Chloe George

Tag: Data Sovereignty

  • The 110,000 number, the £1 trick, and the £8.5 million sales operation

    The 110,000 number, the £1 trick, and the £8.5 million sales operation

    This piece exists because of a Telegraph article I didn’t read.

    Last week, Matthew Lesh, who runs public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, published a piece in the Telegraph headlined “In defence of Palantir”1. The standfirst read: “The American company provides an invaluable service to the British taxpayer.” The photo caption ran: “It’s hard to avoid the reality that the opponents of Palantir would prefer that patients die rather than use the best available piece of software.”

    I don’t have a Telegraph subscription. For reasons I won’t bore you with, but which you can probably guess. The headline and the standfirst and the photo caption were enough. Three sentences of free-tier journalism told me the entire argument: critics of Palantir are letting people die, the American company is doing British taxpayers a service, and anyone who disagrees is, by implication, in bad faith.

    That is a strong claim. It rests, almost entirely, on one figure. So I went looking for that figure.

    If you’ve read anything in defence of Palantir’s NHS contract in the last year, you’ll have noticed it doing all the heavy lifting: 110,000 additional operations. Sometimes paired with a 6.8% lift in cancer diagnoses and a 15.3% reduction in discharge delays. The number is the load-bearing wall of the whole pro-Palantir argument. Pull it out and the rest of the building wobbles.

    So let’s pull it out.

    This piece is about three things. Where the 110,000 figure actually comes from, how the £1 contract that started this story became a £330 million one, and why £8.5 million of taxpayer money has been spent paying KPMG to convince NHS trusts to use software those trusts had already publicly said was worse than what they had. There’s a brief detour through US extraterritorial law and a CEO who has openly daydreamed about drone-spraying his critics with fentanyl. Stay with me.

    The 110,000 figure is supplier marketing, not evidence

    The first thing to know about the 110,000 figure is that it comes from Palantir. It is repeated by NHS England, repeated by Telegraph columnists, repeated until it sounds like a fact. The most recent public source for it is Louis Mosley, executive vice-chair of Palantir UK2 (a man I’ve written about at length elsewhere3), defending the contract against the break clause being triggered. He is not what you’d call a neutral party on whether his own company’s software works.

    A cartoon magician on stage pulling the number 110,000 extra operations out of a hat; a single audience member labelled Telegraph applauds; a sign reads Independent evaluation 2029; a cat looks unconvinced.
    The 110,000 number, in context.

    An actual independent evaluation hasn’t started reporting yet. NHS England awarded Imperial College Projects a £700,000 contract in February 2026 to evaluate the Federated Data Platform.4 It is a three-year study. Findings expected in 2029. So when someone tells you Palantir is delivering for the NHS, what they mean is “Palantir says Palantir is delivering for the NHS, and the body assessing whether that’s true won’t tell us until 2029. Two years after the contract has to be renewed or scrapped.”

    The cancer figure is even slipperier. It is not a 6.8% increase in cancers diagnosed. In Palantir’s own wording, it is “a 6.8% increase in the number of people finding out whether or not they have cancer within 28 days of referral”.5 That’s a workflow metric, the NHS Faster Diagnosis Standard6, which tracks whether patients are diagnosed or have cancer ruled out within 28 days of urgent referral. The fact that over 90% of those referred turn out not to have cancer7 tells you what kind of metric it really is. It tells you people are getting a yes-or-no faster. It doesn’t tell you anyone got treatment they wouldn’t have got, or lived who would otherwise have died. The slide from “more 28-day notifications” to “more cancer diagnoses” to “patients will die without Palantir” is an extraordinary distance for a single number to travel.

    One study has been waved around as evidence the FDP works. It was published by the BMJ in March 20268, looked at theatre scheduling at one hospital, Chelsea and Westminster, and found that operating theatres got busier after the new system came in. NHS England describes it as the independent evidence the FDP is delivering. Several things are worth knowing about it.

    The hospital where it took place is the hospital where Palantir’s scheduling tool was originally built. The study was paid for by that same hospital. Two of the ten authors work for that same hospital. None of this is hidden. The paper says all of it on its first page.

    It gets less comfortable from there. The chair of the hospital throughout the period of the study, Matthew Swindells, was also working for Palantir as a paid adviser through Peter Mandelson’s lobbying firm, Global Counsel9. Dr Justin Whatling, who sat on the innovation board of the hospital’s official charity, was simultaneously Palantir’s UK head of healthcare10. So the people running the hospital that built the product, paid for the study, and supplied the data were also working for Palantir. None of those Palantir connections appear in the study’s conflict-of-interest section.

    The study itself can’t actually tell us whether the new system did anything. Here’s why.

    In December 2021, a Covid wave hit. NHS staff got sick in huge numbers, operations got cancelled across the country, and performance crashed. By January 2022, the wave was fading and the NHS was starting to recover. That same month, Chelsea and Westminster switched on the Palantir scheduling tool. Over the following months, performance got better. The study attributes that improvement to the tool.

    But the NHS was getting better anyway. Everywhere. It was bouncing back from Covid, not because of any new software. The authors of the study admit this in their own paper. They can’t separate what the tool did from what the recovery did. Their study had no comparison group, no other hospital to check against.

    A month after the paper came out, the BMJ published a separate analysis. This one did have a comparison group. It compared Chelsea and Westminster with trusts in the same region that hadn’t adopted Palantir’s system. They followed the same recovery curve. As Lib Dem MP Martin Wrigley summarised it on the floor of the Commons11, the BMJ analysis “shows the benefits to be exaggerated and untrue”. The Chelsea and Westminster recovery wasn’t a Palantir effect. It was just the recovery.

    Cancellations are worth a note too. The whole point of better surgical scheduling is supposed to be fewer same-day cancellations. The study found cancellation rates didn’t fall. By its own data, the weekly median was 5.2% before the tool was introduced, and 5.2% after.

    So the evidence base, fairly stated, is this. One study at one hospital, funded by the hospital, conducted by a team that included two of the hospital’s employees, in a setting whose senior leadership was simultaneously working for Palantir, with the authors themselves admitting they can’t separate the tool’s effect from a Covid recovery. One BMJ follow-up that added a comparison and found no Palantir-specific effect. And one genuinely independent evaluation, by a different Imperial team, that won’t report until 2029. That is what £330 million is buying.

    How £1 became £330 million

    A cartoon shows a grand staircase in a government building with each step labelled with rising figures from £1 to over £1bn; a man in a suit with a Palantir lapel pin walks cheerfully up; an NHS patient sits at the bottom holding a sign reading We just wanted shorter waiting lists.
    The “land and expand” model, illustrated.

    The £1 contract is a beautiful piece of corporate strategy if you don’t think about it too hard, and a master class in how to capture a public institution if you do.

    The official story is that in March 2020, in the chaos of the first COVID lockdown, the NHS needed a data platform fast and a public-spirited American company stepped up for the price of a Freddo. Palantir charged just £1 for use of its Foundry software. There was no competitive tender12 because of emergency procurement rules.

    The actual story, published by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in 202113, is that internal UK government documents disclosed under FOI showed Palantir had been “wooing” NHS chiefs since summer 2019. By January 2020, before COVID was on anyone’s radar, Palantir’s London team were already working on a product “exclusively focused” on the UK’s healthcare market. That isn’t an emergency response. That’s an opportunity that arrived right on cue. I traced this whole story earlier this year in The Seeing Stones14.

    The £1 ran for three months. Then it was extended for £1 million. Then it became a £23.5 million two-year contract15 in December 2020, awarded under the G-Cloud framework which doesn’t require a published tender. The campaigning group Foxglove had to threaten legal action just to make the government publish that contract.

    By November 2023, the £1 had become £330 million for the Federated Data Platform. The contract was published in late December 2023 with three-quarters of its 586 pages redacted, including most sections on data protection.16 The Good Law Project is suing over the redactions.

    This pattern has a name in tech procurement. It’s called land and expand. Get in cheap. Get embedded. Renegotiate from a position of strength because you’re now the incumbent. Rinse, repeat, charge a premium. It’s a perfectly fine sales strategy if you’re selling pizzas. It’s a different thing entirely if you’re selling software that processes the medical records of 56 million people.

    The £8.5 million sales operation

    This is the bit that should make every taxpayer pause for a moment.

    In April 2024, NHS England awarded an £8.5 million contract to KPMG to “promote the adoption” of the Federated Data Platform17 across NHS trusts. Those are the actual words in the procurement documents. Promote. The. Adoption.

    Why did promotion need to be paid for? Because trusts kept saying no. Greater Manchester’s health authority said in writing that there were “no products designed or produced by Palantir Technologies Inc. as part of the FDP programme that exceed the NHS Greater Manchester local capability.”18 Translation: it isn’t as good as what we already have.

    Leeds Teaching Hospitals, which oversees seven hospitals and treats 1.5 million patients a year, told NHS England in writing that adopting Palantir’s tools would mean they “would lose functionality rather than gain it by adopting them.” Berkshire Healthcare just said “no plans to join the FDP programme.” As of August 2025, only 34 trusts, just under 15%, were actively using the platform16.

    So here is the situation, plainly stated. The government bought £330 million of software. Trusts said it was worse than what they had. The government then spent another £8.5 million paying a Big Four consultancy to convince trusts to use the worse software. In October 2025 the medium-term planning framework was changed to mandate FDP sign-up across acute, community and mental health services, and to demand that existing local data systems be removed.11 Refusal is being engineered out of the system.

