---
title: "The Continuity List Names 914 People. We Traced 211 Of Them To Graves."
dek: "Annex C to the National Relocation Instruction is the standing order that turns a list of post-holders into a government. Its validation form has had an eleven per cent return rate since 2011. Two people maintain it, one of them part-time."
kind: investigation (Investigation)
desk: Shadow Governance
author: Marcus Oyelaran and Nadia Ferreira-Ost (fictional)
published: 2026-08-19T06:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/continuity-roster-914-names
tags: continuity of government, National Relocation Instruction, Whitehall, records, civil service
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

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

*Annex C to the National Relocation Instruction is the standing order that turns a list of post-holders into a government. Its validation form has had an eleven per cent return rate since 2011. Two people maintain it, one of them part-time.*

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.

> **Figure:** All 914 rows of Annex C, checked against the public record — see https://theyburied.com/article/continuity-roster-914-names

## 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.

> Nobody has ever been given money to clean a list that only matters on a day that has not happened.
>
> — Katharine Ollerenshaw-Diallo, head of the secretariat, 2003–2011

## 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.

## Sources (invented)

- A former deputy secretary, Held the continuity brief in two departments; asked not to be named and gave reasons this newspaper accepted — Three meetings in person; supplied the position-title version of Annex C and the secretariat's maintenance file, 2011–2025 (March–June 2026)
- Rosalind Achterberg-Nwosu, Records researcher; not told what the list was — Commissioned to identify the current holder of 914 posts from a spreadsheet headed 'PANEL — VERIFY CURRENT HOLDER' (May–July 2026)
- Katharine Ollerenshaw-Diallo, Head of the continuity secretariat, 2003–2011 — Read the full draft; interviewed twice by telephone; replied in writing (July 2026)
- Marjorie Pentreath-Blakey, Last person recorded as holding the post at row 604; runs a garden centre near Bromyard — Telephoned without warning; read the post title back to her and asked whether it had been hers (26 June 2026)
- The Cabinet Office, Written questions, 2 June 2026 — Answered on 24 June, in six sentences, none of which addressed the return rate (June 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- The names. We were given the position-title version of Annex C, with no name column. Every person in this story is somebody we derived from a post title using public appointment records. The secretariat's own copy may hold different names against the same rows, and if it does, our count is wrong in a direction we cannot estimate.
- Whether Annex C is the operative annex. The maintenance file's contents page lists an Annex D at folio 211. We have not seen Annex D, we do not know what it contains, and two people who should know declined to say whether it supersedes C.
- Whether an activation would use the list at all. Nobody we spoke to could point to a rehearsal in which the roster was worked through row by row rather than by ringing whoever was known to be awake.

## Right of reply

**Katharine Ollerenshaw-Diallo, head of the continuity secretariat 2003–2011** (Replied in writing on 17 July 2026. Printed entire and unedited.):

> Your arithmetic is right and your story is wrong, and the difference is worth a page of your newspaper, so I will use it.
> 
> The instruction does not summon Mrs So-and-so. It summons the holder of a post. That is the whole design and it is deliberate, because the people who wrote it in the 1950s had watched a war and knew perfectly well that individuals are the least reliable component in any arrangement. The name and the telephone number in the file are a convenience for the duty officer. They are not the authority. If a permanent secretary died in 2016, the authority sits with whoever is permanent secretary this morning, and that person does not need to be on a list to be the permanent secretary.
> 
> So three hundred and forty of your rows do not trouble me at all. A post with a new holder is a post that works. You have counted an out-of-date address book and called it a broken government.
> 
> Now let me tell you what you should have led on, because it is in your own figure and you walked past it.
> 
> Some of your two hundred and eleven are not people who died in a post. They are posts that died. Your row 604 is one. The regional water-resources function was abolished in 2014 and its duties were not inherited by a named successor — they were distributed. When the duty officer reaches that row there is no holder to ring, and no rule that tells him who to ring instead. I would guess, from the shape of your categories, that you have somewhere between forty and seventy rows of that kind. Those are holes in the instrument. Everything else is stationery.
> 
> That is the story. It is duller than yours and it is the one that would actually fail on the day.
> 
> Two members of staff I will not defend, and I will not pretend I did better. I had three, then two and a half, then two. I wrote a submission in 2009 asking for a fourth and a database, and I have kept the reply, and the reply is a paragraph about restraint. Nobody has ever been given money to clean a list that only matters on a day that has not happened. That is not a scandal about secrecy. It is the ordinary behaviour of a treasury and it will still be the ordinary behaviour of a treasury when your readers have forgotten this article.
> 
> One last thing, and you may print it or not. You telephoned a woman at a garden centre and she was pleased. I would have been pleased too. Being on that list was, for most of the people on it, the single clearest statement anybody in government ever made that their job mattered. You have made a joke of that, gently, and I understand why, and I would ask you to consider that the list's real function for sixty years has been morale rather than survival, and that a thing which works only as morale still works.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.