Tom Watson has said ‘mob rule’ must not decide public contracts. Perhaps he should take a look at his new employer
What a world we live in. Imagine: gangs dragging civil servants off commuter trains and beating them up because they handed government data jobs to the wrong contractor – and the government is changing its procurement decisions as a result. Well, OK, it might not have happened yet, but it’s only a matter of time. As the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson asks: “Do you want to let the rule of law lead procurement practice, or do you want mob rule to lead procurement practices?” No, I absolutely don’t want the latter, and it’s always good to get ahead of trouble.
But then I remember there are two common meanings of mob rule. One is intimidation by crowds of thugs. The other is a pejorative term for democracy. And while I’ve yet to see government procurement practices in the UK determined by pitchforks and flaming torches, democratic transparency could be a genuine threat to certain contractors. One might have hoped that Watson, who once took on the Murdoch empire, would have recognised the distinction. But then again, one might have hoped that Watson would not have taken a job as a senior vice-president at Palantir.
Over the past few years, this US company has been worming its way into the British state. It has landed contracts worth hundreds of millions with the Ministry of Defence, several police forces, the Financial Conduct Authority, the atomic weapons establishment and the NHS. Its superpower, according to a deep investigation by Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin in the London Review of Books, is that it is “willing to spend more on securing political access than almost all of its British and continental competitors”. It made abundant use of Peter Mandelson’s company Global Counsel, which seems, in turn, to have made abundant use of the UK’s remarkably flimsy lobbying laws. Watson is one of more than 30 former UK ministers and officials Palantir now employs.
Palantir’s contracts might have been awarded lawfully, but some of us might question the ways in which doors were opened for it. These include an unrecorded meeting between Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the co-founder of Palantir, Peter Thiel, in Downing Street in 2019. It was invited back to Downing Street when the Covid-19 pandemic began a few months later, and was working in the NHS within days, on a contract for which it charged only £1. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has criticised such loss-leaders, which can quickly lead to reliance on a company, at which point it can name its price.
Another controversial meeting was brokered by Mandelson in 2025, when he was UK ambassador to the US. Keir Starmer visited Palantir’s showroom in Washington, where he met the company’s global and UK chief executives, Alex Karp and Louis Mosley. They talked about defence spending. No 10, Geoghegan and Amin tell us, “refused to say whether Starmer knew that Palantir was a client of Global Counsel, in which Mandelson still held a stake of around a fifth at the time. The meeting was never declared on transparency registers.” A few months later, Palantir secured a £241m contract with the Ministry of Defence, without an open tender.
Now we learn that Martha Dalton, a key player in Andy Burnham’s campaign to win the Makerfield byelection, enabling him to become prime minister, was on unpaid leave from the lobbying company she co-founded, Lodestone. Lodestone had done extensive work for Palantir. And the Financial Times reports that Samantha Jones, then the lead non-executive director on the board of the health department, was an adviser to one of Palantir’s partners when the company was bidding for its huge and controversial NHS contract. Now she is permanent secretary in the same department.
There have been repeated allegations that some of Palantir’s products are rubbish. But, as the House of Commons science, innovation and technology committee warns, government agencies can quickly succumb to “vendor lock-in”: once you start using them, it can be very hard to stop.
Thiel, has claimed that “the NHS makes people sick”, and that we should “just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over”. The company is deeply embedded in the Trump administration, where it supplies software that helps ICE find undocumented people. It also works for the Israeli government on identifying targets in Gaza. When Karp was confronted by a protester who told him that “Palantir kills Palestinians”, he replied: “Mostly terrorists, that’s true.”
This is the company handling our critical information. After official denials, it turns out that NHS England has granted Palantir “unlimited access” to patient data. This is a huge issue. Identifiable patient data is supposed to be visible only to people directly involved in a patient’s care, or who have received the patient’s informed consent. There are widespread concerns about how this and other datasets might be used.
So, as Palantir runs into ever-greater controversy, it’s not hard to see why it might have hired Watson, who, with Burnham, was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government. I wouldn’t presume to speculate about what attracted Watson to the multibillion-dollar company.
In July, the government’s ethics and integrity commission recommended a major shake-up, enabling us to see all the encounters between lobbyists and ministers, aides and senior officials. I’ve heard this call many times before. The pattern is always the same: a scandal, followed by a call to action, followed by … little or nothing.
Before he became prime minister, David Cameron noted that lobbying “has tainted our politics for too long”. He would shine “the light of transparency” on it. Instead, he oversaw an act that was “more loophole than law”. It did nothing to protect us from lobbying by people such as Cameron – pulling strings, once out of office, among his old colleagues, to try to drum up government business for the bank Greensill .
You could almost believe that the real purpose of government was to do the bidding of corporations, foreign states and the ultra-rich. You could almost believe that some government ministers may have an eye on future opportunities when they resist effective reform.
So this is another key test for Burnham. Will he allow the mob rule of private business to keep dominating our lives, or will he ensure that government is for the people?
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