    I think about this in domestic terms. It is like buying a fridge, your spouse pointing out that the fridge is worse than the one you already have, you then hiring a third party to come round and explain to your spouse why actually the fridge is great, and finally, when your spouse is still unconvinced, banning them from saying anything negative about the fridge. The fridge cost more than the house.

    A cartoon couple looking unimpressed at an oversized new fridge while a Big Four consultant gestures at it; an old fridge in the corner labelled the one we already had; a £330m invoice pinned on the wall behind.
    The £8.5 million KPMG contract, illustrated.

    “But surely we can’t unwind it now?”

    I had this question myself. With only 15% of trusts actively using the FDP, how locked in can we really be? Quite a few people I respect think we are already past the point of no return. I don’t think they are right.

    The break clause is real. A senior government source told the Financial Times in March 2026 that “we are confident we could do it if we wanted to.”2 At Digital Health Rewired the same month, Will Monaghan, group chief digital information officer at University Hospitals of Leicester and University Hospitals of Northamptonshire, said that if the NHS walked away from Palantir, trusts could “lift and shift” onto another platform, though it would be “incredibly disruptive”2. It would not be impossible. The break clause activates in February 2027.

    The honest answer about lock-in goes like this. The technical lock-in for the 15% of trusts using the FDP is reversible. The architectural lock-in is harder. The way the NHS labels, defines, and connects its own data has been built around Palantir’s software. To swap it out you don’t just install a different programme. You have to rebuild the underlying language the NHS uses to talk about itself.

    Then there is the ecosystem lock-in, which is a different kind of problem entirely. At least six Palantir engineers have been issued NHS.net email accounts5, which give them access to a directory containing the names, roles, workplaces, email addresses, and mobile numbers of up to 1.5 million NHS staff. They have access to NHS SharePoint and to internal Microsoft Teams groups. Some NHS staff have reported joining virtual meetings without realising other participants were Palantir employees, because @nhs.net email addresses made them look like internal colleagues. One resident doctor told the Guardian that he didn’t want his personal email and phone accessible to someone who “might next month be working on systems for drone strikes”. Once Palantir staff are embedded inside the NHS’s own directory, file-sharing system, and meeting rooms, removing the company stops being a procurement decision and starts being an HR exercise.

    A cartoon Microsoft Teams meeting grid showing six participants, all with @nhs.net email addresses; three are clearly NHS staff (doctor, nurse, ops manager) and three are clearly Palantir employees in branded clothing; a thought bubble from the nurse reads Wait, who are you again?
    There are at least six Palantir engineers with NHS.net accounts. This is just one meeting.

    And the wider lock-in, where Palantir is also embedded in the MoD via a £240 million contract, AWE Nuclear Security Technologies via a £15 million contract, and is piloting at the FCA19, is a lock-in at the level of the British state.

    So no, we are not too embedded for the FDP. We are getting more embedded every month, and the policy direction is to make adoption mandatory. Which means now is the moment to act. Not 2028.

    The CLOUD Act question nobody in government wants to answer

    This is the bit defenders of the contract really don’t like talking about.

    The US CLOUD Act20, passed in 2018, allows US authorities to compel American companies to hand over data they hold, regardless of where in the world it is physically stored. Contractual assurances about UK data sovereignty don’t override US extraterritorial law. They can’t. They aren’t enforceable in a US court.

    This is not a fringe concern. Marietje Schaake, former MEP and one of Europe’s most respected technology policy thinkers, has flagged the CLOUD Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as giving “law enforcement and intelligence the right to access data anywhere in the world if held by a US company”.21 The Swiss army rejected Palantir on broadly these grounds, citing concerns in an official report about “the possibility that sensitive data could be accessed by the US government and intelligence services”22. And in March 2026, two senior systems engineers working with the UK Ministry of Defence told the investigative outlet The Nerve that Palantir poses “a national security threat to the UK”. One of them, with an intelligence background, said Palantir probably now has “a complete profile on the whole UK population. At the very least I’d call that a security risk.”22

    When defence minister Luke Pollard told the Commons that all data used in Palantir software “remains under the ownership of the MoD”, he was telling the technical truth about ownership and missing the point about access. UK ownership doesn’t prevent US access. That is the whole architectural problem the engineers are flagging. Contractual reassurance does nothing to solve it.

    The CEO daydreaming about drone-spraying his critics

    A cartoon shows a wild-haired CEO at his desk with a drone remote, grinning, while a drone hovers above and sprays yellow liquid from a tank labelled fentanyl onto a tired woman at another desk labelled analyst; a poster on the wall reads Defend the West.
    “I love the idea.” (Karp, talking about analysts who criticise his company. Actual quote, February 2025.)

    Some of you will think this section is a reach. I want to address that.

    It would be easy to dismiss Alex Karp’s public statements as performance, the kind of provocative-billionaire schtick that gets attention but shouldn’t be taken seriously. I don’t think that holds, because the statements are too consistent and they map too closely to the company’s actual behaviour.

    In February 2025, during a talk promoting his book, Karp said: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.”23 That’s the CEO of the company processing British medical records talking about how he’d like to use drones against critics. In 2026, Palantir summarised one of the arguments in Karp’s book The Technological Republic as “The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone”23. The company’s 22-point manifesto24 calls openly for the return of national service, frames AI weapons as inevitable, and rejects what it calls “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism.” Karp’s recruitment programme pays 22 hand-picked teenagers about $5,400 a month to skip college and study “Western civilization” at Palantir, and tells British and American school leavers to “Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination.”25 Karp himself told the New York Times in 2024 that he and his company hold “a consistently pro-Western view, that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself”23. The Western civilization curriculum is the political view made into a recruitment pipeline.

    This is not a software vendor. It is a political project that happens to sell software. You don’t have to think Karp is a Bond villain to think the company should not be the operating system for British healthcare.

    What we can do

    The good news, and there is good news, is that the fight is not over and a lot of people are now in it.

    38 Degrees has gathered over 229,000 signatures on petitions26 calling on the government to terminate Palantir contracts. The British Medical Association passed a motion at its 2025 AGM opposing the FDP rollout, and in February 2026 told doctors to limit their engagement with the platform. The Good Law Project is suing over the redacted contract. Foxglove is running the Say No to Palantir campaign. A serious cross-party debate in the Commons on 16 April 202611 went well beyond the usual handful of campaigners and into the genuine middle of British politics.

    Useful resources

    • Good Law Project: leading the legal challenge over the contract redactions
    • Foxglove: the No Palantir in the NHS campaign and a clear explainer
    • Medact briefing: the most thorough single document on why this matters, written for trust boards
    • Write to your MP: the break clause is a political decision and your MP’s view counts
    • NHS data opt-out: limited in effect, but still worth doing

    The 110,000 figure isn’t a fact. It is a press release. The independent evaluation won’t tell us anything until 2029. The £1 was a wedge. The £8.5 million paid to KPMG is a quiet confession that the product can’t sell itself. The CLOUD Act exposure is real. The CEO is the CEO. NHS England, the body parroting the figures, is being abolished.

    February 2027 is coming. We have time to get this right. We just have to be loud enough that the people deciding hear us over the lobbying.

    References

    1. The Telegraph: Matthew Lesh, “In defence of Palantir”, 4 May 2026. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/04/in-defence-of-palantir-peter-thiel-left-nhs-digital-health/
    2. Digital Health News: “Government considers use of break clause in Palantir NHS contract”, March 2026. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/03/government-considers-use-of-break-clause-in-palantir-nhs-contract/
    3. chloegeorge.co.uk: “Louis Mosley: The man who sold England’s data”. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/louis-mosley-palantir-uk/
    4. Digital Health News: “Imperial College Projects awarded contract to evaluate FDP”, February 2026. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/02/imperial-college-projects-awarded-contract-to-evaluate-fdp/
    5. Digital Health News: “Palantir staff being issued NHS email accounts sparks concerns”, April 2026. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/04/palantir-staff-being-issued-nhs-email-accounts-sparks-concerns/
    6. NHS England: Faster Diagnosis Standard. https://www.england.nhs.uk/cancer/faster-diagnosis/
    7. PubMed Central: Study showing the proportion of urgent cancer referrals that are non-cancerous. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11323589/
    8. BMJ Health & Care Informatics: Lammila-Escalera et al., evaluation of FDP scheduling tool at Chelsea and Westminster, March 2026. https://informatics.bmj.com/content/33/1/e101949
    9. The Lowdown: “Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign against the FDP”. https://lowdownnhs.info/topics/accountablility/palantir-the-controversy-the-contracts-and-the-campaign/
    10. NICE: Board members listing (Justin Whatling). https://www.nice.org.uk/about-us/our-board/board-members
    11. Hansard: NHS Federated Data Platform debate, 16 April 2026. https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-04-16/debates/2FDCA71C-D0C1-4738-BEE8-A4BDA311DB99/NHSFederatedDataPlatform
    12. CNBC: Reporting on the £1 NHS Covid-19 data store contract, June 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/08/palantir-nhs-covid-19-data.html
    13. Bureau of Investigative Journalism: “Revealed: data giant given emergency Covid contract had been wooing NHS for months”, February 2021. https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2021-02-24/revealed-data-giant-given-emergency-covid-contract-had-been-wooing-nhs-for-months
    14. chloegeorge.co.uk: “The Seeing Stones”. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/palantir-nhs-seeing-stones/
    15. Computer Weekly: Reporting on the £23.5 million Palantir NHS data store contract. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252496953/Palantir-once-more-in-sights-of-civil-libertarians-over-NHS-Covid-data-store
    16. Corporate Watch: “FOI requests reveal Palantir’s NHS FDP rollout failures”. https://corporatewatch.org/foi-requests-reveal-palantirs-nhs-fdp-rollout-failures/
    17. Digital Health News: “NHSE awards £8.5m contract to KPMG to promote adoption of FDP”, April 2024. https://www.digitalhealth.net/2024/04/nhse-awards-8-5m-contract-to-kpmg-to-promote-adoption-of-fdp/
    18. The Register: Reporting on NHS Greater Manchester FDP rollout, May 2025. https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/16/nhs_hospitals_palantir/
    19. chloegeorge.co.uk: “Land and Expand: Palantir at the FCA”. https://chloegeorge.co.uk/palantir-fca-data-lake/
    20. US Department of Justice: CLOUD Act resources page. https://www.justice.gov/criminal-oia/cloud-act-resources
    21. Medact: Briefing on Palantir and the NHS Federated Data Platform. https://www.medact.org/2026/resources/briefings/briefing-palantir-fdp/
    22. The Nerve: “MoD sources warn Palantir’s role at heart of government is a threat to UK’s security”, March 2026. https://www.thenerve.news/p/palantir-technologies-uk-mod-sources-government-data-insights-security-state-secrets
    23. Wikipedia: Alex Karp entry, including New York Times 2024 interview. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Karp
    24. Al Jazeera: “Technofascism? Why Palantir’s pro-West ‘manifesto’ has critics alarmed”, April 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/21/technofacism-why-palantirs-pro-west-manifesto-has-critics-alarmed
    25. Fortune: Reporting on Palantir’s Meritocracy Fellowship, November 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/11/05/palantir-colleges-no-longer-reliable-training-ground-gen-z-hire-22-high-school-students-fellowship/
    26. Business Chief: Reporting on petition signatures against Palantir UK contracts. https://businesschief.com/news/palantir-faces-backlash-over-600m-uk-government-contracts
  • The Man Who Sold England’s Data (And Got a Seat on the Board)

