‘My Personal Pride and Joy’: Mandelson’s UK Palantir Deal

On 22 July 2025, Britain’s Ambassador to the United States sent a short email to the two most senior aides in Downing Street. The subject line was a name: “Peter Thiel.”

“This celebrated techie is in London til Aug 9,” Lord Mandelson wrote to Morgan McSweeney, then the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, and his deputy Jill Cuthbertson. “I don’t know whether you have been approached already, but would the PM like to meet him?”

Contained in the second tranche of the so-called Mandelson files laid before Parliament, this email is one of a series of moments in which Mandelson personally connected the UK government to Palantir, the data analytics and surveillance firm co-founded by Thiel, and to the wider network of investors around it – at a time when his own consultancy, Global Counsel, still counted Palantir among its clients.

Mandelson co-founded Global Counsel in 2010 and remained its President and Chair of its international advisory board. He stepped down from the firm’s board in 2024 but did not divest his significant financial stake despite official advice that he do so before taking up the appointment: “the retained role and interest in Global Counsel would have to
cease if appointed HMA (His Majesty’s Ambassador).”

The firm’s client list included Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, a major Trump supporter and, like Mandelson himself, a close associate of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

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Epstein and Thiel

Mandelson was announced as ambassador by Sir Keir Starmer in December 2024. In January 2025, UK Security Vetting recommended against granting him developed-vetting clearance; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office overruled that recommendation, clearing the way for the appointment. 

Senior officials have since indicated the objection turned on his foreign commercial entanglements — including Global Counsel’s work touching China and Russia — as much as on his links to Jeffrey Epstein. He took up the Washington post on 10 February 2025.

Mandelson’s closeness to the financier after his conviction for sex trafficking is extensively documented. A 2019 internal review by JP Morgan, filed to a New York court in 2023, recorded that Epstein appeared to maintain a “particularly close relationship” with him; Epstein called him “Petie,” and the two stayed in contact from at least 2005 until 2016 – long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. 

It was that correspondence, in which Mandelson offered the financier support even after his conviction, that ultimately cost him the Washington embassy.

Epstein, by Peter Mandelson’s own account, was “a prolific networker” and Peter Thiel was another associate. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2023, Epstein repeatedly sought meetings with the Palantir co-founder around 2016, on one occasion inviting him to lunch with Russia’s UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin; when Churkin died in 2017, Epstein emailed Thiel with the news. 

The financial ties ran deeper: as Byline Times reported, with Epstein’s investment of $40 million into Thiel’s Valar Ventures fund, he was described as a “co-owner” by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Thiel’s spokesperson says he was just a limited partner, but his stake is now worth roughly $170 million – the largest single asset of Epstein’s estate.

Meanwhile, Palantine, the tech surveillance company Thiel had also cofounded, had, by 2025, had millions in UK contracts, including the NHS, and was represented by Peter  Mandelson’s lobbying company Global Counsel.

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The £750m Palantir Deal

Just over a fortnight into the job, on 27 February 2025 – the day of Starmer’s White House meeting with President Trump – the Prime Minister visited Palantir’s Washington office and met its co-founder and chief executive, Alex Karp. 

As Byline Times and the Good Law Project have reported, the visit was arranged by Mandelson; no minutes or transcript were kept, and Palantir was at that point still a client of his firm.

Days later, the access continued. On 5 March 2025, a partner at the Silicon Valley venture firm 137 Ventures – an investor in both Palantir and the defence company Anduril – emailed an invitation for Mandelson to attend the Hill & Valley Forum, the Washington gathering that brings together defence-technology executives and Congress. The sender’s name is redacted, but the file notes Mandelson would be attending “with Louis”: Louis Mosley, the head of Palantir’s UK business.

By the late summer, the relationship had hardened into a deal. The files show Mandelson working to land a Palantir announcement in time for President Trump’s state visit, scheduled for mid-September.

On 21 August 2025, Mandelson wrote to the Prime Minister directly. The letter is headed “The State Visit: Technology Partnership.” Its entire contents have been redacted, replaced with a single “***” and marked OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE. The Government’s own note states that references to Palantir were withheld only where redaction was agreed with the Intelligence and Security Committee on grounds of national security or international relations.

A separate email thread from the same week captures officials scrambling over the detail. On 25 August, the Ministry of Defence’s procurement directorate circulated an updated draft of the joint statement to be signed during the visit. The next day, an official whose name is redacted relayed questions from Number 10, ending: “Finally, who is the MOD lead on the potential Palantir announcement?” The exchange was forwarded “FYI” by Mark Newton, the embassy’s Minister-Counsellor for Defence.

By 26 August, James Roscoe, then the embassy’s Deputy Head of Mission, was chasing it: “Keen to know the answer to the final Palantir question too?” The following morning, Newton wrote that the matter “all sits with Andy Start, our National Armaments Director,” noting that the Defence Secretary’s office had asked for urgent advice on Palantir – the specifics redacted.

It was at this point that Mandelson weighed in himself. In an email timed at 09:05 on 27 August, sent from his phone, the ambassador wrote four words of his own: “I am reluctant to intervene on Palantir.” The same day, a further note to Mandelson headed “State Visit – Defence Update” was circulated; its body, too, is redacted in full.

Mandelson never saw the visit he had been preparing. On 11 September 2025, days before Trump’s arrival, Starmer dismissed him after the publication of emails to Epstein in which Mandelson had supported the financier. The Foreign Office said the emails showed the relationship was “materially different” from what had been understood at his appointment.

In his farewell letter to embassy staff that day, Mandelson singled out one achievement. The UK leaves the relationship with the United States “in a really good condition,” he wrote, “with a magnificent State Visit and the new US-UK Technology Partnership – my personal pride and joy that will help write the next chapter of the special relationship – set for next week.”

It went ahead without him. On 17 September, as Trump’s state visit opened, Palantir confirmed it would invest £1.5 billion in the UK and expand its Ministry of Defence contract to £750 million over five years – replacing a £75 million, three-year arrangement.

The deal was folded into the Technology Prosperity Deal that Trump and Starmer signed at Chequers the next day. Anduril, the other US defence-technology firm named in the embassy’s July meeting notes, received no announcement.

Global Counsel collapsed into administration in February 2026, confirming as it did so that it had finally divested Mandelson’s shares.