‘Peter Mandelson’s Fixing of Keir Starmer’s Visit to Spytech Firm Palantir Raises Serious Questions’

When Keir Starmer travelled to Washington DC to burnish the UK’s global credentials last February, one of his first stops after his meeting with President Donald Trump wasn’t a UN forum or humanitarian body. Rather, it was Palantir — a controversial American surveillance tech company, headquartered just a 10-minute drive from the Oval Office. 

The visit was, as the Good Law Project revealed, arranged by Peter Mandelson — Britain’s Ambassador to the United States and a long-time Labour power broker. Yet no official record was kept: no minutes, no transcript. Just a handshake, a quiet word, and — for many — a growing unease

Palantir is no ordinary tech firm. Rising to prominence out of the War on Terror, seeded with funds from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and raised on a diet of contracts with spy agencies and the US military, Palantir is arguably the bastard child of military-industrial intelligence gathering, co-founded by Peter Thiel, a self-described conservative libertarian.

Palantir’s tools have been used to deport migrant families, enable drone warfare, and entrench policing systems later accused of fuelling institutional racism. 

Recent reporting by 404 Media reveals that the company’s collaboration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deepened under the new Trump administration. Building on its previous involvement, the company is now actively supplying leads to help locate individuals targeted for deportation.

Now, Palantir is over here. It sits at the heart of the UK’s NHS—its UK head recently boasted, “Every NHS hospital has its own instance of #Palantir software”—and has secured hundreds of millions in Government contracts with the Ministry of Defence (MOD), health service, police, local councils, and an array of other bodies.

What precisely Starmer and Mandelson discussed with Palantir remains unknown. The Cabinet Office insists it was merely an “informal visit”. Yet the circumstances are far from casual.

At the time of the trip, Palantir was still a client of Global Counsel—the lobbying firm founded by Mandelson. Though Mandelson had stepped back from CEO duties, he remains president and chair of its international advisory board.

Then there is former MP and Labour peer Tom Watson, who The Times revealed had taken up a paid position on the company’s ‘public services advisory board’. Watson is also a senior advisor to PR firm Lodestone Oxford Limited, which listed Palantir as a client between October and December 2024.

So once again, we find a Labour leader aligning with certain men—and we must ask where do their loyalties truly lie: with shared political mission or with private profit?

Questioning this matters because Palantir’s ambitions are unmistakable: it aims to become the default operating system for government. Its Foundry platform already underpins key parts of the NHS, thanks to its lead role in a £330 million consortium contract for the now widely implemented Federated Data Platform—an agreement so heavily redacted that three-quarters of its 586 pages were blacked out.

More information about the deal only came to light following legal action by the Good Law Project, which uncovered that Palantie was handed the contract before negotiations had concluded.

The Foreign Office says it has no emails about Mandelson’s role arranging Starmer’s visit. Elsewhere, Leicestershire Police has also removed details of its £800,000 Palantir deal from public record after being asked about it by journalists, and is now refusing to release details of the contract to the public via Freedom of Information (FOI) requests.

Similarly, 35 out of 45 UK police forces have refused to confirm or deny any relationship with the company under FOI, citing “national security” grounds (though it is known Palantir is doing business with two forces: Leicestershire and Bedfordshire — where it is being used “to tackle organised crime”, though once again no contract has been released).

Byline Times can also reveal that the company has now signed a £500,000 deal to supply a “strategic AI platform” with Coventry City Council. This follows a £4.5 million award in 2014 to provide an “intelligence hub” for Sunderland Council.

Palantir’s relationship with the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) also forms a significant part of its rising influence. Since at least 2014, Palantir has been working closely with the MoD, notably through lucrative pilot schemes such as a £1.6 million Royal Navy Data Science project in 2018. Recently the company won a £75 million contract with Defence Digital, the MoD’s tech-focused unit, to drive the military’s digital transformation.

One key player to this relationship has been Sir Graeme Lamb, a retired senior British Army officer and ex-Deputy Commander of coalition forces in Iraq, who began advising Palantir after leaving the military in 2009.