    The Man Who Sold England’s Data (And Got a Seat on the Board)

    I’ve written about Palantir twice now. The first time, I traced how a CIA-funded surveillance company ended up running the NHS’s data. The second time, four days later, I followed the same company into the Financial Conduct Authority, the body that regulates every bank and financial firm in the UK. Both pieces were about how a single American company has quietly embedded itself into one British public institution after another, until removing it becomes almost impossible.

    This one is about the person who made that happen. Because somebody had to do all the dinners and the handshakes and the parliamentary appearances, and in Palantir’s case that somebody has a name, a column in a political magazine, and a grandfather who looms somewhat larger in British history than most people’s grandfathers do.

    His name is Louis Mosley. And he’s been having quite a year.

    Who is Louis Mosley?

    Louis Mosley is 43, London-based, and holds the title of Executive Vice President of Palantir Technologies. He leads the company’s UK and European operations. In practical terms, this means he is the person who turned a £1 pandemic contract into roughly £900 million of public sector deals across health, defence, policing, and financial regulation in about six years. If you work in sales, that’s the kind of performance that gets you a glass award at the annual conference. If you work in public accountability, it’s the kind of performance that gets you a parliamentary inquiry. He appears to have got both.

    He is also the grandson of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. His father is Oswald Alexander Mosley, Oswald’s son by his second wife Diana Mitford. His uncle was Max Mosley, the former president of the FIA, the body that governs Formula 1. Tatler profiled him as part of its “meet the Mitfords” feature, noting that “politics has run through his family for generations.” It’s a family that tends to generate footnotes.

    Here is everything that is publicly known about Louis Mosley’s life before Palantir: he graduated from the University of Oxford in 2006. Before joining Palantir, he “worked in finance.” That’s it. No school named. No Oxford college. No subject studied. No detail about what “finance” means, which bank or which fund. No visible LinkedIn profile. No Wikipedia page. For a man who gives evidence to parliamentary select committees, writes for the Spectator, appears on the BBC, runs nearly a billion pounds of UK government contracts, and sits on the MoD’s industry board, his pre-Palantir biography is three facts long. Think about how unusual that is. One prime minister couldn’t eat a bacon sandwich. Another one’s naughtiest confession was running through wheat. Another allegedly put part of himself into a dead pig. A chancellor got fined for birthday cake. An energy secretary went to prison over speeding points. A health secretary got caught snogging on his own CCTV. A foreign secretary got sacked for making up a quote. We know which PM played guitar in a band called Ugly Rumours. We even know the current chancellor padded her CV. British public life is forensic. Social media even more so. And yet the man running Palantir UK doesn’t appear to have a LinkedIn profile. For Louis Mosley, head of Palantir UK, grandson of the leader of the British Union of Fascists, the man who manages nearly a billion pounds of public contracts across the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the police, and the financial regulator, we know: Oxford. 2006. Finance. That’s it. No school. No college. No subject. No career detail. No LinkedIn. No Wikipedia page. Try finding another person in British public life with that much power and that little biography. You won’t. That gap is not an accident.

    What we do know is that before Palantir, he had a political career. In 2011, he stood as a Conservative candidate in a Kensington and Chelsea council by-election. Local residents were uncomfortable with the Mosley name. Jewish residents in the ward wanted him to publicly condemn his grandfather’s antisemitism. When asked, he told journalists he didn’t really know much about his grandfather’s career. By 2017, he was chairman of the Hackney Conservative Association and speaking at the Conservative Party conference. He was also shortlisted for the Northampton South parliamentary seat. He was, in other words, actively trying to get into the British state through the front door of electoral politics. It didn’t work out. He found a much more effective entrance through procurement.

    I want to be clear about something. I’m not suggesting Louis Mosley shares his grandfather’s ideology. I have no evidence of that and I’m not making that claim. Nobody should be defined by their grandparents. But there is an irony here that’s hard to ignore. Oswald Mosley tried to take control of the British state through politics and failed. His grandson tried the same route, standing for council, chairing a local Conservative association, getting shortlisted for Parliament, and that didn’t work out either. What did work was procurement. Palantir now sits inside the NHS, the MoD, the police, the FCA, and the nuclear submarine programme. Nobody voted for that. The result, a single organisation embedded in the most sensitive institutions of the British state, is remarkably similar. The method is just quieter.

    The man on the panel shows

    Until recently, Mosley operated with the kind of low visibility that tends to accompany people who are very effective at getting what they want. That changed in early 2026, when the £240 million MoD contract made the news and Mosley started appearing on Sunday morning political television. He gave evidence to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. He wrote for the Spectator. He started saying things publicly that were previously the kind of thing said over watermelon cocktails in private dining rooms.

    When the committee chair asked him directly whether offering the NHS £1 during a pandemic was essentially buying Palantir’s way into being a long-term provider, Mosley said he “strongly rejected” the critique. It was a national emergency. They were invited. They helped. The fact that the £1 gesture subsequently became hundreds of millions of pounds of contracts awarded without competitive tender was, presumably, just one of those things. Worth noting, though, that in 2021, before the big NHS contract was awarded, Bloomberg obtained an internal Palantir email from Mosley with the subject line “Buying our way in…!” In it, he outlined a plan to buy up small companies that already worked with the NHS, in order to, in his words, “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.” He strongly rejects the critique. He also wrote the email.

    He also confirmed, quite calmly, that all NHS data processed by Palantir sits in Amazon’s data centres in London and is “not exported elsewhere.” Which sounds reassuring. But there’s a US law called the CLOUD Act, passed in 2018, which says that American authorities can legally force any US company to hand over data it holds, no matter where in the world that data is physically stored. Amazon is a US company. Palantir is a US company. The data might be in London, but the legal power to demand access to it sits in Washington. Mosley did not mention this. The committee did not ask about it. Sometimes the most interesting part of parliamentary evidence is the question nobody thinks to ask.

    The revolving door that lost its hinges

    A “revolving door” is what people call it when officials move between government jobs and the private companies they’re supposed to be overseeing. It happens a lot. I covered the Mandelson connection and the broader picture in the FCA piece, so I won’t go through it all again. But there’s one detail about Mosley specifically that I keep coming back to.

    According to gwallter.com’s investigation, four Ministry of Defence officials left the MoD and joined Palantir before the major defence contract was awarded. Then, after his company got the contract, Mosley himself was given a seat on the MoD’s Industrial Joint Council. That’s the body where the Ministry of Defence sits down with the defence industry to discuss future work. In other words: Palantir’s UK boss now sits at the table where the MoD decides what to buy next.

    I’m going to let that sit for a moment. The head of a company that just received a £240 million no-competition contract from the Ministry of Defence then joined the Ministry of Defence’s own industry board. That’s not a revolving door. A revolving door implies the door is still there. This is more like someone removed the wall.

    The claims that didn’t survive the morning

    In early 2026, Mosley posted on social media that Palantir’s software had helped reduce domestic murders in Bedfordshire to zero over the previous 12 months. Bedfordshire, he said, typically sees five or six domestic murders a year. Thanks to Palantir identifying more than 1,000 at-risk women and alerting them to danger, the number had dropped to none. The Observer ran it. It looked like the future of policing.

    AOAV (Action on Armed Violence) looked into it. The claim fell apart in two separate ways.

    First, the basic facts. In January 2026, a 46-year-old woman called Beata Szauer was found dead in her home in Luton with stab wounds. Three men were arrested on suspicion of her murder. So the central claim, zero domestic murders in the past 12 months, was wrong. A woman had been killed. In the area Mosley was talking about. During the period he was talking about.

