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