The US data analytics company Palantir has secured contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds with the Ministry of Defence, police forces, the Financial Conduct Authority, the atomic weapons establishment and the NHS, raising concerns about its growing influence within the British state.
Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson, now a senior vice-president at Palantir, has said that "mob rule" must not decide public contracts. However, critics argue that democratic transparency could be a genuine threat to certain contractors, and that Watson's new role highlights the company's extensive political connections.
Political Access and Lobbying
According to a detailed investigation by Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin in the London Review of Books, Palantir's superpower is that it is "willing to spend more on securing political access than almost all of its British and continental competitors". The company made abundant use of Peter Mandelson's company Global Counsel, which seems to have made abundant use of the UK's "remarkably flimsy lobbying laws". Watson is one of more than 30 former UK ministers and officials Palantir now employs.
Palantir's contracts might have been awarded lawfully, but the ways in which doors were opened for it have been questioned. These include an unrecorded meeting between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel in Downing Street in 2019. The company was invited back when the Covid-19 pandemic began a few months later, and was working in the NHS within days, on a contract for which it charged only £1.
Controversial Meetings and Contracts
Another controversial meeting was brokered by Mandelson in 2025, when he was UK ambassador to the US. Keir Starmer visited Palantir's showroom in Washington, where he met the company's global and UK chief executives, Alex Karp and Louis Mosley. They talked about defence spending. No 10 "refused to say whether Starmer knew that Palantir was a client of Global Counsel, in which Mandelson still held a stake of around a fifth at the time. The meeting was never declared on transparency registers." A few months later, Palantir secured a £241m contract with the Ministry of Defence, without an open tender.
Martha Dalton, a key player in Andy Burnham's campaign to win the Makerfield byelection, was on unpaid leave from the lobbying company she co-founded, Lodestone, which had done extensive work for Palantir. The Financial Times reports that Samantha Jones, then the lead non-executive director on the board of the health department, was an adviser to one of Palantir's partners when the company was bidding for its huge and controversial NHS contract. Now she is permanent secretary in the same department.
Concerns Over Data and Vendor Lock-in
There have been repeated allegations that some of Palantir's products are rubbish. But, as the House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee warns, government agencies can quickly succumb to "vendor lock-in": once you start using them, it can be very hard to stop.
Thiel has claimed that "the NHS makes people sick", and that we should "just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over". The company is deeply embedded in the Trump administration, where it supplies software that helps ICE find undocumented people. It also works for the Israeli government on identifying targets in Gaza. When Karp was confronted by a protester who told him that "Palantir kills Palestinians", he replied: "Mostly terrorists, that's true."
After official denials, it turns out that NHS England has granted Palantir "unlimited access" to patient data. Identifiable patient data is supposed to be visible only to people directly involved in a patient's care, or who have received the patient's informed consent. There are widespread concerns about how this and other datasets might be used.
Calls for Reform
In July, the government's ethics and integrity commission recommended a major shake-up, enabling us to see all the encounters between lobbyists and ministers, aides and senior officials. The pattern is always the same: a scandal, followed by a call to action, followed by little or nothing.
Before he became prime minister, David Cameron noted that lobbying "has tainted our politics for too long". He would shine "the light of transparency" on it. Instead, he oversaw an act that was "more loophole than law". It did nothing to protect us from lobbying by people such as Cameron – pulling strings, once out of office, among his old colleagues, to try to drum up government business for the bank Greensill.
This is another key test for Burnham. Will he allow the mob rule of private business to keep dominating our lives, or will he ensure that government is for the people?