    Second, even if the numbers had been accurate, the logic wouldn’t hold. The Office for National Statistics, which is the government body that tracks crime data, says murder figures are “relatively low-volume” and that changes from one year to the next “need to be interpreted with some caution.” When the numbers are this small, a county going from six murders to zero in a given year could just be chance. It doesn’t automatically prove that anything you did worked. AOAV also pointed out that Mosley couldn’t even prove his own starting figure: Bedfordshire recorded eight murders in total in 2023-24, across all types, not just domestic cases. So where does “five or six domestic murders a year” come from? It’s not clear. On top of that, domestic abuse is massively underreported: fewer than a quarter of cases ever come to official attention, which means any system trained on police records is only seeing a fraction of the problem. Palantir published no analysis showing that its software, rather than the social workers, victim support teams, and safeguarding programmes already operating in Bedfordshire, caused any change at all. What remained, as AOAV put it, was a police chief justifying his own decision to use a controversial American company’s software. And a tech executive using the claim to sell more of it.

    A man made a claim on social media about saving women’s lives. The claim was channelled, uncritically, into a double-page spread in the Observer, which Carole Cadwalladr later described as Palantir spin presented without robust interrogation. Cadwalladr’s own reporting found at least two Bedfordshire women murdered in their homes during the relevant period. The post is still up. Nobody at Palantir has corrected it. The Observer hasn’t updated the story. I find that I keep thinking about Beata Szauer when I read Mosley’s posts about how AI is making everyone safer. I think somebody should.

    When journalists from Declassified UK spotted Mosley walking towards the BAFTA drinks reception in February, where Palantir was celebrating the £240 million MoD deal with politicians and military officials, they called out and asked whether the technology he’d just sold to the British military had been battle-tested through Palantir’s partnership with the Israeli defence ministry. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. He walked into the party. Protesters gathered outside in the rain. Inside: canapés.

    Editorial cartoon showing a figure in a suit walking into a grand building for a private drinks reception while a journalist and protesters stand outside in the rain. A brass plaque by the door reads Private Function.

    What Mosley and his boss actually think

    In February 2026, Mosley published an essay in the Spectator, a right-wing political magazine, about what AI will do to the people who work in offices. His argument boils down to this: all the people who currently do admin, HR, compliance, and paperwork in government are about to be replaced by AI. He calls them “the lanyard class,” which is the kind of phrase someone uses when they want to sound like they’re on the side of ordinary workers while running a company worth over $200 billion. Once AI takes over the desk jobs, he says, the real workers, the ones who do physical things with their hands, will finally be valued. And because so much of what government actually does is admin and paperwork, if AI can do all of that, you don’t need the departments or the people who currently do it. Government gets smaller and smaller. Eventually, he reckons, there’s barely anything left. The state basically disappears on its own.

    To back this up, he quoted a 19th-century communist philosopher called Friedrich Engels, who once predicted that the state would “wither away.” A man who runs a surveillance company used a communist thinker to argue that government is doomed, in a conservative magazine. I want you to know that I’ve read this essay several times now and it doesn’t get less strange.

    A few weeks later, his boss went further. Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC, the American business channel, and said something quite extraordinary. AI, he explained, would weaken the influence of “highly educated, often female voters” and boost the economic power of “vocationally trained, working-class, often male, voters.” If you didn’t see this coming, he added, you belonged in an “insane asylum.” To be clear about what just happened there: the chief executive of a company that the Labour government has given over a billion pounds of public contracts to went on television and said his technology will specifically weaken the economic power of university-educated women, who are, according to YouGov’s analysis of the 2024 election, one of Labour’s strongest voter groups. Nobody in government has publicly responded to this. I’m genuinely not sure they’ve noticed.

    But here’s the thing about Mosley’s essay that I keep coming back to. Think about what Palantir actually sells. It sells software that organises and analyses huge amounts of data for big organisations. Its customers are the NHS, the Ministry of Defence, the police, the FCA. Those are all, by definition, enormous government bureaucracies full of data and paperwork. That’s the entire reason Palantir has a business. If you genuinely got rid of all the admin, all the regulations, all the back-office jobs, Palantir wouldn’t have anyone to sell to. As one commentator pointed out, Mosley is arguing for the death of the very thing that keeps his company alive.

    What’s actually happening is simpler and less revolutionary than he makes it sound. The paperwork isn’t disappearing. It’s just being done by Palantir’s software instead of a person. The NHS still needs to track patients. The MoD still needs to analyse intelligence. The regulations still exist. The data still gets processed. The only thing that changes is who gets paid for doing it: instead of a civil servant on a government salary, it’s an American tech company charging hundreds of millions of pounds. The admin doesn’t go away. It just gets privatised.

    Scotland Yard’s quiet experiment

    In February 2026, a detail emerged that got less attention than it deserved. Scotland Yard had been using Palantir’s AI tools to monitor its own police officers: tracking how often they called in sick, how much overtime they worked, and their patterns of absence. When someone filed a freedom of information request asking about this, which is the legal mechanism anyone can use to ask a public body what it’s doing, the Metropolitan Police refused to confirm or deny whether it had used Palantir’s technology since 2021.

    Refused to confirm or deny. That’s a phrase the police normally use when you ask about undercover operations or counter-terrorism intelligence. They used it here about whether they’re running an American tech company’s software on their own staff. That is a sentence I typed and then stared at for a while.

    Other forces have been similarly secretive. Leicestershire police quietly removed details of a contract worth over £800,000 for an “intelligence and investigation platform” from the public record entirely. Forces across the UK have been accused of hiding their dealings with Palantir, citing national security concerns. It’s hard to hold a company accountable for how it handles public data when the public institutions using it won’t even admit they’re using it.

    The resistance (it’s bigger than you think)

    I wrote about what you can do in both the NHS piece and the FCA piece, so I won’t repeat the full list here. But the picture has shifted since I wrote those, and it’s shifted in a direction that gives me genuine hope.

    People are saying no. 200,000 doctors. 50,000 patients. The Welsh NHS. The Scottish NHS. Leeds Teaching Hospitals. Green Party MPs. Labour backbenchers. Investigative journalists at The Nerve, Declassified UK, AOAV, Liberty Investigates, and the Good Law Project. And the NHS contract comes up for review in February 2027.

    The British Medical Association, the union that represents doctors, has told its members to limit their involvement with Palantir’s NHS data system and called for a “complete break” from the company. That’s 200,000 doctors. The entire medical profession saying: we do not trust you with our patients’ data. Leeds Teaching Hospitals told NHS England privately that adopting some of Palantir’s tools would cause them to lose functionality. Not gain it. Lose it. The technology being sold as the future of the NHS was, in at least one major hospital, worse than what they already had. I’d like you to read that sentence again.

    Fifty thousand patients wrote to their local hospital trust boards through the Good Law Project’s campaign. Green Party MPs demanded an immediate inquiry. Labour MP Clive Lewis called The Nerve’s investigation a “scandal.” And Lord Vallance, the government’s science minister, told a parliamentary committee in March 2026 that the government wants to change how it buys technology. Politicians say they want to change things all the time, of course. It’s sort of the main thing they do. But a government minister publicly distancing himself from the way Palantir got its contracts, while Palantir’s own CEO is on American television saying his technology will weaken the people who vote for that government, is, at minimum, a situation that someone should probably resolve.

    Wales said no. They’re building their own system. Scotland kept Palantir out of its NHS entirely. Nobody had to give Peter Thiel’s company the keys to find out how many beds are free in Edinburgh or Cardiff. The alternative exists. It’s not theoretical. It’s being built next door.

    And there’s a date that matters. The NHS contract comes up for review in February 2027. That’s less than a year away. Which means the decisions being made right now, by doctors, by trust boards, by patients writing letters, will directly shape whether Palantir stays embedded in the health service or whether the government looks for an alternative. This is also, by the way, the same company whose software powers the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation operations under Donald Trump. The technology processing your NHS data and the technology identifying people for immigration raids in America is made by the same company, sold by the same man.

    The man in the middle

    I’ve been writing about Palantir for three articles now, and in each one Louis Mosley appears at the centre of the story. He’s the one who hosted the dinners. He’s the one who gave evidence to parliament. He’s the one who joined the MoD’s advisory board. He’s the one who wrote the Spectator piece about how the state will wither away while his company bills the state hundreds of millions. He’s the one who made the debunked claim about saving women’s lives in Bedfordshire. And he’s the one who walked past the journalists and into the party when asked about Gaza.

    He is, by any reasonable measure, extremely good at his job. I say that without irony. Getting from £1 to £900 million in six years while crossing two governments, surviving the Mandelson scandal, and picking up a seat on your biggest client’s own advisory board is an objectively remarkable achievement. If I could do sales like that I wouldn’t be writing blog posts at midnight in Somerset.

    But here’s the thing I keep coming back to. All of this, every contract, every expansion, every quiet appointment to an advisory board, happened on behalf of a company whose co-founder, Peter Thiel, wrote in 2009 that he no longer believes democracy and freedom are compatible. Whose CEO just went on television and said his technology will reduce the power of educated women. And whose software is embedded in the Israeli military’s operations in Gaza while simultaneously running the NHS, the MoD, the police, and the financial regulator.

    And when a journalist asked Louis Mosley about the Gaza connection, outside the BAFTA building where Palantir was celebrating its latest Ministry of Defence contract, he said nothing. He just walked into the party.

    I think we deserve an answer. And I think we should keep asking until we get one.

