For a month we asked why no one governing would name it. Tonight we stop asking, and start keeping the record, his and our own.

Today Andy Burnham was elected leader of the Labour Party, unopposed, nominated by 379 of its members of parliament, at a special conference in London. On Monday he becomes Prime Minister. For a month this paper has run a single question at him and at his party: what happens to human work when the machines can do it, and why will no one about to govern name it out loud. We were right to keep asking. Tonight we are going to stop, because asking has done its job, and start on something harder and more useful. We are going to keep the record.

First, our own.

A paper that intends to hold a Prime Minister to his word has to hold itself to the same standard first, out loud, before it earns the right. So here is our scorecard, and it does not all fall our way.

We made two calls in June and they come due today. We said the contest would end in a coronation, with no vote of the membership. It did, and we have marked it right. We said his economic vision would not name the force reshaping work, and on 29 June, when he set out his ten-year plan, it did not. But we also got something wrong. In early July we let a briefing that his advisers gave the Financial Times be read, in our pages, as Burnham's own plan for AI and work. It was not his plan. We corrected it on 8 and 15 July, and we record the miss here again, in the open, because that honesty is the whole price of what comes next.

Then, today.

In his own words this afternoon, across five commitments and some two thousand of them, Andy Burnham did not mention artificial intelligence, automation, or the future of work once. This is not our reading of his politics. It is the shape of his own speech. His diagnosis of what has gone wrong with Britain is, in his own words, that the country "took a series of wrong turns in the 1980s", followed by four decades of centralising, privatising politics. His remedy is where power sits: taking it from Westminster and handing it to the places that lost it. It is a serious argument, and it faces almost entirely backwards. He said, and we quote him, that "this generation of politicians, myself included, have failed". He is right, and that admission is the fairest possible statement of what this paper has spent a month describing. The gap is not his alone. He is simply about to be the most powerful person standing in it.

Here is the strange part. Someone has already done the work he has not. An unofficial site, published in his name by supporters and not by him, carries a detailed, costed programme for work in the age of AI: a levy on firms that fire and automate, a credit for firms that hire instead, the lot. It is thoughtful, and it is not his, and we will not pretend otherwise, because pretending otherwise is the exact mistake we made once already. But set the two things side by side, the stranger's plan and the leader's silence, and the picture is complete. The defining economic question of the age is being answered in Andy Burnham's name by people on the internet, and not by the man who on Monday will actually hold the levers.

So, from tonight.

We are opening The Ledger, and it is worth saying plainly why it matters. A person can take charge of this country and say nothing about the force remaking every job in it, and ordinarily there is no record of that silence, only the next day's news washing it away. The Ledger is the record. It holds what people in power actually said, in their own words rather than our gloss on them, set against what they go on to do. And it holds our own calls in the same table, the ones we got right and the one we got wrong, marked to the same standard. A promise made in a room on a Thursday is usually gone by Friday. Written down, dated and checked against the outcome, it stops being weather and becomes a record.

The rules are simple, and the rules are the point. Only a person's own words go in, never a briefing given in their name, never a supporter's plan, which is the discipline we learned the hard way this month. Every entry carries its source. Nothing is marked kept or broken until the outcome is real. And our own predictions live in it on identical terms, because a paper that will not grade its own homework has no business grading a Prime Minister's.

Burnham is its first subject because on Monday he will be the most powerful person on our beat, not because he is the worst of the bench he himself indicted. The same instrument would sit as readily under whoever comes after him. His first live entry is the promise he made today, in his own words: that the government he leads will set out its full economic path, he said, "starting next week". We will be reading it for one word.

[The Ledger, at launch: the seven opening entries render here from the pledge tracker.]

That is the record as it stands tonight, and you can hold it against us as easily as against him. Next week it gets its first real test, when the plan he promised arrives and we read it for the one question he has not yet answered. We will mark it either way.

Disclosure. This is a signed editor's note and the view in it is my own. It was drafted with the same AI that writes this paper, and our analyst desks run on models built by Anthropic, which is one of the AI companies whose rise sits behind the very question of work this note is about. We name that rather than write around it.