The Continuity List Names 914 People. We Traced 211 Of Them To Graves.

LONDON, United Kingdom — Two hundred and eleven of the people who become the government of this country on the day the instruction is activated are dead.

We know because we worked out who holds all 914 of the posts, and ran every name against the death register.

What the list is

Annex C to the National Relocation Instruction has 914 rows. Each row is a post: a permanent secretary, a regional controller, a utility director, a chief constable, four bishops. Against each post, in the secretariat's own copy, sits a name and a telephone number.

On activation, the holders of those posts are summoned to designated locations, and the ones who arrive constitute the administration of the country until the instruction is stood down.

That is not an allegation. It is what the instrument is for, in the language the instrument uses about itself.

A former deputy secretary gave us the position-title version — no name column — together with eleven years of the secretariat's maintenance file. He would not give us the named version and said so to our faces, which we record because it is the reason our numbers are inferences.

What we did with it

We took the 914 post titles and worked out who currently holds each one, from gazetted appointments, filings at the companies registry, the medical and engineering registers, and diocesan yearbooks for the bishops.

Then we ran every resulting name against the death register.

Then a records researcher who had never been told what the list was did the whole thing again from the post titles alone, working from a spreadsheet headed PANEL — VERIFY CURRENT HOLDER.

She disagreed with us on 31 rows. We took her answer on 19 of them and ours on 12. Both answers for all 31 are published with this story so that a reader may take neither.

The arithmetic

Five hundred and seventy-six rows are wrong about the person. Sixty-three per cent.

Two hundred and eleven are dead. Three hundred and forty have left the post. Eighty-eight are alive, employed, and employed elsewhere. Those figures sum to 639 rather than 576 because sixty-three people retired and then died, and sit in two of our categories.

Three hundred and thirty-eight rows are right.

The form

Every October the secretariat sends each department a validation form. It is one page. It asks whether the holder of each listed post has changed and, if so, to whom.

Until 2011 departments were required to return it. In 2011 that requirement was withdrawn in a general schedule of administrative burdens, alongside a form about bicycle sheds.

In the 2025 round, 47 departments out of 412 replied. It has not been above fourteen per cent since the requirement went.

The maintenance file contains eleven years of chasing letters. The early ones are polite and long. The later ones are polite and short.

Two people

The secretariat that maintains the machinery of national survival has two members of staff.

One is full-time. One works three days a week and is on loan from another directorate, which has twice asked in writing to have her back.

Row 604

Row 604 is a regional water-resources post. The function was abolished in 2014.

Marjorie Pentreath-Blakey runs a garden centre outside Bromyard. She is in this story because the appointment record puts her in that post on the day it stopped existing, not because we have seen her name on the annex. We telephoned her without warning and read the post title back.

She had not thought about it in years. She asked whether she was still on it.

We could not tell her, and said so: our copy of Annex C has no names in it. What we could tell her is that row 604 is still there, and that the post it names has not existed for twelve years.

She said she was pleased anyway, and then asked what she was supposed to bring.

The instruction does not say. Neither, when we put the question in writing, could the Cabinet Office, whose six-sentence answer used the phrase "kept under regular review" and did not mention the form.

What this desk takes from it

The shadow government is real, it is written down, and it is a distribution list nobody has the budget to clean.

We expected secrecy and found a maintenance problem. There is no vetting panel in the file, no loyalty test, no selection at all beyond the post you happen to hold on the morning it goes off.

The best answer to this story is printed below it, unedited, by the woman who used to run the thing. Her case is that we have counted an address book and called it a broken government — that the instruction summons posts, and posts have new holders. She is right about that.

Where she goes further is where we cannot follow her yet. Some of our 211 are not people who died in a post; they are posts that died, with no named successor to ring. She puts that at forty to seventy rows. We cannot check her figure without the abolition dates for every post on the annex, and we have asked for them.

That is the hole. Not a secret list of rulers. A list with rows on it that no longer ring anywhere.