    A note on transparency: I use Claude, made by Anthropic, to help with research and writing. Anthropic has a formal partnership with Palantir, which was the first company to bring Claude into classified environments. I think you should know that.

    I also think it’s worth knowing what happened next. In early 2026, the Pentagon tried to blacklist Anthropic after the company refused to give the US military unrestricted access to Claude. Anthropic had two red lines: no autonomous weapons and no domestic mass surveillance. The Pentagon wanted those limits removed. When Anthropic said no and went public about it, the Trump administration declared the company a national security threat. A federal judge blocked the blacklisting, ruling that it violated the First Amendment, which is the bit of the US constitution that says the government can’t punish you for saying things it doesn’t like. The judge called it “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation” and wrote that nothing in the law supports “the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government.” In other words: you can’t label someone a threat to national security because they told you no and then told the press about it. Apparently that needed saying.

    I mention this because it matters for how you read this article. AI is going to be used in government whether we like it or not. The question is whether the companies building it have any guardrails at all. Anthropic drew a line and got punished for it. OpenAI stepped in hours later and signed a deal with the Pentagon that its own CEO admitted was “definitely rushed.” OpenAI says it has similar red lines, but as MIT Technology Review pointed out, the key difference is that where Anthropic wanted explicit contractual bans, OpenAI’s approach relies on trusting that the government will follow the law. Which is reassuring until you remember that the US government’s own mass surveillance programme, which secretly collected millions of Americans’ phone records, was ruled unlawful by the US Court of Appeals only after Edward Snowden exposed it in 2013. Some OpenAI staff publicly said the deal wasn’t worth it. Caitlin Kalinowski, OpenAI’s head of robotics, resigned, saying that “surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”

    And then something happened that I think is genuinely important, especially for anyone who has ever felt like ordinary people can’t change anything. ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295% in a single day. Over 1.5 million people joined a boycott called QuitGPT. Claude, the tool I’m using to write this, hit number one on the Apple App Store for the first time, overtaking ChatGPT. Anthropic’s revenue jumped from $14 billion to $19 billion annualised in a single month. People voted with their wallets, and it actually worked. A company said no to the most powerful military on earth, and millions of ordinary users backed them up overnight. That is power to the minions, right there.

    Palantir, meanwhile, which has no red lines at all, partnered with the Israeli military and powers ICE deportation raids without hesitation. I’d rather use a tool made by a company that got sued by the Pentagon for saying no to something than one made by a company that has never said no to anything. Better the devil with boundaries than the one without.

    Sources and citations

    1. Yahoo News UK: Who is Palantir UK boss Louis Mosley and why is he everywhere? (January 2026)
    2. UK Parliament: Oral evidence from Louis Mosley to the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
    3. gwallter.com: Who is Louis Mosley? (February 2026)
    4. Government Transformation Summit: Louis Mosley speaker bio
    5. Wikidata: Louis Mosley (born 1983, parents identified)
    6. From the Hornets Nest: The Elephant in the Committee Room (June 2011, Kensington & Chelsea by-election)
    7. HuffPost UK: Louis Mosley at Conservative Party conference (October 2017)
    8. Conservative Home: Louis Mosley shortlisted for Northampton South (May 2017)
    9. Sunder Katwala on Bluesky: Tatler’s “meet the Mitfords” profile of Mosley (April 2025)
    10. Hansard: Ministry of Defence Palantir Contracts debate (February 2026)
    11. The Spectator: AI is coming for the lanyard class, by Louis Mosley (February 2026)
    12. Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance: Peter Thiel’s Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’ (September 2022)
    13. US Congress: CLOUD Act (H.R.4943) (2018)
    14. openDemocracy: Four MoD officials joined Palantir before record defence contract
    15. AOAV: Louis Mosley’s claim about Bedfordshire domestic murders contradicted by facts (March 2026)
    16. ONS: Homicide in England and Wales, year ending March 2025 (February 2026)
    17. Carole Cadwalladr / The Nerve: The broligarchy’s war on journalism (March 2026)
    18. Declassified UK: Palantir UK chief walks away from Gaza genocide questions (February 2026)
    19. Bloomberg: Palantir, Israel agree strategic partnership for battle tech (January 2024)
    20. Futurism: CEO of Palantir says AI will seize power away from college-educated women (March 2026)
    21. YouGov: How Britain voted in the 2024 general election (July 2024)
    22. View from Cullingworth: How AI won’t fix the world’s problems with bureaucracy (February 2026)
    23. Wikipedia: Palantir Technologies (Met Police profiling detail)
    24. Novara Media: What is Palantir? How a US spytech firm penetrated the British state (February 2026)
    25. The Small Business Cybersecurity Guy: Palantir UK contracts risk 2026 (February 2026)
    26. Lowdown NHS: Palantir, the controversy, the contracts and the campaign (April 2026)
    27. The Nerve: Palantir deals with UK state total at least £670m (February 2026)
    28. The Register: UK to rethink tech buying after Palantir contracts (March 2026)
    29. Cato Unbound: The Education of a Libertarian, by Peter Thiel (2009)
    30. Chloe George: The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS (March 2026)
    31. Chloe George: Land and Expand: How Palantir Swam Into the FCA’s Data Lake (March 2026)
    32. CNBC: Anthropic wins preliminary injunction in DOD fight as judge cites ‘First Amendment retaliation’ (March 2026)
    33. CNN: Judge blocks Pentagon’s effort to ‘punish’ Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk (March 2026)
    34. CNBC: OpenAI strikes deal with Pentagon, hours after rival Anthropic was blacklisted by Trump (February 2026)
    35. MIT Technology Review: OpenAI’s ‘compromise’ with the Pentagon is what Anthropic feared (March 2026)
    36. CNN: Some OpenAI staff are fuming about its Pentagon deal (March 2026)
    37. TechCrunch: ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295% after DoD deal (March 2026)
    38. Futurism: Humongous numbers of people are uninstalling ChatGPT (March 2026)
    39. South China Morning Post: NSA mass spying exposed by Snowden was illegal, US court rules (September 2020)
    40. TechCrunch: OpenAI hardware exec Caitlin Kalinowski quits in response to Pentagon deal (March 2026)
  • The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS

    The Seeing Stones: How a CIA-Funded Surveillance Company Ended Up Running the NHS

    Coming up in today’s show and tell…

    • Palantir, a surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel with CIA seed money, now holds over £500 million in UK government contracts, including a £330 million deal to run an NHS data platform covering tens of millions of patients.
    • The contract grew from a £1 pandemic “freebie” to £60 million without any competitive tender. When the £330 million contract was finally published, 71% of it was blacked out because the data protection terms hadn’t been agreed yet.
    • Palantir’s lobbyist was Peter Mandelson’s firm Global Counsel. Mandelson held a ~21% shareholding while arranging meetings between Palantir’s CEO and the Prime Minister. He has since been sacked as ambassador and is under police investigation. Palantir still has all its contracts.
    • The NHS’s own chief data officers said their existing tools were better than what Palantir was offering. Scotland kept Palantir out entirely. The government is paying KPMG £8 million to persuade hospitals to use software they don’t want.
    • Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project offers an alternative model where data stays under the control of the people it belongs to. The NHS chose the opposite approach. The contract comes up for review in February 2027.

    Update, 23 March 2026

    Four days after this article was published, the Guardian reported that Palantir has been awarded a contract by the Financial Conduct Authority to analyse its internal intelligence data, including case files, emails, call recordings, and reports of suspected financial crime across 42,000 firms. Palantir now holds contracts covering NHS patient data, Ministry of Defence operations, police systems, and financial regulation. The cross-departmental infrastructure this article warns about isn’t a future risk. It’s being built right now, one contract at a time. A full investigation into the FCA deal is coming.

    I fell down a rabbit hole this week. It started with a question about what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of Palantir, and it ended with me staring at a Hansard transcript at midnight going “no, but seriously, WHAT?” I need to tell you about it, because it’s one of those stories where the more you find out, the more unbelievable it gets, and I think more people should know.

    Fair warning: this starts with Tolkien, takes a detour through watermelon cocktails, and ends with your medical records. Stay with me. I promise it’s worth it.

    A quick word about seeing-stones

    In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a palantír is a seeing-stone. Think crystal ball, but instead of a fortune teller at a village fete telling you you’ll meet a tall stranger, it lets you spy on people across vast distances. The Elves made them for good reasons. Then the bad guys got hold of them, and it all went sideways. Saruman used one and thought he was gaining power. He was actually being controlled. Denethor used one and it drove him to despair. The palantír is Tolkien’s cautionary tale about what happens when surveillance technology ends up in the wrong hands.

    In 2003, the billionaire investor Peter Thiel co-founded a data analytics company. He named it Palantir. He also named his offices after Middle-earth locations: Gondor, Rivendell, the Shire. His venture fund Founders Fund bankrolled a weapons company called Anduril (Aragorn’s sword), founded by former Palantir executives. He co-founded a separate venture fund called Mithril (the magic armour metal). You have to admire the commitment to the theme, if nothing else.

    Now, I want to believe he just really liked the books and thought “seeing-stone” sounded cool. But Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford. He’s not a man who picks names carelessly. And I think if you name your surveillance company after a fictional device whose entire literary purpose is to warn you about the dangers of surveillance, you probably understood the assignment. You just disagreed with the conclusion.

    That company now holds over £500 million in UK government contracts, including a £330 million deal to run a data platform for the NHS. Your NHS. Your data. And the story of how that happened is genuinely one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever tried to write down.

