Dominic Cummings Lobbied Officials to Hand ‘Test and Trace’ Contracts to Palantir After Secret Meeting With Peter Thiel

Boris Johnson’s former Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings lobbied Government officials to hand Covid ‘Test and Trace’ tech contracts to a firm run by a Trump-supporting billionaire, after he held a secret meeting with its founder, alongside the Prime Minister.

A recent Guardian investigation revealed that Cummings and Johnson held an undeclared meeting with Palantir founder Peter Thiel in August 2019. According to the report, the meeting was marked “private in a log of Johnson’s activities that day and was not subsequently disclosed on the government’s public log of meetings”.

Now new emails released to Byline Times, following a freedom of information request, reveal the true extent of Dominic Cummings’ subsequent involvement in lobbying senior officials to hand over huge Covid contracts to Thiel’s company, and another one run by his fellow Trump-supporting billionaire Larry Ellison.

In September 2020, Cummings sent an email to Dido Harding – the Conservative peer appointed by former PM Boris Johnson to oversee the previous Government’s £37 billion, flagship Test and Trace Programme.

In an email carrying the subject header “testing fundamentals”, Cummings instructed Harding to ignore Cabinet Office procedures, claiming that if the programme needed to spend “100m quid” procuring goods to support the Coving Testing rollout then they shouldn’t “worry about the CABOFF [Cabinet Office] paperwork”. Crucially, the former advisor also insisted that officials should have “NO MINISTERS ON THESE CALLS”.

Cummings demanded that officials should bypass the NHS when building the software to power the Test and Trace programme and instead look towards controversial US tech firm Palantir as well as IT firm Oracle, owned by Larry Ellison.

Cummings said: “We need a cloud solution for the huge data needs – forget NHSX doing it, we need to get someone like Palantir or Oracle (Larry Ellison is offering free) to do this, but we need someone who really knows what theyre talking about to navigate this.

“Marc Warner/Faculty handled Palantir for the NHS in Feb‐May – this was NOT done by NHSx and if left to NHS wd never have happened… this is incredibly urgent as the data infrastructure for millions of tests per day is highly non‐trivial and we wont be able to do it in a fortnight, we need to get it going NOW for it to work in November”.

In the next paragraph of the email Cummings claimed that the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who had been CC’d in the message, had advised officials  “that all normal processes are binned for testing” and that they could “hire exactly who they want from inside or outside civil service without need to wait even an hour for approval” before claiming that officials will be “absolved from legal blame if JRs [judicial reviews]” against procurement processes arose in the future. 

Both Oracle and Palantir went on to secure covid contracts from Johnson’s Government during the pandemic.

In 2023, The US firm landed the £330m Federated Data Platform contract from the NHS to Palantir.

As Byline Times previously reported Thiel had likened the UK’s commitment to the NHS to “Stockholm syndrome” and backed a complete overhaul of the institution. In a clip still available online, Thiel said of the health service: “Rip the whole thing from the ground and start over”.

Speaking at a Q&A event at the Oxford Union, the Thiel spoke of the need to fix the health service with “market mechanisms”. 

The first step to fixing the Health Service, Thiel said, was to break the public away from the idea that it is “the most wonderful thing in the world”. “Highways create traffic jams, welfare creates poverty, schools make people dumb and the NHS makes people sick,” he added.

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Cummings and the VIP Lane’s Biggest Winner

Back in 2023, the campaign group Good Law Project revealed that Dominic Cummings referred a company called Innova Medical onto the VIP Lane, set up by the Department For Health and Social Care during the pandemic.

The referral from the former No.10 advisor was enough to land Innova a place on the VIP lane and the firm subsequently went on to win contracts worth in excess of £4bn to supply Lateral Flow Tests, despite only being incorporated during the pandemic. 

According to reports in the Guardian, Innova Medical recorded around $2billion profits from the Covid contracts. The firm’s owner, Charles Huang, in recent court filings in the US is accused by his former business partners of “squandering” or moving $1bn of those profits, spending $70million on luxury private aircraft, a further $18m on a Los Angeles mansion as well as “homes for his mistresses”.

New emails obtained by Byline Times can now shed further light on Cumming’s involvement. The emails, sent in October 2020, reveal that:

• Cummings ordered senior civil servants to “buy buy buy” 200 million covid tests – including from Innova.

• He ordered officials to get “the deal done by COP [close of play]” the same day and to consider “using military planes if necessary” to collect the tests from overseas.
• In the rush to buy the Covid tests Cummings also gave his opinion on the highly controversial procurement of PPE by the previous Government.

• Cummings noted: “To stress – reason why we seem [so] crazed – we watched supposed orders, including even ones where we’d signed contracts and sent cash – vanish in the PPE crisis – companies welched on deals, and gvts stopped planes flying and impounded them – we may well see similar behaviour”.

• Less than an hour after the Cummings email a senior civil servant asked Simon Case, the then Cabinet Secretary, for his “support for us to bypass the approvals process and to instruct DHSC Finance to raise the orders today”.

Cummings’ referral of Innova onto the VIP Lane featured in the recent ITV documentary –  The Covid Contract: Follow the Money.  

Dominic Cumings and the Cabinet Office were approached for comment but did not respond by the time of publication. 

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Russell Scott’s brilliant new book: VIP Lane: Cronyism and the Pandemic is available to buy now from Byline Books.