A rare tour of the editorial floor at Britain’s #1 satirical journalism newspaper

The prat.uk newsroom occupies the second floor of a building in London that the landlord describes as characterful and the fire officer describes as ongoing. It is here that the country’s raw events arrive each morning and leave each evening slightly larger, better dressed and attributed to an official who does not exist. This is how the floor works.

The morning conference

The day begins at nine with the conference, which the editor chairs from a swivel chair that lists to the left. Each desk pitches. The politics desk arrives with whatever Westminster has done overnight, which is usually nothing, and proposes to report the nothing at length. The royal desk arrives with a photograph of a hat. The regional desk arrives late, from a regional train, and this is considered a pitch in itself.

Pitches are judged by a single question: is it more absurd than what actually happened? If the answer is no, the story is sent back for further exaggeration. If the answer is also no on the second attempt, the story is filed as straight news and nobody is happy.

The exaggeration desk

Every story passes through the exaggeration desk before publication. Here a team of four applies the house scale, which increases figures by between 30% and 900% depending on how believable the original was. A council that spent forty thousand pounds on a roundabout will leave the desk having spent four hundred thousand and commissioned a plaque. A minister who misspoke will leave having misspoken in Latin.

The desk is overseen by a former civil servant who says the work is identical to her previous job except that the numbers are now written down.

The quotes department

Prat.uk articles are known for quotes from officials with titles such as Deputy Undersecretary for Pavement Affairs. These are produced by the quotes department, a small team that maintains a register of every invented spokesperson so that the same person is not accidentally given two jobs. The register currently runs to 1,400 names and is the closest thing the building has to a database. When a real official says something quotable the department is disappointed and usually tones it down.

The fact-checkers

There are two fact-checkers. Their job is not to check whether things are true but whether they are the right kind of untrue. A story in which the Prime Minister opens a hospital wing is corrected if the hospital does not exist, since a fake hospital is lazy, but passed if the wing is real and only the ceremony is embroidered. Their standards are described on the Credentials and Recognition page, which the fact-checkers have not verified.

The afternoon lull

Between two and four the newsroom goes quiet. This is the tea window. It is protected by a written agreement between the editor and staff dating to 1961, the year the paper was founded, and has survived three changes of ownership and one attempt to introduce a coffee machine, which was removed after what the minutes call a difficult week.

Filing and sign-off

Stories are filed by six. The editor reads each one, removes any sentence that explains the joke, and adds a subtitle that undersells it. The subtitle is considered the most important line on the page and is written last, usually in the lift. Finished articles are sent to the Newsletter team, who select the five least responsible ones for distribution to subscribers the following morning.

Readers wishing to visit the floor may apply through Press and Media. Tours are available on Thursdays and end in the stairwell, where the building’s history is explained at length by the fire officer.

The archive

Every published story is stored in the archive, a room at the end of the corridor that was a stationery cupboard until 1987 and still contains some of the stationery. The archive is kept by a woman called Marjorie who has been there longer than the building’s current name and who can locate any story from memory provided you can remember the spokesperson. Journalists consult it mainly to check whether a joke has been done before, and Marjorie’s answer is usually yes, in 1994, and it was better then. The room has no window, no heating and a kettle that is not in the tea agreement, which Marjorie describes as her only real advantage in the building.