    The £1 contract (or: how to buy the NHS with watermelon cocktails)

    Cartoon of two people at a dinner table with watermelon cocktails, a napkin reading NHS Patient Data 57 million records, and a £1 coin being slid across the table. Caption: Just a casual dinner.

    The version of this story most people know goes like this: pandemic hits, NHS needs help, generous tech company steps in for £1, everyone claps. It’s a lovely story. It’s also not quite what happened.

    The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Palantir had been courting the NHS for months before Covid was a thing. In July 2019, Palantir’s UK boss Louis Mosley hosted a dinner with the chair of NHS England. The email chain, which I have read more times than is probably healthy, mentions “exotic drinks” and “watermelon cocktails.” Over these watermelon cocktails, they discussed potential uses of NHS data. The chair emailed afterwards: “If you can see ways where you could help us structure and curate our data… do be in touch.”

    Just a nice dinner. Just some cocktails. Just the beginning of what would become half a billion pounds in government contracts. As you do.

    By January 2020, two months before the pandemic, Palantir’s London team were already building a product “exclusively focused” on the UK healthcare market. So when Covid arrived and they offered to help for £1, that wasn’t a random act of kindness. That was the free sample outside a shop. The first one’s always free.

    And oh, did it work. £1 became £1 million by July 2020. Then £23 million by December. That £23 million contract was awarded without competition. Through various extensions, Palantir won £60 million from the NHS without ever competing against another company. Sixty million quid and not a single tender. I once had to fill in a 12-page form to get a £500 council grant for a community project, so apparently there are different processes depending on how many zeros are involved.

    Cartoon of a man sliding a £1 coin across an NHS reception desk while behind him sit increasingly enormous money bags labelled £1M, £23M, £60M, and £330M. Caption: Just getting my foot in the door.

    In 2021, openDemocracy and the legal campaign group Foxglove sued the government over it. The government’s legal position was, and I am not making this up, that “citizens have no right to a say in major NHS contracts” with big tech firms. Your health data. No say. They actually argued that. In a court. With lawyers and everything. Faced with a judicial review, they caved and promised not to extend Palantir’s role without consulting the public.

    They broke that promise two years later. In March 2023, leaked documents showed NHS bosses had quietly ordered hospitals to upload patient data to a new Palantir-run database, without the public consultation they’d committed to. Their own internal documents acknowledged this was “likely to be perceived by some privacy campaigners as contentious.” I admire the understatement.

    Then came the big one. November 2023: a £330 million, seven-year contract to build something called the Federated Data Platform (which is the kind of name that sounds important enough that most people stop asking questions, which I suspect is the point). When the contract was made public, it was released on the last working day before Christmas, and 417 of its 586 pages were completely blanked out.

    I should explain what “blanked out” means here, because it’s actually worse than it sounds. “Redacted” means the pages existed but their contents were hidden with black boxes on the version published for the public to see. So journalists, MPs, campaign groups, your GP, you: none of us could read what was in 71% of the contract. Government policy says public bodies have to give reasons when they redact contracts. No reasons were given.

    The Good Law Project launched legal proceedings to find out what was underneath all that black ink. And what they discovered was, if anything, more alarming than what anyone had guessed. The pages weren’t redacted for national security reasons or commercial sensitivity in the usual sense. They were blanked out because those sections, including the data protection clauses, hadn’t actually been agreed yet. NHS England’s own lawyers admitted the provisions were still “subject to commercial negotiation.”

    Let me just make sure that’s landed. NHS England awarded Palantir a £330 million contract to handle the health data of tens of millions of people. They signed it. Then they continued negotiating the terms afterwards. Including the bit about how your medical records would be protected. And when they published the contract, they hid the unfinished bits by blacking them out and releasing it on the day everyone was wrapping presents. The Good Law Project said this was potentially unlawful, not least because once you’ve signed, you’ve given away your negotiating power. Palantir already had the deal. What incentive did they have to agree to stronger privacy terms at that point?

    I’ll just leave that there for a moment while we all process it together.

    Cartoon of a woman reading a thick document where every page is covered in black redaction bars. She has reached page 417. A mug on the desk reads Transparency. Caption: The public version.

    Then, within weeks of signing, Palantir secretly hired a Tory-linked PR agency to pay social media influencers to promote the platform. The briefing asked the influencers not to mention Palantir by name. The NHS investigated it as a potential contract breach. It’s like watching someone trip over their own shoelaces at a job interview. Except the job is running the health data of everyone in England.

    Wait, but what does the NHS actually need this for?

    Before I go any further, I want to be fair about something. The NHS has a real problem, and Palantir offered a real solution to it. If I don’t explain that, this whole piece sounds like conspiracy thinking, and it isn’t. The problem is genuine. It’s who we chose to fix it that’s the issue.

    Here’s the thing about the NHS: it’s enormous, and it’s fragmented. There are around 200 hospital trusts in England, plus integrated care boards, GP practices, mental health trusts, ambulance services, and community health providers. Each one has its own IT systems. Many of those systems are, to put it diplomatically, not new. Some of them can’t talk to each other at all. Your GP records are in one system. Your hospital records are in another. Your outpatient appointments might be in a third. Your prescription history could be somewhere else entirely.

    If you’ve ever turned up at A&E and the doctor has asked you questions that you know are already in your medical records somewhere, you’ve experienced this problem personally. If you’ve ever been referred to a specialist and had to explain your entire history from scratch because they couldn’t see your GP notes, that’s the same problem. It means duplicated tests, missed information, delayed discharges, and longer waiting lists. People genuinely suffer because NHS data systems don’t join up. Better data integration could genuinely save lives. Nobody disputes this.

    The Federated Data Platform was supposed to fix it. The idea was to link up all that fragmented data so the NHS could see, in real time, how many beds are available across a region, where waiting lists are longest, where ambulances are being held up, and where discharge bottlenecks are causing problems. At a trust level, it would help hospitals manage patient flow and theatre scheduling. Perfectly reasonable goals. Genuinely useful. The kind of thing you’d want your health service to be doing.

    So the question isn’t: did the NHS need better data infrastructure? It did. The question is: did the NHS need this company to build it? A company founded with CIA money, whose main clients are military and intelligence agencies, whose co-founder has documented ties to a convicted sex offender, and whose lobbyist is under criminal investigation? When the NHS’s own chief data officers wrote an open letter saying they already had tools that exceeded what the FDP was offering? When Leeds Teaching Hospitals said adopting it would mean losing functionality? When the contract was awarded through a process involving £60 million in uncontested deals, broken consultation promises, and privacy clauses that weren’t finished when the thing was signed?

    The NHS needed a better filing system. What it got was a surveillance platform with a lobbying operation, a Tolkien fixation, and a founder who thinks democracy is overrated. Which, as solutions go, is a bit like calling a plumber and getting a submarine. Technically it involves pipes, but it’s not quite what you had in mind.

    If the product isn’t better, what’s actually going on?

    This is the bit where I need to be really careful, because I’m going to lay out a set of documented facts and then ask an open question, and I want to be clear about which is which.

    Here are the facts. Scotland kept Palantir out of NHS Scotland entirely. Their data systems work. Their patients are being treated. The sky did not fall in. The NHS’s own chief data officers said their existing tools were better than what Palantir was offering. Leeds Teaching Hospitals said adopting the platform would mean losing functionality. Most trusts don’t want it. The government is paying KPMG £8 million to persuade hospitals to adopt it. If you’re paying a consultancy firm eight million pounds to convince your own customers to use your product, the product is not selling itself.

    So why is it still happening? Let me show you what the public record says about who benefits.

    Palantir paid Global Counsel, Mandelson’s lobbying firm, from 2018 onwards. The fee has never been publicly disclosed. Mandelson retained a roughly 21% shareholding in Global Counsel while simultaneously facilitating meetings between Palantir and the Prime Minister. That means he had a direct financial interest in Palantir winning UK government contracts. That’s not speculation. That’s Companies House filings and Hansard.

    The Good Law Project noted that the head of Palantir’s UK operation made a donation to a Conservative minister. The revolving door between the NHS and Palantir is documented too: openDemocracy found that at least three former NHS data experts left the health service and joined Palantir, including Indra Joshi, who was the NHS’s head of AI and helped launch the Covid-19 datastore, the first NHS project to use Palantir’s software, before leaving the health service and joining the company in 2022. Imagine being the person responsible for introducing a company’s product into your workplace, then going to work for that company. It’s technically legal. It doesn’t look great.

    Cartoon showing a revolving door between three buildings labelled NHS, Palantir, and Government, with people carrying boxes of belongings walking calmly between them in a circular pattern while a cleaner mops the floor unbothered.

    On the political side, the Good Law Project found that Health Secretary Wes Streeting has accepted up to £372,000 from companies and individuals with links to private healthcare since entering parliament in 2015, representing more than 60% of his total registered donations. Nobody is suggesting that money was specifically in exchange for the Palantir contract. But when a Health Secretary who has received hundreds of thousands of pounds from private health interests is privately briefed that a private health contractor’s reputation is damaging delivery, and his response is to press on with the contract anyway, it’s reasonable to ask what’s shaping his priorities.

    I want to be honest: nobody has produced a smoking gun showing someone received a brown envelope in exchange for this contract. That’s not how it works at this level, and expecting it to look like that is how it keeps working. What the public record shows is lobbying fees, shareholdings, political donations, a revolving door of staff, dinner party networks, and the kind of access that money buys but never explicitly pays for. It’s structural, not transactional. The money doesn’t flow in a straight line from A to B. It flows in a circle, where relationships become contracts become jobs become donations become access become relationships again.

