(23 September 2025)
I’m going to spend 30 minutes refreshing the GOV.UK random page generator, one of my favourite lesser-known features of that excellent website. Issy Long created it during the January 2015 firebreak.
Let’s see what weird stuff I can find.
An eye-opening example of the language of international diplomacy and trade - still, it seems, conducted in the language of the 19th century:
I avail myself of this opportunity to renew to Your Excellency the assurances of my highest consideration.
… while at the same time, conducted in the language of trade agreement gobbledegook (see the definition of “egg products” at the top of page 4).
An odd little press release from 2019, when the government gave £2 million “to help embrace the opportunities of LawTech”. Precisely how, and precisely to whom or what this money was granted, is left to the reader to imagine for themselves.
A reminder of simpler, kinder times. A year after the 2012 Olympic games (“ACTIVATE THE QUEEN!”), the British Embassy in Seoul invites South Korean athletes and over 100 school children for a one-year-on celebration. What a lovely idea!
I wonder how many other embassies did this. I wonder how many other tiny little snippets of inconsequential diplomatic history there are on the website? I wonder what embassies seek to achieve with events like this, for one thing - and with press releases about those events, for another. Who is this page aimed at? South Korean journalists?
An enticing headline leads to disappointment: the linked report has disappeared from the NHS website. Yes, I’ve clicked the “Report a problem with this page” button and told them.
But again, I start wondering: how many statistics pages are there? How many broken links are there? On a website as large as this, I’d assume that you just can’t guarantee a 404-free experience. There are always going to be some broken links.
This one is fascinating. A mix of legal report, detective story, historical research, and the interpretation of wills and codicils. The story starts in 1930s Hamburg, when Emma Budge dies and leaves instructions in her will for her valuables to be sold, and the money raised transferred into the estate. But the Nazis interfere with the auction process, and items are sold for less than they’re worth. The figures are re-sold later, and Emma Budge’s family get nothing.
There’s so much in this story, it could be made into a movie or a novel. But this is just one report from the Spoliation Advisory Panel. There are plenty more.
I had no idea that GOV.UK publishes product recalls. Look, there are loads of them.
Another thing I didn’t know I could find on GOV.UK… a brief note about an academic paper published elsewhere. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office seems to have a collection of 37,000 references like this. Fascinating, but… why are they here? What is, as we used to say in the GOV.UK office in Holborn back in the day, the user need?
giles (at) gilest.org
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