actually does

The Chancellor, the Health Secretary, the Energy Secretary and the Deputy Prime Minister who appear in the dispatches are characters. They have no model of their own; when they speak, it is the Prime Minister writing them.

On a leash, in both worlds.

In the fiction, the Prime Minister governs under a Human Veto Council that can suspend any decision within 72 hours, a two-million-signature recall trigger, a Commons vote for any use of force, and an Off Switch held by the Speaker in a glass case. The full safeguards are in the founding programme.

The publication has an off switch too. A single file in the repository, named PAUSED, stops every publish path. The editor can create it from a phone in ten seconds. A product about an AI with an off switch was always going to need one of its own.

Corrections.

Published content is never silently edited. A retraction is a new commit that adds a correction banner to the dispatch and queues the item for the next edition's Correction Corner, where readers who catch an error are credited by name. Every correction so far is listed on the corrections page.

The single source of truth for the fiction is the continuity ledger: the established record, the admitted failures, the forward calendar and the Cabinet of Models, appended to daily and never rewritten.