    I don’t know exactly who benefits from this arrangement or by how much. But I know that when a product the customers don’t want is being sold to them with £8 million of public money, by a company whose lobbyist had a financial stake in the outcome, whose staff are recruited from the very organisation they’re supposed to be serving, and whose contract was signed before the privacy terms were even agreed… “sorting out the NHS’s data” probably isn’t the whole story.

    The man behind the seeing-stone

    To understand how we got here, you need to know a bit about Peter Thiel. He studied philosophy at Stanford, which I mention because his philosophy is genuinely built into Palantir’s DNA, and it’s… well. It’s a lot.

    He co-founded PayPal. He was the first outside investor in Facebook. He created Palantir with seed funding from In-Q-Tel, which is the CIA’s venture capital arm (the CIA has a venture capital arm! I didn’t know that either, and I sort of wish I still didn’t). His biographer Max Chafkin describes his thinking as “bordering on fascism”. He’s written openly that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. In his book Zero to One, he argues companies are better run than governments because they have a single decision-maker. A dictator, essentially, though he’s too polished to use that word.

    His political network is vast. JD Vance, the current US Vice President, is Thiel’s protégé: mentored by him, employed by him, and bankrolled with $10 million for his Senate run. More than a dozen people with ties to Thiel sit inside the Trump administration, including former Palantir staff in the Department of Health, the Treasury, and DOGE. Stephen Miller, the architect of America’s mass deportation policy, personally owns more than $100,000 of Palantir stock. Palantir makes the software that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US agency currently carrying out mass deportation raids under Trump) uses to find people. I’m not going to draw you a diagram. You can see it.

    And then there’s the Epstein connection. Byline Times documented that Thiel maintained a business relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein through a venture fund called Valar Ventures, from 2014 until Epstein’s final arrest in 2019. Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak described Thiel and Epstein as “co-owners” of the fund. Thiel’s spokesperson denied the “co-owner” bit but confirmed Epstein was a limited partner. The distinction may matter to some people. I will let you decide if you’re one of them.

    The man actually running it

    Thiel is the co-founder and chairman. But the person running Palantir day to day is Alex Karp, and he’s arguably even more interesting, because he’s the contradiction that makes the whole thing work.

    Karp and Thiel met at Stanford Law School. Karp then went off and got a PhD in social theory from Goethe University in Frankfurt. He grew up in a leftist family with activist parents. He describes himself as “progressive but not woke” and has donated to Biden and Kamala Harris. On paper, he’s the political opposite of Thiel. And yet they co-founded the same surveillance company, and they’ve been running it together for over 20 years. Funny how that works.

    In 2024, Karp was the highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company in the United States, with compensation of almost $6.8 billion. That’s billion with a B. For context, the entire £330 million NHS contract, the one that’s supposed to transform healthcare data for the whole of England, is roughly 3% of what Karp personally earned in a single year. I don’t know what to do with that information. I’m just putting it there.

    He’s also been saying some very interesting things out loud recently. On CNBC last week, he said “what makes America special right now is our lethal capabilities, our ability to fight war.” He’s described himself as “exceedingly proud” of Palantir’s work supporting Israel. And in the same interview, he said that AI technology will reduce the economic power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of “working-class, often male” voters. Which is, I think, a remarkably candid thing for a self-described progressive to say about his own product. The New Republic described it as a direct pitch to the Republican Party from a CEO whose company is already embedded in the Pentagon.

    So that’s Palantir’s leadership. The co-founder believes democracy is incompatible with freedom. The CEO describes himself as progressive while running a surveillance company that aids deportation raids, supports military operations, and whose product he cheerfully admits will undermine the economic power of educated women. They present as opposites but they built the same machine and it serves the same ends. The difference is that Thiel is honest about his philosophy. Karp wraps the same outcomes in nicer language.

    The Mandelson web (where it gets really wild)

    OK. This is where the story goes from “that’s concerning” to “are you actually serious.” I need you to stay with me because every single thing I’m about to say is documented, sourced, and on the public record, even though it reads like the plot of a thriller that would be rejected for being too far-fetched.

    In 2018, Palantir hired Global Counsel, the lobbying firm co-founded by Peter Mandelson. The goal was to make Palantir look like a respectable partner for the UK government. At this point, both Thiel and Mandelson were connected to Jeffrey Epstein. Thiel through Valar Ventures. Mandelson through a personal relationship that continued after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for sex offences against children. The man hired to make the surveillance company look respectable, and the man who founded the surveillance company, were both connected to the same convicted sex offender.

    I’ve typed that sentence several times now and it still doesn’t feel real. But it is.

    Global Counsel got busy. In February 2023, they hosted a dinner where the NHS’s chief data officer was listed as the “guest of honour”. Nine months later, Palantir won the £330 million contract. I’m sure that’s a coincidence.

    When Mandelson became UK Ambassador to the US, civil servants warned him that his interest in Global Counsel “would have to cease”. He didn’t comply. He kept his roughly 21% shareholding. While still ambassador, still holding those shares, he arranged a meeting between Palantir’s CEO and Keir Starmer at Palantir’s US headquarters. The meeting didn’t appear on the PM’s register of visits.

    Shortly after, the MoD awarded Palantir a contract worth roughly £250 million. Directly. Without competition. MPs asked for the documents from the Starmer-Palantir meeting. The government refused, saying it was “too expensive to find them”. The minutes of a meeting between the Prime Minister and a surveillance company that just received a quarter-billion-pound defence contract. Too expensive to locate. I’ve lost socks that were easier to find.

    Mandelson has since been sacked as ambassador, forced to resign from Labour and the House of Lords, and is under Metropolitan Police investigation. Global Counsel has gone into administration. But Palantir still has every single one of its contracts.

    Byline Times asked the question that I think deserves a proper answer: if Mandelson’s links to Epstein disqualify him from holding power, why does the company controlled by Epstein’s business partner still have access to the UK’s most sensitive infrastructure? Nobody’s answered that yet. I’d genuinely love to hear someone try.

    Why your NHS data matters more than you think

    Here’s where we need to talk about what Palantir’s software actually does, because it’s not just a fancy spreadsheet.

    Palantir’s Foundry platform is designed to link datasets that weren’t previously connected, find patterns between them, and build profiles. That’s the product. That’s what it does for the CIA. That’s what it does for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US agency carrying out mass deportation raids under Trump), combining immigration records with financial data and phone records to track people. That’s what it does for the military, fusing satellite imagery with intercepted communications to generate targets. Palantir’s CEO said last week that “what makes America special right now is our lethal capabilities, our ability to fight war.” Charming.

    That same cross-referencing engine now sits on top of the NHS.

    The NHS holds structured health data on the population of England. Your GP visits, your prescriptions, your mental health records, your sexual health, your pregnancies, your addiction history. Linked to your postcode and date of birth. Ernst & Young estimated in 2019 that this data is worth £9.6 billion a year: about £5 billion to commercial organisations who could profit from the patterns, and £4.6 billion in benefits to patients through better outcomes.

    I want to pause on that framing for a second, because it bothers me. The NHS wasn’t built as a data asset. It was built to look after people. The data exists because doctors and nurses care for patients. The fact that someone put a commercial price tag on it, and bundled “value to pharmaceutical companies” together with “benefits to sick people” into one headline number, tells you something about how this conversation has already been quietly shifted underneath us.

    A report from health justice group Medact, backed by Amnesty International, Privacy International, and the Good Law Project, just laid out why the next shift should worry us. Medact warned that the platform could enable government departments like the Home Office and police to access patient data. Palantir’s own UK executive has argued publicly for a “common operating system” linking NHS, DWP, and other public data. And Reform UK has explicitly pledged to “automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks and the police” to find and deport people. The infrastructure for that is being built right now. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s in their policy document.

    The chilling effect is already measurable. During the pandemic, around 57% of migrants avoided seeking healthcare because they feared being reported to the Home Office. Put a surveillance company’s cross-referencing engine in the middle of that system and people who need medical help will stop asking for it. That’s not hypothetical. That’s maths.

    Meanwhile, fewer than a quarter of England’s 215 hospital trusts were actually using the platform by the end of 2024. Leeds Teaching Hospitals told NHS England it would “lose functionality rather than gain it”. The response from government? They paid KPMG £8 million to “promote the adoption” of software that hospitals don’t want. Eight million pounds of public money on what is essentially a marketing campaign for a product the actual customers are politely declining. That’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today, and yet here we are.

    Cartoon of a man in a suit enthusiastically presenting a laptop labelled Platform to tired NHS staff in scrubs, one of whom is holding their own laptop with a sticky note reading Already works. A banner behind reads Adoption Campaign £8m budget.

    Tim Berners-Lee and the road not taken

    Right. Here’s the bit that turns this from infuriating to properly heartbreaking. Because there was always another way, and it was right there.

    Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and gave it away for free. No patent. No licensing fee. Because he believed information should be open and accessible to everyone. I wrote my university dissertation about him in 2002 (specifically about whether Flash animation would be the future of the web, which in hindsight was not my strongest prediction), and I’ve been banging on about his vision ever since. But his recent work is what matters here.

    He’s been building a project called Solid, which does exactly what the NHS needed: it keeps data under the control of the people and institutions it belongs to, with access granted on a permission basis. No centralised platform. No vendor lock-in. No surveillance company required.