He publicly advocated for the firm in defence committee hearings as early as 2014. Other former defence insiders include John Woodcock (now Lord Walney) and ex-MI6 chief Sir John Sawers. Sawers reportedly helped secure a £27 million post-Brexit border data contract with the Cabinet Office in 2020.

In the end, we must be clear-eyed about what’s happening here. Palantir is not just winning contracts – it is capturing data. It is being handed the keys to the kingdom: and for all we know this includes patient files, immigration patterns, soldier’s movements, crime maps and welfare dashboards. All under the guise of efficiency and innovation. But beneath its techno-promises of efficiency potentially lies a darker, ideological mission.

Just look at Palantir’s billboard campaign, dropped “at select colleges” across the US: “A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West… we build to dominate.” A declaration: not of service or stewardship, but of conquest. 

Palantir’s CEO, Alexander Karp, has made no effort to soften the tone. “When the whole world is using Palantir,” he has said, “they can still not like us. They’ll have no choice.” This is not the voice of a public servant. More the voice of a company that sees democracy as an obstacle to be managed, not a value to be upheld.

That authoritarian impulse appears reflected in the politics of its founder Peter Thiel, Palantir’s chairman and early investor. A man who wrote in 2009 that he “no longer think[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”. He has likened NHS loyalty to Stockholm syndrome and advocated ripping “the whole thing from the ground.” Thiel was one of Trump’s biggest donors in 2016.

This is the ideological ecosystem Palantir supports. And yet, this is the firm the UK Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, may hand the digital heart of the NHS to. Streeting insists he wants to modernise the health service — to embrace a data-driven future, but trust is the foundation of public institutions. And can we trust a system run by a company with such a record? 

A company whose policing tools, which the company refers to as “crime risk forecasting” in patents, were reportedly abandoned after being linked to discriminatory practices when deployed as part of a predictive policing program, Operation Laser, by the LAPD. A company whose systems allegedly facilitated US border agents forcibly separating families and detaining citizens without cause.

Speaking to Byline Times, Donald Campbell, Advocacy Director at campaigning organisation Foxglove, found the increasing read of Palantir in the UK Government deeply alarming.

“This is a firm that’s notorious for its work in some of the most appalling areas of warfare, security and surveillance,” he said. “From the rampant abuses of US border forces to the horrors of the war in Gaza, Palantir’s services can be found.

With a track record like this, you’d think that a devotee of the rule of law and democratic accountability such as Keir Starmer would run a mile. The Government needs to urgently rethink its decision to hand over the keys of Britain’s public services – along with its citizens’ data – to Palantir

Donald Campbell, Advocacy Director at Foxglove

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) doesn’t see it that way. They argue the UK and US have $1.5 trillion invested in each other’s economies and want to strengthen this relationship further. 

“As the only two allied countries with trillion-dollar technology eco-systems,” they told Byline Times, “driving greater collaboration between our tech sectors will unlock new economic growth.”

Palantir’s defenders argue it doesn’t own the data — it just organises it, and that it is the clients themselves that will choose how to use the resources provided. Speaking with Victoria Derbyshire in 2023 regarding the FDP deal, Alex Karp was posed the question that “if you’ve got all that data… an extremely precious British resource in one place… that opens the door in the future to it being sold”. Karp’s response; “by the UK government, not by me.”

While this is correct (and something which further highlights the concerns around the opacity with this Labour Government in its dealings with Palantir — especially relating to a potential future sell-off of sensitive UK health data), it is also a side show. Power doesn’t only reside in ownership; it resides in the architecture of power. If you design the system, you help shape the choices. 

Let’s not pretend this is inevitable. Critics say NHS England could still invest in its own in-house systems. Multiple civil society organisations and patient advocates have highlighted lack of transparency in the Government’s dealings with Palantir.

Current and former MPs like Clive Lewis and Caroline Lucas have raised alarms. But without a broader political reckoning, Palantir’s long game will prevail — just as it has in the US, where it has become indispensable to federal agencies.

The UK must decide: do we want our Government systems run by a surveillance contractor that cut its teeth in drone warfare and immigration raids and now seeks to “dominate”? Or do we believe in a public service ethos that values transparency and democratic accountability? 

Palantir did not reply to our requests for comment.