    Split panel cartoon. Left side labelled The Seeing Stone, Palantir: a man sits alone in an armchair clutching a glowing orb with tiny people visible inside it. Right side labelled The Web, Given away free 1989: a diverse group of people each hold their own small glowing orb, smiling.

    Speaking in Barcelona on 3 March, he demonstrated an AI assistant called Charlie that pulls from a user’s own data store, not a corporate database. He said: “Claude doesn’t understand anything about you, but Charlie does.” Because Charlie has permission to use your data, on your terms. That’s the model. That’s what was always possible.

    The NHS’s own people knew this. The NHS Chief Data and Analytical Officer Network wrote in an open letter that they “already have similar tools in use that presently exceed the capability” of what the Federated Data Platform was offering. They didn’t need Palantir. They needed investment in what they already had.

    Berners-Lee and Thiel are almost perfect philosophical opposites. One built the web and gave it away because he believed it belonged to everyone. The other built a surveillance company and named it after Tolkien’s cautionary tale about surveillance. One believes you should own your own data. The other believes exceptional individuals should control it. The NHS chose Thiel’s model. Nobody asked us which one we preferred.

    What can actually be done (the hopeful bit)

    I promised myself I wouldn’t write one of those pieces that makes you feel terrible and then stops. So here’s the constructive bit, and I mean it.

    The political picture isn’t great right now. Wes Streeting was privately briefed that Palantir’s reputation was hindering the platform’s delivery and pressed on. In private WhatsApp messages to Mandelson, he conceded Israel was “committing war crimes before our eyes”, while publicly dismissing concerns about Palantir’s NHS involvement. It’s fair to say the political class, across parties, has not covered itself in glory on this one.

    But there are real pressure points, and real people applying real pressure. The contract comes up for review in February 2027. The BMA has formally called for the contract to end. Medact’s report is backed by Amnesty International, Privacy International, and the Good Law Project. Scotland has kept Palantir out of NHS Scotland entirely, which proves it’s possible. Local campaigns are fighting trust by trust, ICB by ICB.

    And here’s the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that actually gives me hope, although I want to be honest about the limits of that hope because I think you deserve that. Every single fact in this article comes from a public source. Companies House filings. Contracts Finder. Hansard. The lobbying register. FOI responses. Investigative journalism built on publicly available records. The information is all there. It’s just scattered across dozens of databases that don’t talk to each other, which means connecting it all up currently requires months of work by specialist journalists and lawyers with resources most of us don’t have. Most of us are trying to get through Tuesday.

    So I’ve been thinking: what if there were a tool where you could type in any company’s name and see, in one place, what public contracts they hold, who their directors are, who lobbied for them, and what political donations are connected? Not opinion. Not editorialising. Just public data, linked up and searchable. The kind of thing that currently takes an investigative team months, available to anyone with a browser and a cup of tea.

    I’m calling the project Power to the Minions, because I’m a mum of four who lives in Frome and I think naming things should be fun, and also because that’s literally what it is: giving ordinary people access to information that currently only well-resourced professionals can piece together.

    Now. Before I get carried away with my own pitch, let me be the first to say: I’m not going to pretend a search tool fixes democracy. If it were that simple, someone would have done it by now, and we’d all be living in a utopia where government contracts were awarded on merit and dinner party invitations had no bearing on procurement decisions. Clearly, we are not living in that utopia. I checked.

    The investigative journalists who broke this story are brilliant. openDemocracy, the Bureau, Byline Times, Foxglove, the Good Law Project: they’ve done extraordinary work over six years. And Palantir still has its contracts. So why would a tool help where journalism hasn’t?

    Here’s my honest answer: journalism produces stories. Stories have news cycles. They peak, they get shared, people are outraged for a week, and then everyone moves on to the next thing. The Palantir-NHS story has been broken repeatedly since 2020. Each time there’s a flurry of attention. Each time it fades. The contracts remain. That’s not a failure of journalism. That’s the nature of how attention works. A story is a photograph of a problem. What doesn’t exist yet is a window.

    The difference between a photograph and a window is that the photograph gets looked at once and then goes in a drawer. The window means anyone can look, any time, for as long as the building stands. A tool that connects Companies House data with Contracts Finder with Hansard with the lobbying register isn’t a photograph. It’s a window. It doesn’t need a news cycle to work. It’s just there, permanently, for anyone who wants to look through it.

    Cartoon of a woman holding a cup of tea, looking through a window at an illuminated web of connections linking nodes labelled Contract, Director, Donation, Lobbyist, Minister, and Dinner. Caption: What if the light was just always on?

    Does it stop Palantir on its own? No. Of course not. A window doesn’t stop a burglar. But it does mean the neighbours can see what’s happening. And it means the next time someone awards a contract to a company whose lobbyist is under criminal investigation and whose founder has documented business ties to a convicted sex offender, the connections are visible within minutes instead of months. That changes who can ask questions, how quickly, and how often. It doesn’t replace the journalists and lawyers. It gives them (and everyone else) a head start. Instead of spending three months finding the web, they can spend three months acting on it.

    Also, and this is the bit that quietly matters most: it changes the calculation for the people doing the dodgy deals. Right now, if you’re awarding a contract to a friend of a friend after a nice dinner, you know it’ll take years for anyone to connect the dots. If the dots connect automatically the moment the contract hits Contracts Finder? You might reconsider whose dinner invitation you accept. Transparency doesn’t just expose problems. It prevents some of them from happening in the first place, because the humans involved are, at bottom, quite keen on not being caught.

    I know what I’m describing sounds like it might already exist. There are good tools out there. OpenCorporates makes Companies House data searchable. They Work For You makes Hansard searchable. But nobody’s built the connective layer between them. You can look up a company. You can search for contracts. You can check the lobbying register. You can search Hansard. What you can’t do, anywhere, is go from “this company got this contract” to “and here’s who lobbied for it, and here’s where the directors sit on other boards, and here’s who donated to which politicians” in one search. That’s the gap. And it’s the gap where the story lives.

    The elephant in the room: they already have our data

    I can hear the question, because I asked it myself: even if we get Palantir out at the 2027 review, haven’t they already had access to our data since 2020? What’s done is done, surely?

    Fair point. And I want to be honest about it rather than do the thing where you pretend there’s a magic undo button and everyone goes home happy. Yes, Palantir has been processing NHS data for over five years. The structural knowledge they’ve gained, the patterns they’ve identified, the architecture they’ve built: that institutional learning doesn’t evaporate when a contract expires. Nobody’s invented Ctrl+Z for corporate knowledge. That’s a real and uncomfortable truth.

    But ending the contract still matters. A lot. It stops the ongoing, daily access to live patient data. It prevents the Federated Data Platform from becoming the permanent infrastructure through which a future government could do cross-departmental surveillance. It breaks the vendor lock-in before it becomes irreversible. And it sends a signal, to Palantir and to every other company watching, that there are consequences for how you behave, who you associate with, and whose data you handle. Consequences are underrated. We should have more of them.

    Scotland proves it’s possible. They kept Palantir out of NHS Scotland entirely. The sky didn’t fall in. Their data systems still work. The patients are still being treated. The lesson is clear: you don’t need a CIA-funded surveillance company to manage healthcare data. You need investment in your own people and your own infrastructure. Which is, funnily enough, what the NHS’s own data chiefs were saying all along, to anyone who was listening, which apparently did not include the people signing the contracts.

    There’s something Tim Berners-Lee said that I think about a lot: the web was designed, which means it can be redesigned. The same is true of the systems that currently protect opacity. They were built. They can be rebuilt. And you don’t need to be an investigative journalist or a lawyer to help. You just need the data to be findable.

    The seeing-stone serves whoever holds it

    Cartoon of a glass orb on a desk with GP records, Prescriptions, Mental health, Postcode, and Date of birth written inside it. Two hands reach for it from opposite sides: one with an NHS cross on the cuff, the other with an eye symbol cufflink. Caption: One seeing-stone to rule them all.

    I keep coming back to Tolkien, because the metaphor really is almost annoyingly perfect.

    The palantír isn’t dangerous because the bad guys built it. The Elves built it, for perfectly good reasons. It’s dangerous because once it exists as a centralised tool of seeing, it serves whoever holds it. The Federated Data Platform is the same. The NHS built it to manage waiting lists. Reasonable goal. But once it exists as a single connected data layer across the entire health system, run by a company whose core business is cross-departmental surveillance, you’ve created something whose potential uses extend well beyond anything the NHS intended.

    A future government that wants to cross-reference your health data with your immigration status, your benefits claims, or police intelligence doesn’t need to build anything new. The pipes are already laid. They just need to turn the taps.

    Cartoon of an NHS building with coloured pipes labelled GP Records, Prescriptions, Mental Health, Sexual Health, and Immigration Status all feeding into a single tap controlled by a suited hand, dripping into a bucket labelled TBD. A diverse group of patients watches from outside. Caption: The plumbing is already done.

    Tim Berners-Lee closed his Barcelona talk with something that I think is worth finishing on: “Imagine apps which are collaborative, which are creative, which are compassionate. Imagine this world, and do whatever you can to get towards that world.”

    I reckon “whatever you can” is the important bit. Not everyone can sue the government or fund a legal challenge. But we can build tools that connect public data. We can support the people doing the hard work: openDemocracy, Foxglove, the Good Law Project, Medact. We can pay attention. We can refuse to let complexity be the thing that shields power from accountability.

    The man who invented the web gave it away because he believed it belonged to everyone. The man who founded Palantir named it after a fictional surveillance device because, I suspect, he understood exactly what he was building.

    I know which vision I’d rather build towards. And if you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you do too.